Grace Bumbry, opera singer of lustrous power, dies at 86
She starred in mezzo-soprano and soprano roles, becoming one of the
first African Americans to conquer the international opera stage

By Emily Langer, Washington Post
May 8, 2023 at 9:39 a.m. EDT

Grace Bumbry, a singer of radiant charisma, expansive range and
superstar glamour who became one of the first African Americans to
conquer the international opera stage, died May 7 at a hospital in
Vienna. She was 86.

Her death was confirmed by her publicist, David Lee Brewer. Ms. Bumbry
had suffered a stroke in October.

Few audiences had ever heard a Black singer perform in an opera house
when Ms. Bumbry was growing up in St. Louis in the 1930s and ’40s, the
daughter of a railway clerk and a schoolteacher. Segregation dominated
American institutions, including the local music conservatory, where Ms.
Bumbry was denied entrance despite the talent she had shown from her
earliest days singing in the choir of her family’s Methodist church.

Championed by contralto Marian Anderson, she launched her career in
Europe in the years after Anderson, Leontyne Price and other Black
singers had begun to break down opera’s color barrier. Ms. Bumbry made
international headlines in 1961 when she became the first African
American to perform at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, a storied
cultural institution dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner.

Wagner is a revered but also deeply problematic figure in classical
music, a brilliant composer but an avowed antisemite who espoused
notions of German and racial superiority. When some Wagnerites protested
the appearance of a Black singer at Bayreuth, Wieland Wagner, a grandson
of the composer who as co-director of the festival sought to expunge its
long-standing Nazi associations, responded that his grandfather “wrote
for vocal color, not skin color.”

“I require no ideal Nordic specimens,” Wieland Wagner declared.

Cast in the opera “Tannhäuser” as the Roman goddess of love, Ms. Bumbry
received 42 curtain calls lasting 30 minutes and became known admiringly
as the “Black Venus.” She soon signed a five-year, $250,000 contract
with Sol Hurok, the impresario who shepherded Anderson’s career as well
as those of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the violinist Isaac Stern,
and who arranged a North American tour that helped make Ms. Bumbry a
star on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ms. Bumbry pursued a remarkable range of roles in a stage career that
lasted nearly 40 years. Her performance at Bayreuth notwithstanding, she
did not consider herself a Wagnerian singer and said that the works of
the 19th-century Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi were her “heart and soul.”

She debuted at the Paris Opera in 1960 as Amneris, the jilted Egyptian
princess in Verdi’s opera “Aida,” reportedly after the intercession of
first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Two years later, the Kennedy White House
invited Ms. Bumbry to perform at a state dinner that served as another
high-profile showcase of her talent.

Amneris is a canonical role in the dusky mezzo-soprano repertoire, which
Ms. Bumbry mastered in her early years onstage. She sang mezzo parts
including the title role of Bizet’s “Carmen,” Dalila of Saint-Saëns’s
“Samson et Dalila” and Princess Eboli of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” — Eboli’s
aria “O don fatale” was one of her signature arias — before scaling the
soprano range beginning in 1970. The higher register opened to her more
of the great female protagonists of opera, among them Richard Strauss’s
Salome, Bellini’s Norma, Puccini’s Tosca and Cherubini’s Medea — as well
as Aida, Amneris’s Ethiopian rival.

With her designer gowns, Saluki show dogs and a fleet of cars that
included a Rolls-Royce and an orange Lamborghini, Ms. Bumbry was a
lustrous presence onstage as well as off. When she sang “Salome” at
London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in 1970, she stoked
anticipation by leaking to the press that in the sensual “Dance of the
Seven Veils” she would disrobe down to her “jewels and perfume.”
Strategically arrayed gems served as a sparkling bikini.

“Covent Garden had never before rented so many opera glasses,” Ms.
Bumbry told Ebony magazine in 1973. “When I started dancing everything
else on stage stopped and I could see the glasses going up en masse.”

