President Obama recalls her St. Louis roots at induction in D.C.
By Chris King Of The St. Louis American
“Reflecting on the challenge of finding one’s voice, Grace Bumbry once said: ‘God has already planted that in your throat. It’s your job to free it up, to allow that beautiful thing to shine through.’”
Thus President Barack Obama introduced the opera great from St. Louis on Monday when Bumbry received Kennedy Center Honors of 2009 from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
“True to her name, Grace allowed her voice to shine through and touch all those within its range. Around her family’s piano in St. Louis; on the talent show where, as a teenager, she moved the host to tears; and then, after being turned away from one music school because of the color of her skin – her triumphant international debut at the Paris Opera, when she was just 23 years old,” Obama said.
“With a pitch and presence like no other, she became a global sensation, moving audiences at the great opera houses of the world. And performing here at the White House, it was said that she moved Jacqueline Kennedy to lean over and gently sing along the words to the president.”
Obama spoke in surprising detail about the inner workings of Bumbry’s art.
“Defying every expectation, Grace Bumbry then made the transition from mezzo to soprano. And over the decades that followed, she displayed a range like few others – sometimes the middle ranges as a mezzo; sometimes the highs of a soprano; sometimes both in the same performance. Grace not only triumphed in different techniques, she transformed them,” Obama said.
“And though she gave her final operatic performance in 1997, she appears in recitals to this day. After nearly 50 years, she remains the definition of a diva in the classical sense: a divine voice worthy of the heavens. And tonight – 32 years after she performed at the first Kennedy Center Honors for her mentor Marian Anderson – we honor Grace Bumbry.”
To add a highlight the president missed, in 1961 Wieland Wagner, grandson of the composer Richard Wagner, cast Bumbry as Venus in a new production of Tannhäuser.
As the Goddess of Love that seduces Wagner’s noble hero, Bumbry would be the first black opera singer to appear at Bayreuth, the world’s most revered shrine to the great composer and his art. It was a move that infuriated many conservative opera-goers.
Wieland Wagner shot back: “When I heard Grace Bumbry, I knew she was the perfect Venus. Grandfather would have been delighted.”
The media frenzy that ensued was global, helping to inspire Jacqueline Kennedy’s historic invitation for her to sing at the White House.
Born Grace Ann Bumbry in St. Louis, the daughter of a railroad company freight handler and a school teacher, the future international opera star started singing around the family piano and then in the family church youth choir. She graduated from Sumner High School and won a radio talent competition at age 17. Her prize was a scholarship to the local music conservatory, only the conservatory was segregated and did not admit Bumbry into its classrooms but offered her private lessons instead.
Her parents refused. Instead, she auditioned for Arthur Godfrey’s popular “Talent Scouts” program. Her selection, Verdi’s “O don fatale,” moved the host not only to tears, but also to predict that “her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.” In a touch of supreme irony, that same day the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision banning segregated schools.
Bumbry was joined in the ranks of 2009 Kennedy Center honorees by writer, actor, director and producer Mel Brooks; pianist and composer Dave Brubeck; actor, director, and producer Robert De Niro; and singer and songwriter Bruce Springsteen.
Obama’s general remarks were strongly colored by his consciousness of having made a recent major commitment of U.S. troops to the war in Afghanistan.
“In times of war and sacrifice, the arts – and these artists – remind us to sing and to laugh and to live,” Obama said.
He also recognized the military service of Brubeck and Brooks.
“By the time he was nine, this boy from Brooklyn had seen his first musical and dreamed of becoming ‘the King of Broadway,” Obama said of Mel Brooks.
“But World War II meant service in the Army – or, as he put it, ‘the European Theater of Operations’ with ‘lots of operations’ and ‘very little theater.’”