Requiem for an Unwritten Memoir How Grace Bumbry changed opera

L’Ouverture

Months before Grace Bumbry, a relatively unknown shy twenty-four-year-old Black woman from a working-class background in north St. Louis exploded onto the world’s opera stage as “Die Schwarze Venus” (the Black Venus) of Bayreuth in the summer of 1961, she had begun blazing a pathway to becoming a world-class opera star. Bumbry always said God was the invisible force behind her success. Providence and strategically placed people. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the American Embassy in Paris helped Bumbry score an audition at the Paris Opera. Snagging the role as Amneris in Aida on the spot, she became the first person of color performing there for what critics hailed as a sensational international operatic debut. Subsequent performances that year at the Opera House of Basel Switzerland generated tremendous critical acclaim in the European opera scene. Building on those successes, Bumbry found herself standing before Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor and General Director for the Cologne (Germany) Opera, auditioning for an upcoming production of Bizet’s Carmen.

Bumbry had just completed her rendition of “Carmen’s Habanera” one of the most famous operatic arias of all time when Maestro Sawallisch asked an unexpected question.

“Would you mind singing something in a high register?”

“For Carmen, I don’t need anything in the high register,” Bumbry said emphatically.

“No, no, no, no,” Maestro Sawallisch explained. “I have something else in mind.”

“Well, if you give me a little time to vocalize I’ll sing ‘O Don Fatale,’ ” Bumbry said, a little puzzled by the request.

Maestro Sawallisch’s idea would set the opera world and Bumbry’s career ablaze.

Fifteen minutes later, Bumbry returned and belted out “O Don fatale,” one of the most feared arias for mezzo-sopranos, but she considered it to be the warhorse on which she had ridden to many triumphs.

The expression on Maestro Sawallisch’s face said it all. He was indeed more pleased with what Bumbry’s voice could accomplish in a higher register.

“Would you be interested in going to Bayreuth to audition for Wieland Wagner?” he asked curiously.

“Yes,” Bumbry said, all the while wondering what the maestro was up to.  She knew Wieland Wagner, the grandson of the composer Richard Wagner, was renowned for his innovative approaches in opera. Maestro Sawallisch had planted an important seed. He knew that Wagner was searching for a new singer who could redefine the role of Venus, the goddess of love and the physical essence of female beauty in an avant-garde production of Tannhäuser commemorating the 100^th anniversary of its first performance.

In the opera, Venus tempts the wandering Tannhäuser into her Venusberg, a garden of erotic and otherworldly delights, thus Venus needed to be a bewitching temptress who invoked an elegant mixture of mystery and controlled sexuality. Tannhäuser leaves but is drawn back, haunted by her great beauty and allure. The idea of a Black woman in that role was not just out of the box but outrageous in 1961 Germany. The Nazi party had not been out of power for more than two decades. Until then all of the women who played Venus had been White, mostly statuesque blondes. Maestro Sawallisch’s idea would push the boundaries. He was certain Bumbry’s look and voice would fit.

A month later Bumbry took the train on a cold January day from Switzerland to Bayreuth to audition before Wagner, the legendary composer, himself. With no German operatic arias in hand, she relied on the Italian “O Don fatale.” After giving her best performance, Bumbry went backstage to wait. Wagner had three other singers to hear that day.

When it was over and there had not been any news, Bumbry assumed that one of the German sopranos had been selected. Preparing to leave the building, she put on her coat when one of Wagner’s assistants came running.

“Where are you about to go?” the assistant said.

“I’m leaving.”

“Herr Wagner would like to see you,” the assistant said.

Bumbry took off her coat and followed the man to Wagner’s office.

She and Wagner exchanged pleasantries. Then Wagner said the words that she did not expect to hear. “I’ve chosen you for the role of Venus.”

Her heart danced at the news, eager to get back to her hotel room to call her boyfriend Andreas Jaeckel, and her beloved mentor Lotte Lehmann. Bumbry could barely contain herself. At that utterance, “Die Schwarze Venus” (the Black Venus) was born. Life had been granting Bumbry many wins. This would be more significant than she could have imagined. Ultimately Wagner made the final decision, but Maestro Sawallisch championing her for the role has been historically underplayed.

