When the soprano Grace Bumbry projected the single word “Guardie!” (“Guards!”) as Amneris at the beginning of Act 4 of Verdi’s Aida, it was the kind of order that brooked no opposition, and was typical of her complete command of the role and of the stage.
Bumbry, who has died aged 86, was one of those singers who demanded complete attention when she was performing. Her magnetic presence in the theatre was seconded by her strong, evenly produced voice, basically a high mezzo that she was eventually able to extend into the soprano range – indeed into the title part of Aida itself.
The freely produced top of her register and the rich quality of the lower part of her range comprised an instrument that seemed secure in encompassing any part on stage, any solo in the concert hall. Such was her status in opera, it is easy to forget that she first came to the attention of record collectors with her imposing contributions to sets of Handel oratorios in the late 1950s, in performances with the Utah Symphony Orchestra under Maurice Abravanel. And in 1961 she recorded Messiah in London under Sir Adrian Boult, with Joan Sutherland and Kenneth McKellar, before public and musical taste tended towards smaller-scale performances.
Her first significant performances as a soloist were in school productions of Messiah at Sumner high school in her native St Louis, Missouri. At the age of 12, she had joined the local Methodist choir, and that fuelled an immediate desire to become a singer. Like the mezzo-soprano Marian Anderson, whose recordings and radio broadcasts the young Bumbry listened to at every opportunity, she initially had little thought of opera, eager instead to become a concert artist. Hearing the St Louis Symphony under its long-serving conductor Vladimir Golschmann further inspired her in that direction.
In her teens, however, she came first in a competition on local radio, which led to her appearing at the age of 17 on a national broadcast talent show, singing from Verdi’s Don Carlo the aria O Don Fatale and reducing the presenter to tears on air. The initial prize had also won her a place at a local conservatory, but it was segregated, and Bumbry was offered only private lessons, which her parents turned down.
A year later she won a scholarship to Boston University, where she majored in music. Unable to settle in there, she transferred to Northwestern University, outside Chicago, where the great German soprano Lotte Lehmann happened to be conducting masterclasses. Bumbry was asked to participate, and the veteran singer was so impressed that Bumbry was invited to her school at Santa Barbara, California.
Lehmann also arranged a kind of scholarship for her new, impecunious pupil – Grace’s father, Benjamin Bumbry, was a railroad porter, and her mother, Melzia (nee Walker), a teacher. Bumbry intended to stay in Santa Barbara only for the summer of 1955; in the event she was there for three and a half years, following a regular curriculum of voice, theory and piano, then extending her languages and interpretation. For years Lehmann remained as Bumbry’s mentor.
Many prizes followed, and she took part in the auditions for the Metropolitan Opera of 1958, at which she was declared a joint winner with another soprano, Martina Arroyo. Then she sought out new paths, going to London and participating in Lehmann’s masterclasses at Wigmore Hall, where she also gave two recitals of her own, but an audition for Bayreuth proved unsuccessful.
After her international stage debut as Amneris at the Paris Opéra in the spring of 1960, she spent a fruitful time out of the limelight, learning her repertory under contract at Basle in Switzerland, where her roles included Carmen, Dalila, Orfeo, Lady Macbeth, and Azucena in Il Trovatore.
In 1961 Bayreuth accepted her as Venus in Tannhäuser, where she caused a sensation as the first black singer at the festival. Wieland Wagner, the grandson of the composer, who had cast her, told his critics: “When I heard Grace Bumbry, I knew she was the perfect Venus. Grandfather would have been delighted.” There were 42 curtain calls and Jacqueline Kennedy invited Bumbry to perform at the White House.
The allure of her portrayal can be judged by the live recording of Tannhäuser made at the time, with Victoria de los Angeles and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting. She is, indeed, a powerful advocate of profane love, whose hold over Tannhäuser can be fully comprehended.
The impresario Sol Hurok drew up a demanding tour schedule for Bumbry for the following year. It included her Carnegie Hall debut, appearances in 21 cities, and a triumphant homecoming to St Louis.
In 1963, Bumbry made her Covent Garden debut, as Princess Eboli in Don Carlos, with Boris Christoff and Tito Gobbi, a revival of the legendary 1958 Visconti staging, and two years later she made her debut in the same role at the Metropolitan, New York. Of this performance, Irving Kolodin wrote in the magazine Saturday Review: “She sang the ‘veil song’ beautifully with a light coloration not easy for mezzos to come by, but she also had the full range of stops to make O Don Fatale an experience in musical drama rather than merely an exercise in vocal agility.” The same aria she had sung in her teens as a talent show contestant had now won over the Met’s exacting audience.
At the Salzburg festivals of 1964 and 1965, she appeared as a much-admired Lady Macbeth to Fischer-Dieskau’s Macbeth. In that role, Bumbry showed her ability to encompass a role that has been tackled by both sopranos and mezzos with appreciable panache. In 1966 and 1967 she reappeared at Salzburg as Carmen, with Jon Vickers as Escamillo and Herbert von Karajan conducting, to much acclaim.
She sang her first Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana in Vienna, then took the role to New York. The famed Met diva Zinka Milanov, who had just retired and who granted Bumbry four lessons, commented that she did not much care for a mezzo in the role, but that when she heard Bumbry she was really convinced that she had the timbre of a soprano and that this, rather than the range of the voice, was the deciding factor.
By the end of the 60s, Bumbry was, in any case, taking on soprano roles, starting with Salome in a new production of Strauss’s melodrama at Covent Garden in 1970, and, also at Covent Garden, the title role in Norma. She had already sung the opera’s mezzo role of Adalgisa there. In her new guise she added Tosca, Leonora in both La Forza del Destino and Il Trovatore, and Gershwin’s Bess to her Metropolitan repertory, then sang Jenůfa at La Scala in 1974 and Dukas’s Ariane in Paris in 1975.
At the long-awaited opening of the Bastille in Paris in 1990, she sang Cassandre in Les Troyens. In 1997 she staged her formal operatic farewell in Lyon as Klytämnestra in Elektra, but she continued to give recitals and undertake carefully chosen roles. In 2012 she sang the Old Lady in Bernstein’s Candide at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, and the following year the title role in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades under Seiji Ozawa at the Vienna State Opera.
Among her best recordings is that of O Ma Lyre Immortelle, the aria of the dying Sapho, in Gounod’s opera of the same name. It has always been popular with high mezzos or low sopranos, so Bumbry fitted ideally, her delivery at once dignified and tragic as befits character and scene. The Guardian critic Philip Hope-Wallace wrote in Gramophone magazine: “Miss Bumbry should go far; range, temperament like this are by no means ordinary.”
Alongside her operatic career, she had a love of German lieder that stemmed from her work with Lehmann. Her timbre was well-matched to the songs of Brahms, where her generosity of voice and style really came into their own, while in Schubert she was better suited to the larger-scale, more dramatic settings than to the intimate pieces.
Bumbry’s 1963 marriage to the tenor Erwin Andreas Jaeckel, who gave up his career to manage hers, ended in divorce in 1972. Together they had settled in Switzerland, where she continued to live for many years before settling in Vienna. Her long-term partner, Jack Lunzer, died in 2016.
• Grace Melzia Ann Bumbry, opera singer, born 4 January 1937; died 7 May 2023
• Alan Blyth died in 2007
