Posted: Mon 17 Oct 2005 15:50 Post subject: Anne Wiggins Brown
American Soprano Anne Wiggins Brown
Biographies
Anne Wiggins Brown (b. 1912)
by Randye Jones
Soprano Anne Wiggins Brown was born on August 9, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland. (This year, rather than 1915, was confirmed by the singer herself.) Her father, Dr. Harry F. Brown, was a prominent physician and grandson of a slave. Her mother, Mary Wiggins Brown, was of African, Cherokee and Scottish-Irish ancestry. She and her three sisters were active in the musical and theatrical life of the racially segregated community. Brown described her early musical training:
I was always with music. My mother played and sang and she taught her four daughters very much about music. She was my first vocal teacher. In those days there was not much that an African-American could do in the theatre, except roles as a servant or something. I thought about being an opera singer but there also was the same difficulty. In those days the Metropolitan didn't have any African-American singers.
Brown's parents tried to enroll her in an area Catholic school, where they hoped to foster her musical talents. However, the school refused to admit an African American. After confronting similar discrimination years later when she applied to the Peabody School of Music, Brown was admitted to Morgan State College in Baltimore and attended Teachers' College, Columbia University. She continued her classical vocal studies with Lucia Dunham at the Institute of Musical Art at the Juilliard School. Brown became the first African American to win Juilliard's prestigious Margaret McGill scholarship.
During Brown's second year of graduate studies, she learned about a new opera:
There was another black girl at Juilliard at that time and she came one day to me and said "Have you read the news about Porgy? It was not Porgy and Bess at that time, it was just Porgy. I discovered that George Gershwin was searching for singers, both musical comedy and jazz singers, for an opera that he was writing. I wrote him a letter that same evening. And a few days later I had a call from his secretary asking me to come for an audition.... I just did the things that I would have done at the Juilliard. He asked me, finally, to sing a Negro spiritual. To which I reacted rather aggressively, perhaps. And I said I didn't bring any of that kind of music and I resented the fact that so many people expected African-Americans to sing Negro spirituals and sometimes only that. That hadn't been his attitude at all. But when he saw how I reacted to it, he said, "All right." And then I sang a spiritual for him without an accompaniment because I didn't have any music for it. And he was very, very, pleased.
The song Anne Brown sang for Gershwin, "City Called Heaven," became a standard of the soprano's concert repertoire. For Gershwin, it decided for him that Brown should be his Bess. The composer often invited Brown to sing not only Bess's lines as they were written, but other characters' parts. As work on the opera progressed, Bess's role grew to the point that Brown suggested to Gershwin that the character's name be added to the title. She commented that:
One day, George Gershwin said, "Come, Annie, 'after he met my mother and heard her call me Annie, he always called me Annie,' "I have something to tell you. You take a glass of orange juice with me across the street at the cafe." He ordered something--a sandwich. And then he said, "I have news for you, from now on George Gershwin's opera will be known as Porgy and Bess." And of course that was a great thrill because that already upped the importance of the role I was to play. We joked about it a bit. I had heard rumors that maybe there would be a change in name but it was a surprise when he announced it to me in that way.
The opera's all-African American starring cast was made up of relative newcomers and musical veterans. Brown's co-star, Todd Duncan, was on the music faculty at Howard University and had only made his operatic debut as Alfio in Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana the year before agreeing to create the role of Porgy. Ruby Elzy, another Juilliard alumna, had performed in the chorus of the Broadway production Brown Buddies and a cinematic role in The Emperor Jones before Gershwin selected her for the role of Serena. Edward Matthews (Jake) had been a recitalist who had performed at Carnegie Hall and was in the orginal cast of Virgil Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Abbie Mitchell (Clara) had performed on Vaudeville, Broadway and operatic stages for nearly 40 years, and John Bubbles (Sportin' Life) had earned fame on Broadway and with the Ziegfeld Follies as a tap dancer and singer.
After a successful test run in Boston, Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York in October 1935. The original production garnered mixed reviews, though the performers received critical praise. Despite lukewarm financial success--only 124 performances--the opera was given a national tour. One incident stood out from the tour. The opera was scheduled for performance at the National Theater in Washington, DC. Brown and Duncan learned that the theater was segregated and refused to perform there until the policy was changed. After threatening to blacklist the singers, the management finally relented and set aside the policy for the week Porgy and Bess played there.