•  •  •

When the news broke that St. Louis-born opera singer Grace Bumbry, eighty-six, had passed away in a Vienna hospital on May 7, after complications from a stroke, I was in Mexico City on sabbatical from my teaching job in Indiana. Of the hundreds of global remembrances and obituaries that I scrolled through, one phrase pierced me. Writing for the Berlin-based VAN Magazine, Olivia Giovetti noted: “It’s a shame she never wrote a memoir.” Between 2006 and 2008, Bumbry and I collaborated on Black Venus: Notes From a Half Century On Stage, a proposed memoir. Holding a tape recorder and notebook, I sat in her Salzburg residence overlooking Mozart Square documenting her journey in opera. In her distinctive musical speaking style, she regaled with stories growing up in a musical family in The Ville, graduating from Charles Sumner High School, where other luminary musical alumni including Olly Wilson, Tina Turner, and Chuck Berry graduated. Bumbry beamed with pride recalling that musical heritage. Her face sparkled, sharing key moments from St. Louis. She recalled the racism she faced there, too. Bumbry’s life was not just worthy of a book but its own opera.

A memoir allows the narrator to dive deeply into key memories or specific time periods from her life while an autobiography is more often than not associated with the factual and historical accounts from a public life. Grace Bumbry could have written either. I was interested in her early life in St. Louis, events surrounding the Bayreuth Festival which made her famous, and the highs and lows of being a leading Black mezzo-soprano and dramatic soprano opera singer. A good memoir reveals what is not said.

Shirley Verrett, one of Bumbry’s contemporaries, wrote I Never Walked Alone: The Autobiography of an American Singer (2003) which documented her ups and downs and was honest about their rivalry. “I was getting phone calls from all over the world with people saying, ‘Did you read what Shirley wrote?’ ” Bumbry said to me. Their rivalry was situational in part, both were Black American opera singers whose careers paralleled one another’s. The media did not help. In January 1982 The New York Times Sunday Magazine splashed them on the cover posing together. After all, they seemed to have fun with it and performed together. Part of Bumbry’s motivation in writing a memoir was getting her account out into the world.

I first laid eyes on Grace Bumbry in February 1997, exiting a white limousine in dangling pearls and a black mink coat, looking two decades younger than her sixty years. As an education reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch I was assigned to cover her appearance at Charles Sumner High School, where she had graduated in 1954. Then a resident of Lugano, Switzerland, she was back promoting the Grace Bumbry Black Musical Heritage Ensemble, a choir devoted to preserving and performing Negro spirituals and gospel. The ensemble was scheduled to appear at Powell Symphony Hall. Watching the way she floated through Sumner High School’s halls awed me. Her skin and hair glistened. Never had I seen the godlike aura of an opera singer up close. Before me stood a trailblazing singer who had performed at all of the world’s major opera houses in the world. Nineteen ninety-seven was a full circle year. She made her operatic debut at the Paris Opera as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida in 1960. Bumbry gave her final operatic performance as Klytamnestra in Strauss’s Elektra in Lyon, France. Grace Bumbry embodied the word diva.

“The terms ‘diva’ and ‘prima donna’ are used interchangeably in the world of popular music and even in opera,” Fred Plotkin, author of Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Opera (1994) said to me on the phone years later. “But they mean different things. Diva, derived from the Italian for goddess or deity, connotes someone who has a transcendent gift for moving listeners with her singing and her aura. A prima donna might be the star singer, but the term has more to do with temperamental behavior than artistry. Grace Bumbry is a diva.”

In the 1981 French cult thriller Diva, when opera singer Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez steps onto a stage before an audience to sing the aria from Catalani’s “La Wally,” she moved as one who had descended from a cloud. Her sparkling white earrings, bracelet cuff, and matching makeup with her shimmering satin gown fit the scene perfectly. Like Bumbry, Fernandez moved as a luminous, lustrous being. In the audience sat Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a doe-eye delivery boy who gazed at the Black American singer as if he had fallen in love. The expression that engulfed his face captured my Bumbry obsession.