Ms. Bumbry’s roles over the years included Azucena in “Il Trovatore” and
Leonora in “La Forza del Destino,” both by Verdi; Lady Macbeth in
Verdi’s adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy; Santuzza in Mascagni’s
“Cavalleria Rusticana”; and Orfeo in Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.” She
“circumvented” the matter of race, she told The Washington Post in 2009,
by using makeup to change her skin tone when necessary for a particular
role.

“For me it was about credibility,” Ms. Bumbry said. “I thought a Black
face singing Lady Macbeth or Salome was not credible.”

She and Simon Estes, the African American bass-baritone, sang the title
roles in “Porgy and Bess” in 1985 when the Gershwin folk opera had its
Metropolitan Opera premiere, five decades after it was first presented
on Broadway. The opera is set in a Black tenement neighborhood of
Charleston, S.C., called Catfish Row. Ms. Bumbry said she found the work
“beneath” her, although she recognized its historic importance.

“I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far, to have
to retrogress to 1935,” she told an interviewer. “My way of dealing with
it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American
history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was
still going to be there.”

Grace Melzia Bumbry was born in St. Louis on Jan. 4, 1937. Both her
parents were from Mississippi.

She and her two brothers grew up with “the necessities of life but no
luxuries,” Ms. Bumbry said. Her mother fashioned clothes from fabric
remnants purchased for 25 cents a piece, ensuring that her children
always had something new to wear. Confidence, her parents taught her,
was everything.

The entire family was musical, but her mother displayed particular
talent and could have been a great singer, Ms. Bumbry said, had the
circumstances of her life been different.

“My mother transferred the repressed energy of her artistic talent into
me,” she told the Boston Globe. “She wore huge hats and big, swirling
capes around the house. You saw this bizarre person marching around,
someone bigger than life, someone living out her fantasies. Outside the
house, she was the picture of reserve and propriety.”

Ms. Bumbry attended choir practice with her brothers and parents before
she was old enough to officially join the group and was 7 when she began
studying piano. She later sang in a high school a cappella group and
took voice lessons from the school’s music instructor.

Following her graduation in 1954, Ms. Bumbry entered a local radio teen
talent competition whose prize included a scholarship to attend the
now-defunct St. Louis Institute of Music. When she won, the conservatory
declined to admit her because of her race.

“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry told the Globe. “But when it
happened, I also thought, ‘I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My
talent is superior.’ All the contestants, 500 of us, performed behind a
screen. The judges did not want to be swayed by looks or style. In the
end, however, there was prejudice.”

The conservatory offered Ms. Bumbry private lessons instead of classes
with other students, an offer her mother rejected. Believing strongly in
Ms. Bumbry’s talent, radio station executives helped place her later
that year on Arthur Godfrey’s radio-television show “Talent Scouts,”
where she sang “O don fatale,” bringing Godfrey to tears. By then Ms.
Bumbry had also performed in a private recital for Anderson, who
reportedly lauded her as having a “magnificent voice of great beauty.”

Ms. Bumbry received scholarships to study at Boston University and
Northwestern University, where she attended master classes taught by the
German-born soprano Lotte Lehmann. She followed Lehmann to the Music
Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif., where Ms. Bumbry remained
for more than three years, immersing herself in the study of music,
drama and languages including Italian, German and French.

She won a series of scholarships and competitions including, in 1958,
the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air. A fellow winner in that
competition was the Black soprano Martina Arroyo.

“I don’t think any of us were walking around with a flag or a banner,”
Arroyo told The Post in 2009. “I don’t think we were out there
politicizing. But by being what she was, she was saying it can be done.
With the talent. No matter what the color, you should start with the
talent.”

Ms. Bumbry debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1962 with a performance ranging
from Italian songs to German lieder to African American spirituals.
Reviewing her performance earlier that year at the White House, music
critic Irving Lowens wrote in the Washington Evening Star that her voice
was “astonishingly rich, flexible and powerful. The sumptuous low
register is a shade reminiscent of Marian Anderson; the dramatic high
register calls to mind the fabled Conchita Supervia; the complete
self-involvement with the music brings to mind Lotte Lehmann. But to my
ear, the combination of qualities is uniquely Grace Bumbry.”