In a 1998 New York Times article, Brown reflected on the negative reactions to the opera:
Many blacks were profoundly unhappy. "My father was very displeased," Ms. Brown said. "He thought that those were the old clichés of black people--dope peddlars, near-prostitutes; he especially didn't like his daughter showing her legs and all that. I thought that DuBose Heyward and Gershwin had simply taken a part of life in Catfish Row, South Carolina, and rendered it superbly."
Porgy and Bess served as a springboard for Brown's career. She returned to Broadway in the DuBose Heyward musicals Mamba's Daughters and La Belle Hélčne, and she was the soprano soloist in the performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, presented on Armistice Day, 1941, by the NBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leopold Stokowski. Brown briefly reprised her role in the 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess. She toured across the United States, presenting recitals from works by German composers such as Brahms and Schubert, to spiritual settings by Burleigh. Despite the notoriety she had earned, she still faced the same racial prejudices many of her contemporaries had experienced. In one instance, Brown was denied use of a concert hall in her hometown--a situation made more ironic by the fact that she had been invited to launch the Liberty ship, the S.S. Frederick Douglass, at a Baltimore shipyard just a few months earlier.
Brown discussed the effects her skintone had on her career:
"We tough girls tough it out," she said with a wry grin. "I've lived a strange kind of life--half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color. On the other hand, many black folks have said, 'Well, she's not really black.' ... Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn't consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, it they couldn't take me as I was--the hell with them."
Determined to escape the racism so prevalent in America, Brown travelled overseas in 1946. She performed in the Royal Opera (Copenhagen) production of Porgy and Bess--again co-starring with Todd Duncan, sang with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and gave numerous recitals throughout Europe. She was especially drawn to the relaxed lifestyle she found in Norway and decided to relocate there. She met and married her third husband, Thorleif Schjelderup, a Norwegian philosopher, journalist and Olympic skier, in May 1948. She raised her family--a daughter, Paula, from her second marriage, and Vaar, a daughter with Schjelderup--in Norway while concertizing and performing on the operatic stages of Europe, Asia, and South America. In 1950, she performed in the Gian Carlo Menotti operas, The Medium, The Telephone, in Norway. She followed this with the leading role in Menotti's The Consul, for which she won the Music Critics Prize for best performance.
In 1953, Brown began a new career as a voice teacher and opera director--including a Norwegian production of Porgy and Bess in 1967--when her chronic asthmatic condition forced her to retire as a performer. She published an autobiography, Sang Fra Frossen Gren, in 1979. She returned to the United States in 1985 for the premiere of Porgy and Bess at the Metropolitan Opera in 1985--fifty years after the original production. In 1998, she participated in the Library of Congress commemoration of George Gershwin's 100th birthday. That year, she also received the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America by Peabody Institute, righting the wrong done by the school decades earlier.
Anne Wiggins Brown continues to reside in Norway and remains close to her daughters and numerous grandchildren. She was the subject of a 2004 film documentary by Nicole Franklin http://www.nicolefranklin.com
entitled, Gershwin, Norway, & The Artists' Libido: A dialogue with Anne Brown.
When interviewer James Standifer asked Ms. Brown what advice she would give to young musicians, she replied:
I would say, "If you are going to be a musician, be a real one." But how many young singers and artists of today are doing that? If there are many, all I can say is to keep on. You know, I have sung a Negro spiritual many times called "Hold On." Hold on and don't let anybody or anything stop you. Retain your integrity as a human being and as an artist and let the chips fall where they may.
Posted: Mon 23 Mar 2009 03:32 Post subject: Obituary
Quote:
March 18, 2009
NY Times
Anne Brown, Who Was Gershwin’s Bess, Dies at 96
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Anne Brown, a penetratingly pure soprano who literally put the Bess in “Porgy and Bess” by inspiring George Gershwin to expand the character’s part in a folk opera that was originally to be called “Porgy,” died Friday in Oslo. She was 96.
Her daughter Paula Schjelderup announced the death.
“Porgy and Bess” burst onto the American scene in 1935 as a sophisticated musical treatment of poor blacks. Critics could not make out whether it was a musical comedy, a jazz drama, a folk opera or something quite different. Time told: it became part of the standard operatic repertory, including that of the Metropolitan Opera.
