Jessey norman biography
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In this musical environment, singing and playing the piano were a regular part of their lives. You expected to have somebody shake your hand and say thank you and that was the kind of end of it. Although she did not receive the scholarship, the judges praised her talent. I get to wear the tricolor, the French colors, as a dress, as an American singing the Marseillaise.
Her range was incredibly wide, encompassing all female voice registers from contralto to soprano.
Only after conquering Europe did Norman return to the United States, where her performances in Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex" at the Philadelphia Opera and in Wagner's "Die Walküre" at the Metropolitan Opera were hailed as triumphs.
Norman is not only recognized as a musical phenomenon but also as possessing the most beautiful voice in the world.
This is the kind of soprano that I am.
But there are not many singers, not many sopranos or other opera singers, not many people who sing opera who can do that. I was very happy to be a part of it, and everybody else around me — the people that were responsible for it — were as nervous as they could be. Why anybody would want to run for 26 miles is beyond my understanding, but that’s something else again!
You started listening to opera at an early age. So I said to the person who was asking me this on the behalf of the President, Monsieur du Pavignon was his name, I said, “Does the President realize that I’m American, and that I’m not French in any way?” He said, “Yes, the President probably knows what he’s doing.
There are several doctors and nurses and so on, and I’m always talking about what I’ve just read in the American Medical Association, and one of the youngsters in my family said, “Aunt J., have you ever read Vogue? And on the occasion at Carnegie Hall, many, many years later when we were having a memoriam — as by this time Marian Anderson had passed, this was in 1997 — and when Robert Shaw said to me, “Let’s do the Alto Rhapsody,” I said, “Well, I might not get through it, because I might cry all the way through it because this is a very meaningful piece to me.” But it was thrilling on that occasion in her memory to sing the first thing I’d ever heard her sing.
When you were 16, you entered an important music scholarship competition.
In 1989 you performed Erwartung back-to-back with Bluebeard’s Castle, where there’s only one other singer on stage. I thought, first of all, it was a very interesting double bill, and that was the thing that interested me enough to say, “Okay, let’s do it.” And then the next year I sang for the 100th anniversary first night of the Met in New York.
How did that feel?
Jessye Norman: That felt wonderful.
In 1989 she appeared at the Met for a historic performance of that company’s first single-character production, Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg (1924).
The celebrated singer was also an accomplished recitalist, touring Europe and North America, as well as recording music by Schubert, Brahms, Chausson, Poulenc, Mahler and Strauss, among others.
I’m all grown up!” So she said, “Well, where are you in high school?” I said, “I’ve got another year.” She said, “Well I suppose you’d have to finish high school before you could come to school here,” and I said, “Come to school here?” At that moment, she went down to the dean of the college and said, “I want to teach this child.
So I saw people in white coats all the time, going back and forth. Maybe I’m being incorrect in this, but I actually sang Aïda with the Orlando Opera Company in the ’70s. I arranged it in the way that a Baptist Church in the South would organize a service, so that we had the choir to process in, singing a spiritual, and then we had the scripture, and Whoopi Goldberg was our preacher, and our guest in the audience happened to be Elton John.
And this was the first time I’d had a locker, so I was very interesting in getting myself organized.