I purchased every Grace Bumbry CD and DVD I could find including: Grace Bumbry: Early Recordings: Oratorio, Opera, Lieder (2007), Famous Opera Arias by Grace Bumbry (1984), Requiem In D Minor, K. 626 (2006), Voices Of Our Time (2011) Bizet: Carmen (1967) and Grace Bumbry In Concert Video (2007). Opera aficionados and many St. Louisans already knew about her. Somehow, I did not. Being in Bumbry’s presence magnified my own desires to pursue the creative arts, travel the globe, and know more than one language. Very much like another famous St. Louisan Josephine Baker, Grace Bumbry’s life and story shattered the limitations of what is possible for Black Americans.

I resigned from newspapers in 2002 with the idea that I could pursue creative nonfiction and write beyond journalism. Large book-length projects, like a Grace Bumbry memoir, were in the back of my mind. Our first email contact was in 2004. Her indifference was poignant, but she invited me for a meeting at my expense in Montreal. Bumbry was leading a master class with The Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the Conservatory of Music. In email, her reticence became clear:

I have to be honest with you and tell you that, at this point, there are two other parties who want to do my book. I’m still undecided because I haven’t found the dynamic I’m looking for. You just might be the right person. I say all this to let you understand that this is only a get-to-know-you meeting. If you’re still interested to make a trip to Montreal for Sunday, Dec. 5, then I shall look forward to seeing you.

I remain sincerely yours,

Grace B.

I thought it outrageously nervy asking me to come to Quebec, but I appreciated it as a test of my hunger. I am convinced she did not expect me to do it, but with university funds, I flew to Montreal for our first face-to-face meeting. For three hours over breakfast at the Hyatt Hotel Regency, Bumbry proved to be a dramatic, fiercely intelligent renaissance woman. Fluent in French, Italian, German, and Dutch, she had lived in Switzerland longer than any place. Since having first seen her, Bumbry was living quietly in Salzburg, a much-celebrated musical city and teaching private voice lessons to students from all over Europe. She dropped one name after another, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Montserrat Caballe, and Martina Arroyo, all singers with people she had worked with over the years. I did not know a single name she mentioned. The conversation ranged from politics, life in St. Louis, religion, journalism, and teaching. I pulled out my notebook, but she forbade me. This was just a getting acquainted session, she said. I was being auditioned. Apparently, I failed the test because she remained resistant. I persisted in emailing with a proposed plan. Bumbry’s global traveling schedule as a master class teacher made her hard to pin down.

By 2006, I was living in New York City in graduate school when she finally invited me to her residence in Salzburg. Pictures of Bumbry’s mezzo and dramatic soprano roles from the world’s largest opera houses covered her walls. Even then, our arrangements were still tentative. If we got along well enough and the elements came together, we would pursue a full manuscript.

At one point sitting alone together, I inquired why she thought the North American critics had been so skeptical of embracing her as a soprano. “I don’t know what their problem is but the voice does what it wants to do,” she said sternly. “I’m the opera singer, Samuel. I know.” Although we had a New York City agent attached and floated a book proposal, the project never materialized. With financing, differing ideas about what should be in the memoir and my university had summoned me back in the fall of 2008.  I bowed out, changed by our time together, but not before she imparted a few gems from her life.

•  •  •

The singing lesson ended like almost every other, with young Grace in tears. Kenneth Brown Billups was her private voice teacher and Sumner High School’s choir director. Billups was an imposing man at six feet two or three, with high cheekbones and short hair.  One day Billips wanted her to sing the spirituals “Witness” and “Honor, Honor.” After demonstrating how he wanted her to do it, he leaned forward, expecting the 15-year-old to parrot them back, his booming baritone voice rang in her ears.

“I could understand what he was expressing intellectually, but I just couldn’t do it; my life experience was not such that I could interpret songs of that magnitude,” she recalled.

“Try it again, Grace,” Billups repeated.

“I couldn’t. Even today I can’t do it the way I heard it as he sang.  I was just devastated.  I crossed my arms and walked home in tears, tears, tears of frustration.”