Drawing from the gritty experiences of South Carolina blacks, “Porgy and Bess” introduced songs that came to be lodged in American culture. Ms. Brown was the first person Gershwin heard singing the part of Bess, a morally challenged but achingly human character who was relatively minor in the original 1925 DuBose Heyward novel and the 1927 hit stage play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward.
As he composed the opera, often with Ms. Brown at his side, Gershwin added more and more music for her. Her voice was also the first he heard singing several other parts in the opera.
“Porgy and Bess” went on to be produced on countless amateur and professional stages all over the world. Because Gershwin died at 38 in 1937, Ms. Brown was the only Bess he ever knew.
Her own story has an operatic flavor. She grew up in a protective middle-class home with crystal chandeliers and music; her father later worried about her going to New York, where she was accepted at Juilliard, much less playing the part of a tawdry woman like Bess. She was lauded for her talent, but as a child was rejected from a Baltimore Catholic elementary school because she was African-American.
Even after winning the Margaret McGill prize as the best singer at Juilliard, she had no hope of reaching the top tiers of opera. Not until 1955 did the Met feature a black singer, Marian Anderson.
Ms. Brown ultimately moved to Oslo. “To put it bluntly, I was fed up with racial prejudice,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.
Anne Wiggins Brown was born in Baltimore on Aug. 9, 1912. Her father, a surgeon, was the grandson of slaves, and her mother was a music lover who played the piano daily. Family legend had it that Ms. Brown could sing a perfect scale when she was 9 months old, The Washington Post reported in 1994.
After attending what was then Morgan College, Ms. Brown was rejected by the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, a leading conservatory. She was encouraged by the wife of the owner of The Baltimore Sun to apply to Juilliard. She had earned an undergraduate degree and was in her second year of graduate studies at Juilliard when she read that Gershwin was writing his opera. She wrote to ask for an interview. His secretary called to ask her to go to his apartment, with lots of music.
She brought music by Brahms, Schubert and other classical composers, which Gershwin played as she sang, she recalled in numerous interviews. When he asked her to sing a Negro spiritual, she balked. She considered the request racial stereotyping, but finally sang “A City Called Heaven” without accompaniment.
Gershwin was quiet after she finished. He finally told her that it was the most beautiful spiritual he ever heard. They hugged.
Soon, Gershwin telephoned to say, “I’ve finished up to page 33 or so,” and asked her to come over to sing it. Finally, in the last days of rehearsals, Gershwin took her to a restaurant to have an orange juice and told her he was expanding the title of the opera to include Bess, her part. Ms. Brown talked Gershwin into letting Bess sing “Summertime” in the third act, reprising the song the character Clara sings earlier.
Although the show received mixed reviews in October 1935, Ms. Brown was praised. Olin Downes in The Times said her work was “a high point of interpretation.” She went on to appear in the Broadway play “Mamba’s Daughters” (1939), a revival of “Porgy” in 1942 and the Gershwin movie biography “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945), playing herself.
She performed extensively in Europe, South America and elsewhere, and taught voice for many years in a drama school in Oslo; one of her students was Liv Ullmann. Her own singing career was cut short by a lung illness in the 1950s.
In 1948, Ms. Brown made a concert tour of European capitals and settled in Oslo, where she became a Norwegian citizen and married Thorleif Schjelderup, who won third place in ski jumping at the 1948 Winter Olympics. The marriage ended in divorce, as did two previous marriages.
Ms. Brown is survived by her daughters Paula and Vaar Schjelderup; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
In 1998, Ms. Brown received the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America from the Peabody Institute, which has operated as a division of Johns Hopkins University since 1977.
In the interview with The Times, Ms. Brown suggested she had been born 30 years too soon.
“If I had been born even 20 years later I might have sung at the Metropolitan Opera,” she mused. “I might have marched for civil rights. I would have been here for that. I would certainly not have lived in Norway, and my life would have been very different.”
With bright eyes, she added, “Of course, I would not have met Mr. Gershwin, and that would have been a shame.”
"We tough girls tough it out," she said with a wry grin. "I've lived a strange kind of life--half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color. On the other hand, many black folks have said, 'Well, she's not really black.' ... Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn't consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, it they couldn't take me as I was--the hell with them."
'
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