Jessye Norman, Grammy-winning star of opera, dies at 74


Olde Hornet

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RIP!

Her great voice will be missed!


US opera singer Jessye Norman, one of the most renowned sopranos of the 20th Century, has died at the age of 74.

A native of Augusta, Georgia, Norman was one of the rare black singers to reach fame in the opera world.

She established herself in Europe in the 1970s and made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1983.

Norman died in a New York hospital of septic shock and multiple organ failure related to complications from a spinal cord injury in 2015, her family said.

Born on 15 September 1945, Norman grew up in a family of amateur artists and sang in church from the age of four. She earned a scholarship to study music at the historically black college Howard University in Washington DC before going on to the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Michigan.
 

Jessye Norman: Hear 10 of Her Greatest Performances


Listen to classic renditions of Strauss, Wagner and others by the American soprano, who died on Monday at 74.

There was a sense of safety in the rich, majestic, capacious voice of Jessye Norman, who died on Monday at 74. To have lost her is to have lost some part of that safety, too, which may have been one reason for the intensity of feeling that greeted the news of her death.

[Read the obituary for Ms. Norman, and our critic’s appraisal of her career.]

A fellow diva, Renée Fleming, called it a “stunning, saddening loss” on Twitter, posting a classic live recording of Ms. Norman singing the Liebestod from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Yuval Sharon, who directed a foray into John Cage late in her career, shared on Facebook her commanding, committed Jocasta in Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex.”

More Wagner, as well as gorgeous renditions of Ms. Norman’s beloved Strauss and other composers, are on offer here, in selections by our critics and writers of some of her greatest performances. ZACHARY WOOLFE
 
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