He called her mother and said, “Mrs. Bumbry, she’s on her way home and she’s been crying again. But don’t worry about her. She’ll be okay.”

The Bumbry household was a symphony of musical instruments and voices. Her father Benjamin, a tenor, played the piano by ear. Her mother, Melzia read music, played the piano and the lovely dark timbre of her voice soared through their house. It did not matter if she was cooking or washing dishes. Her oldest brother Benjamin was a bass-baritone and played the piano and drums. Charles, who was closest in age to her, had a tenor voice and played the trombone and tuba. From the ways music and singing so permeated her life at home, church, and school, Bumbry felt certain God had placed destiny in her.

“I played the piano and could sing both soprano and what they called alto then,” she said.  “Even as a child, I liked letting my voice do as it pleased.”

Several times as a young girl, she and her mother took the streetcar downtown to see and hear Marian Anderson in a recital at the Kiel Auditorium. Bumbry remembered sitting in amazement at the grandeur of it all, Anderson’s tall striking presence, and the splendor in her voice. “Seeing her recitals in my youth was probably what planted the desire to sing classical music,” she told me. “Little did I know what a powerful and direct role she would later play in my life.”

Billups, a highly respected music teacher, encouraged her to participate in the 1954 Teen O’clock Time talent show at KMOX radio station live on Saturdays at 10 am. The contest lasted for twenty weeks. More than 500 area singers and musicians competed.  She wanted to win it badly for herself and Sumner, the first Black high school west of the Mississippi River, named for Senator Charles Sumner, who supported Black political and civil rights  in the 1860s. She and Mr. Billups practiced “O Don fatale,” from Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo endlessly. Billups was certain the highly dramatic aria could showcase her vocal quality, range, and strength enough for her to win.

The entire Bumbry family sat in the studio to watch her. Mr. Billups paced back and forth, she recalled. Older brother Benjamin, who preceded her in death in 2018, had been away studying at Drake University. In a phone interview, he remembered it well.

“I’m sitting there in the KMOX studio. I see that the band is down in a pit. Pretty soon I see that pit rise up and the orchestra comes up. Grace walked onto that stage and the orchestra struck up and she belted out the words “O Don fatale.” I almost fell out of my chair. I could not believe it. I looked at her. My mouth dropped open. I could not believe this was my little sister.”

When it was announced that seventeen-year-old Grace Bumbry from Summer High School had won, the news rippled. The Bumbry family were ecstatic. She won a $1,000 war bond, a free trip to New York City, a $1,000 scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music, and a $1,000 wardrobe at Stix, Baer & Fuller Department Store.

Bumbry’s win included a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. The conservatory offered her private lessons instead of classes with other students, all of whom were White. Her mother rejected this offer.  Big supporters of Bumbry’s talent, KMOX station executives helped place her on CBS’s “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” in New York City. Her rendition of “O Don Fatale,” brought Godfrey himself to tears and he announced he had ‘special plans’ for the young girl.

Bumbry was admitted to the Boston University College of Fine Arts, where Billups had earned his graduate degree. Segregated America did not know how to handle this rising Black opera singer. Bumbry then transferred to Northwestern University in Chicago where she was discouraged from becoming a member of the famous Northwestern Choir. It would be difficult to find Bumbry housing during its national tours, but Northwestern was where she met opera star and concert soloist, Lotte Lehmann. Bumbry followed the German-born teacher to the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif. There she submitted herself to Lehmann’s tutelage. Lehmann immersed her in studying German, French, and Italian, languages she would speak for the rest of her life.

•  •  •

Determined to not let her skin color limit her range, she found ways to morph with every production. In Aida’s Brothers and Sisters: Black Voices in Opera (1999), a documentary that aired on PBS, she told the interviewer, “I fortunately took a course in stage theater and street makeup in London at Max Factor’s. Carmen, I think, is number 8A. Amneris is Night Egyptian. Lady Macbeth is Max Factor #1A. Then I got to the point where I could make a mixture where I could make it more adaptable to my skin color.”

