Grace Bumbry died at the age of 86 on May 7. As a tribute, we are republishing Jon Tolansky's overview of Bumbry's life and career from the January 2017 issue of Gramophone...

‘Her recording of “Widmung” was an astonishing feat.’ EMI producer Suvi Raj Grubb singled out Grace Bumbry’s 1975 performance of Schumann’s Lied as a particularly special highlight in his autobiography Music Makers on Record (Hamish Hamilton: 1986), reminding us of the fact that this acclaimed dramatic singer-actress has been a master of song as well as of opera. In vocal supremacy and stylistic finesse, her challengingly compelling incarnations of mezzo and soprano roles as diverse as Norma, Medea, Amneris, Carmen, Chimène, Gioconda, Tosca and Salome, to name just a few, have been equally matched by her rapt poetic evocations of songs written by composers as varied as Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms and Dvořák, not to mention her command in oratorio and other genres in works by Handel, Mozart, Verdi and Falla – for a start! ‘Widmung’ (from Myrthen) is indeed an ideal example of her sovereign vocal technique faultlessly channelling high artistic expressiveness as she flowingly invokes the ever changing subtleties in Schumann’s sound world, almost seamlessly transforming from rich elegance to intimate wonder as the second verse follows on – surely just as the composer intended. Unfortunately, that recording is no longer available, and I hope it may perhaps appear again before long as an important example of this great performer’s Lieder singing.

Ironically, the art form in which Bumbry has attained her most widespread fame had not attracted her fundamentally at the outset of her career in the late 1950s, as she told me very recently: ‘Quite candidly, it wasn’t what I was looking for. It was because of Lotte Lehmann in her masterclasses when she insisted I took part in the opera classes that I really discovered opera – and when I say she insisted, she really did insist. I had wanted to become a Lieder singer like Marian Anderson, but Lotte was sure I would sing opera, and after about six or seven months’ very hard work I got the hang of it. That only happened, though, when I realised that singing opera wasn’t about Grace Bumbry, but it was about the particular role I was singing, and that was the entry for me into this wonderful world of opera.’

Like Anderson, Bumbry also made history as a pioneering African American artist, but this time it was in the opera house, when she made her debut singing Amneris (Aida) in Paris, in 1960. Her striking success catapulted her to international stardom and Amneris became one of her signature roles, preserved in the studios when EMI cast her with Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli as Aida and Radames in 1966. To this day her portrayal of Amneris remains a classic example of the vividly penetrating characterisations that abounded in her performances, which she sang with kaleidoscopic palettes of expressive colours that were yet contained within a rigorously controlled framework. A key to the dimension of characterisation was her searching textual curiosity, for instance with Amneris, of whom she said to me, ‘It’s my impression that Radames and Amneris might have had a fleeting romance, before he went to war with the Ethiopians and lost his heart to Aida, one of the captives.’ She underscores this by referring to Amneris’s words in the first scene of Act 2, when she is with her slaves in her boudoir and to herself sings ‘Ah! Vieni, vieni amor mio, ravvivami d’un caro accento ancor!’ (‘Ah! Come my love, revive in me again the dear words of love’). Amneris’s past with Radames is clarified, says Bumbry, ‘if we pay attention to the text, and do not get distracted by the beauty of the music and the voices. The beauty of the music and the pageantry are so great that one can easily overlook important details.’ Indeed, details that vitally enhance our understanding of Amneris’s mindset in Bumbry’s hands.

Another signature role was Carmen. Many have felt that both in the Unitel film she made in 1967 with Herbert von Karajan conducting and directing and in her EMI audio recording (1969-70) – which has a remarkable dramatic theatricality for a studio performance – she ideally captured the vitally elusive complexity of Carmen that for me is often lacking in performances of this searing confrontational masterwork. I felt that Bumbry crucially projected not only the provocative pagan power, the seductive capricious enchantment, but also the strangely haunting, almost aesthetic mystery that in its dichotomy surely arouses the depth of erotic and emotional passion that overwhelms the unknowing Don José. This she evoked in her vocal colour, character and phrasing and in her sophisticated yet spontaneously suggestive acting – a Carmen both casual and profound: profound in her awareness of her destiny and, in uncompromising fidelity to Gypsy law, her resolve not to flinch from it. Watch the DVD in Act 3, just before the card scene, when she says to Don José that he will probably kill her – her eyes and her voice are spine-chillingly still, and for me they encapsulate here the essence of this opera’s truth.

If it was Lehmann who opened the door to operatic awareness for Bumbry, it is Bumbry today who is opening that door for the especially fortunate advanced students and young professionals who attend her Grace Bumbry Vocal and Opera Academy in Berlin (founded 2009). She cares deeply about the future of opera and devotes long spells of her time passing on her panoramic operatic experience to gifted young artists of the future. This and her legacy of recordings (DG is planning a nine-disc box-set to mark her 80th birthday) are indeed inspirational lights for opera’s tomorrow.

Defining moments

• 1953 – Talent-spotted on American TV

Aged 16, Bumbry sings Princess Eboli’s ‘O don fatale’ from Verdi’s Don Carlos on the CBS TV show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.

• 1955 – Lessons with Lotte Lehmann

First masterclass with Lotte Lehmann, who went on to teach her at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara, California.

• 1960 – Opera debut in Paris

She makes her professional debut at the Paris Opera, singing Amneris in Verdi’s Aida – and is internationally acclaimed.

• 1961 – Breaks down racial barriers in Germany

Debut at Bayreuth Festival Theatre singing Venus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser. She is the first African American singer ever to sing a major role at Bayreuth – and she receives 42 curtain calls.

• 1966 – Carmen with Karajan

Sings Carmen with Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg, followed by a studio film directed by him in 1967.

Essential recording

Bizet Carmen

Grace Bumbry mez Jon Vickers ten Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Herbert von Karajan (DG)