Great Performers: Jessye Norman
When the world lost Jessye Norman on September 30, at the age of 74, it lost one of the great voices of recent times: rich, full of colour, flexible and infinitely expressive. As an artist, Norman was aware of her worth and she was every inch the diva.
Read more…Like many of her African-American colleagues – from Marian Anderson to Kathleen Battle, via Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman discovered her voice as a girl, singing in church. The instrument, even then, was supremely flexible and during her professional career she sang a remarkably broad repertoire, making her very difficult to define and characterise as a singer. She could embrace lyric roles like Mozart’s Figaro Countess or the airiest of French mélodie but could also storm the heights of Wagner and Richard Strauss. And she could move from the soprano repertoire down into mezzo territory – here was a singer who could sing Offenbach's Hélène or Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs but also Bizet's 'Carmen' or Mahler's 'Das Lied von der Erde'. Some people claim Norman as a 'Falcon', essentially a singer with a mezzo-soprano timbre but with the ability to soar up into the more dramatic soprano range. But, as she once said, 'pigeonholes are for pigeons'!
As with many American singers, she established her career in Europe. Following a win at the ARD Music Competition in Munich in 1968 (when she was 23), she was given a contract by the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and here she learned her craft – one of her first major roles with the company was Elisabeth in Wagner's 'Tannhäuser'. Soon after she made her Italian debut at La Scala as Verdi's Aida. She wouldn't make her US debut until 1982, but by then she was a major star in the operatic firmament, and she could choose her own roles. And, typically, she embraced a very diverse repertoire.
Norman, for much of her career, kept the various strands of her art in equal balance: opera, oratorio and, particularly song, where she always maintained a link to her roots in recital by throwing in a few spirituals at the end and vesting an extraordinary aura over her audience. (She was one of very few 'classical' singers who could silence and entrance a huge general audience – say at the Olympics or some vast stadium event – with an unaccompanied spiritual.) She also embraced more popular song and jazz with considerable success. Late in her career she enjoyed working solo or in small ensembles with major directors and choreographers in concerts that came closer to 'happenings' – her close friend Robert Wilson staged Schubert's Winterreise for her and achieved, with minimal movement, a thing of wonder and tremendous power.
Norman was a keen and prolific recording artist, with the bulk of her catalogue entrusted to Philips and EMI (now Warner Classics) and she worked with the greatest conductors of her time. With Sir Colin Davis she'd sing everything from Mozart to Berlioz and Tippett, with Claudio Abbado it was Mahler, with Sir Georg Solti and James Levine it was Wagner, with Seiji Ozawa she left a memorable, if slightly idiosyncratic Carmen, with Bernard Haitink we have her Leonore ('Fidelio') and with Herbert von Karajan a single example – Isolde's Liebestod. In the song repertoire, she learned much from her regular partners – Dalton Baldwin, magnificent in the French song repertoire, and with Geoffrey Parsons, the German song literature, and as with many singers, Norman had a long and fruitful musical partnership with the conductor and pianist James Levine.
If one had to single out just a handful of Jessye Norman's recordings, I'd opt for her quite overwhelming assumption of Queen Dido in Purcell's opera – 'authentic' in approach it is not, but in spirit, it's extraordinary: her Farewell is torrential in the beauty and richness of tone, and the sheer regality of her characterisation. I'd also have to have an example of her in Mahler's 'Das Lied von der Erde' (another song of farewell), her 'Abschied' is magnificent and alive to every twist and turn of the poetry. Stravinsky's Jocasta, a truly tragic figure, was a central creation for her and, in her voice, the Latin language breathes anew. But for a single example of the Jessye Norman craft, it would have to be Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, recorded with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester and Kurt Masur, and released in 1983, when it won numerous awards including a Gramophone Award. It is very slow, but she has the technique (and lungs) to manage it, and in the final song, 'Im Abendrot' (another farewell), she rides Strauss's huge orchestra with ease, indeed she almost appears as another instrument in the composer's fabulous tapestry of sound, the Leipzig players rewarding their colleague with playing of astounding subtlety. This is perhaps the kind of voice Strauss had in mind when he wrote these songs (he had Kirsten Flagstad in mind and she gave the premiere). Had he heard Jessye Norman, Strauss would, one imagines, have nodded in approval and, perhaps, shed a tear at the beauty and range of her performance.