Jessye Norman, Soprano (1945-2019)
Christoph Willibald Gluck: ALCESTE
“Divinités du Styx, ministres de la mort”
Conducted by Serge Baudo
Recorded 1982
My personal opinion: The world we live in is complex and elusive. We need structures to understand, templates to categorize. We need classifications for orientation. But what if something is difficult to classify? Once there was Yma Sumac, known as ‘The Peruvian Songbird’. With her vocal range over five octaves she sang low baritone and high coloratura. Sumac was an exponent of exotic South American music, and her few horrible recordings of arias demonstrate, she did well to avoid opera. What was she? A soprano? A mezzo or contralto? An equally bizarre singer was Ivan Rebroff, a self-proclaimed Russian from Berlin, whose voice ranged from bass to weird falsetto sounds. In Carlos Kleiber’s DIE FLEDERMAUS recording, he portrayed Orlovsky as a castrato – the weak point in an otherwise good performance …
Among ‘serious’ singers we also find hard-to-classify voices, crossers between vocal categories. These are loners, singulary appearances of singers in a league of their own. Such a solitaire was Jessye Norman, born 1945 in Augusta, Georgia. Even today, after her career, musiciologists are divided on the question, whether Norman was a dramatic soprano or a mezzo; an opera singer or an all-purpose entertainer. She sang some great Wagner heroines (Sieglinde, Elsa and Kundry) as well as Purcell’s Dido, Haydn’s Armida and Gluck’s Alceste. She switched between Weber’s Euryanthe and Berlioz’ Cassandra and Didon, Strauss’ Ariadne and Stravinsky’s Iocasta. She disgraced herself as Carmen and had no shame to sing Offenbach’s mortally sick Antonia in LES CONTES D’HOFFMANN with the voice of a Valkyrie. She transformed the composer’s BELLE HÉLÈNE into Verdi’s Aida and the Sicilian Santuzza into Gershwin’s Bess. And, as so many African-American opera singers, Jessye Norman couldn’t resist to sing negro spirituals – deep soulful music, certainly not the right sujet for such a voluminous operatic voice …
Jessye Norman – in her prime here, there and everywhere. “How could I live without her?”, wrote James Levine 1998 in “Dialogues and discoveries”. But we should not confuse omnipresence with versatility. Not a single role is associable with her name. Thinking of Sieglinde in DIE WALKURE means thinking of Flagstad, Konetzni, Mödl or Nilsson. Elsa in LOHENGRIN was best sung by lyric sopranos like Gruemmer, Lehmann, Eipperle or Janowitz. For Purcell’s Dido it needs a reserved voice like that of Troyanos, Baker or Kirkby. Jessye Norman’s excursions in Gluck and Haydn are vocally overwhelming, but stilistically utterly implausible. Her CARMEN under Seiji Ozawa was called by critics “a pretentious fiasco”.
Unmasking Jessye Norman at this point? No, of course not. Her voice was a natural phenomenon, an event in itself – only comparable with the vocal tidal waves of Flagstad or Nilsson. Dubious, as so often, are the corrupt business machinations. An artist gets hawked regardless of the consequences. Disasters – for example the failed recordings of CARMEN and LOHENGRIN (the latter with Domingo, who always believed he could sing everything written for tenor) – distract us unnecessarily from outstanding performances such as EURYANTHE under Janowski (the young Norman is terrific in “So bin ich nun verlassen”, secure and expressive in the delicate third act) or “Abschied” from Mahler’s LIED VON DER ERDE, conducted by Colin Davis. Once more: There was never a singer qualified to sing everything. Norman too experienced bitter disappointments, broke up with conductors, colleagues and managers. A healthy dose of self confidence? Or only affectations of a capricious diva? As usual, truth is somewhere in the middle.
Jessye Norman’s voice was not the adequate instrument for all those who appreciate characterization and fine nuances. The mighty sound, the rich and expansive tonal emission (especially in later years) delighted the fanatics among opera-goers; those die-hard fans who willingly make sure that a singer gets cult status. And Jessye Norman was in line with these expectations: Dressed in colossal robes and photographed in majestic poses, “The Black Goddess Of Opera” was an icon, the personified ideal for fans who could not live without their glorified idols. Some things will never change …
Jessye Norman died on September 30, 2019.