When she made her international operatic debut at the Paris Opera in 1960 as Amneris, the jilted Egyptian princess in Verdi’s Aida she was already employing those techniques. The opera’s storyline included a rivalry between the characters of Amneris and Aida. Because Amneris was Egyptian and Aida was Ethiopian, race was present in Bumbry’s mind. For her interpretation, she also wrestled with whether she was a soprano and mezzo-soprano. Mastering both was considered impossible. Tenor and vocal coach Armand Tokatyan, also training her in Santa Barbara, strongly advocated she stick with mezzo. Meanwhile, her mentor Lehmann pushed her to sing as a soprano. What resulted was nearly unprecedented. Bumbry became one of the rare singers to have performed both the roles of Amneris and Aida in the same production, which was later in her career. Both roles required different hues, which she mastered.

The same year she joined the Basel Opera in Switzerland, where she was based for four years where her roles included the lead in  Bizet’s Carmen, Delilah in Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah, Orpheus in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth. All required different skin tones. But no role defined her early career more than what was about to happen at Bayreuth.

•  •  •

Before Bumbry even sang a word or showed her face publicly at Bayreuth, the announcement that a Black woman would be singing the role of Venus at the Bayreuth sparked an enormous uproar in the German press. “A Negro singing Venus did not conform to the intentions of Wagner,” wrote one angry writer. Although Adolph Hilter had been gone for sixteen years, during his life he had been a big fan of the arts and had a direct hand in selecting composers and singers at Bayreuth. Germans who sympathized with Hitler’s view wrote hundreds of letters to the festival’s office complaining, vociferously. “A cultural disgrace!” blared on the neo-Nazi German Reich Party. “If Richard Wagner knew this he’d be turning in his grave. Why does Venus have to be black? We’ve always known her as pink.” The controversy reached a boiling point. Nazi sympathizers demanded that Bumbry be removed immediately. Richard Wagner’s opera had all been steeped in a Nordic mythology and legend and critics of her selection could never be persuaded that a Black woman would fit the image.

Convinced that Bumbry was the perfect Venus, Wagner angrily and steadfastly defended his decision publicly. Wagner was extremely aware that his grandfather had been a notorious racist and anti-Semite and was intent on quelling Bayreuth’s reputation for having yielded to Nazi overtones. “Has Richard Wagner ever said that any role should be sung only by the possessor of a certain skin color?” he said.  “I shall bring in black, brown, and yellow artists if I feel them appropriate for productions. I require no ideal Nordic specimens. When I heard Grace Bumbry, I knew she was the perfect Venus. Grandfather would have been delighted.”

Pleased with Wagner’s support, Bumbry steeled herself and kept away from the entire fracas. “I decided very early on to stay focused on my performance. Wieland had selected me and I had a job to do. I had my family and friends back in St. Louis and my mentor, Lotte Lehmann; I couldn’t let those people down. At the time, I didn’t think that by going to Germany I was trying to be a pioneer or some kind of hero. I only wanted to do my best.”

Bumbry’s heart started to beat faster as she arrived at Bayreuth for the time of the rehearsals. The cast spent some time at House Wahnfried, Richard Wagner’s house that had been used as an actual Hitler hideout during World War II. While the facilities were lovely and well-kept, the reality of it all began to sink in.

Bumbry knew all about the war, Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany, and the widely circulated story that Hitler did not make himself available to shake the hand of gold medalist Jesse Owens and the America team at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She had wanted to believe that she had left racial strife back in America, but it was becoming clear that Europe had its own incarnation of intolerance. Bumbry never cared what other people thought possible for her.

The rehearsal period in Bayreuth went smoothly for her. She felt protected by her colleagues. All the singers rented rooms in private villas. Bumbry rented two rooms, one of which had a piano. During those two months it seemed almost as if the owners were determined to make as much money from the singers as possible. The cold and rainy weather made the time drag, but when the sun finally deigned to show its face she was like the rest of the singers basking in the rays of the sun. All the while newspaper reporters who were determined to make a controversy about her participation.

Over the years, numerous reports surfaced that the cast members had been cruel, calling her names and demeaning the young singer, but that was not Bumbry’s recollection. “That’s not true at all,” Bumbry said. “Sure, they were surprised that this young, Black woman at least ten years younger than everybody else had this unbelievable voice. But I must say, I cannot remember one negative comment during all of the time I was there.”

•  •  •

Grace Bumbry at the White House for the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors. (Office of U.S. President, public domain)

Months of preparation and nonstop news articles all culminated on July 1, the first night of the production. The entire cast had been extremely nervous anticipating the first performance. Before going on stage, Bumbry muttered a prayer. “This is Grace, you know what I have to do. You lead me and show me what I have to do. You’ve put me here, so let’s do it.” A freedom was released in her spirit.                         

Wieland Wagner’s Tannhäuser was not only a departure in that Venus was a Black woman, but the whole set involving her and Tannhäuser was completely avant-garde. In his first production back in 1954, the stage was encased in a gigantic shell with the main figures on the stage being an anonymous male who danced while Venus and Tannhäuser reclined far away in the background. In the new version, the shell was replaced by a dark cavern, dominated throughout by Bumbry as Venus, spectacularly dressed in gold lame, sat enthroned at the forefront of the stage motionless from beginning to end.

A gold body paint matching Bumbry’s gown, further illuminating her interpretation of the role. The company’s makeup artist experimented and came up with a formula that turned the diva’s face gold and did nothing to emphasize her huge doe-like eyes. Some have speculated the gold body paint would downplay her race. From behind Bumbry a huge net was lowered from the ceiling, from which a horde of presumably nude youths emerged performed by members of the world famous Béjart Ballet Lausanne. In the shadows red lights emphasized mimed acts of sexual union, quite bold for the time.

Her self-assured performance that night silenced the European critics when the curtain came down to thunderous applause, rocking the theater for thirty minutes, bringing the cast back for forty-two curtain calls. If ever there was a career-making night, Bumbry’s performance single-handedly turned the tide from skepticism and hatred to a near-universal applause. Reports of her performance scattered to the four corners of the globe. Wagner’s gamble and insights had paid off. “What made the production a sensation was its ‘black Venus,’ the 24-year-old Grace Bumbry,” wrote one critic. Newsweek wrote, “For a sometime choir girl whose mother was a Mississippi schoolteacher and whose father is a railroad freight handler, Miss Bumbry’s triumph was the greatest yet in an operatic career launched in Europe.”  The New York Herald Tribune was among the most generous in its praise, “The night led to fame, fortune, and an operatic career whereby she would never play small roles, truly unusual.”

Many women have been dubbed “Black Venus,” but none have worn the title as proudly as Bumbry.

“For me the ‘Black Venus,’ title was not a cloud that hung over my head. It was something that gave me the opportunity to stand out above my peers. Let’s face it, every artist, whether they admit it or not—black, white, yellow, red—is always looking for some kind of a hanger to hold on to that sets them apart. Mine was put in my lap and I am quite pleased with it.”

By the time Bumbry retired from the opera, she had become a shapeshifter who could play Anglo, Asian, and Black characters and moved from mezzo soprano roles to such dramatic soprano roles in  Salome in Salome, Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana, Abigaille in Nabucco, Medea in Medea, La Vestale in La Vestale, Jenufa in Jenufa, Giocando in La Gioconda, Ariane in Ariane et Barbe-bleu, Leonora in Il Trovatore and La Forza del Destino, Tosca in Tosca, Turandot in Turandot and Cassandra in Les Troyens.

At one point in our interviews, Bumbry walked over to the window and pointed to a statue of Mozart on the Mozartplatz, located in the center of Salzburg’s Old Town, close to Residenzplatz and the Salzburg Cathedral. She pulled back the blinds and said, “I’ll always know he’s there.”

Like Mozart, Bumbry died in Vienna. In the Roman Catholic tradition, a Requiem is a Mass for the dead. While Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626, was unfinished at the time of his death, it is still considered a masterpiece by musicologists. Although Bumbry’s memoir was unfinished, her work will shine luminously.