Helen L. Phillips was first black singer at the Met
By Daniel R. Brown
Of the St. Louis American
At 11 a.m. today, August 11, famed opera singer Helen L. Phillips will be laid to rest at Valhalla Cemetery, 7600 St. Charles Rock Rd. Phillips, the first African American to sing in the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, died of heart failure in New York City on July 27, 2005. She was 85 years old.
Local choir director Fred Robinson, who is a graduate of Phillips’ alma mater, Sumner High School, recalled how she came to perform at the world-renowned opera house.
“Generally everyone says that Marion Anderson was the first. In fact, though, Helen Phillips sang in the chorus at the Met,” Robinson said.
“They were short of singers, and they called one of the agents in New York to say they needed a singer that afternoon, and that they wanted the agent’s best soprano. The agent sent Helen. When Helen arrived and they realized she was black, it was too late, so they told her to just go backstage. She was really the first black singer at the Met.”
In Phillips’ historic debut at the Met, she performed Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” from December 1947 through February 1948, according to Met archivist Jeff McMillan.
In January 1955, Marion Anderson became the first black singer to perform a major role at the Met, portraying Ulrica in Verdi’s “A Masked Ball.”
Concert pianist Eugene Hayes, who had his Carnegie Hall Debut in 1958, befriended not only Phillips but also another famous Sumner graduate, Robert McFerrin, who was the first African-American male to perform at the Met.
“The Met is the mecca of opera,” Hayes said. “Marion Anderson didn’t get there until her career was almost over, and Robert McFerrin was the first black man to sing at the Met. He is still in St. Louis. He told me years ago that when he was there he got death threats”
Hayes, whose piano virtuosity also took him around the world, said that black performers like himself and Phillips had to seek acceptance abroad. “You were an outsider in your own country. That’s why all of us went to Europe,” Hayes said.
“Even if you made a dynamic New York debut, you still were not a welcome guest at the table everywhere. You had to go abroad where they were a little more color-blind.
Hayes continued, “There were just certain things that black folks didn’t do. They didn’t play tennis. They didn’t play golf. They were not supposed to sing opera. They had all of the things you weren’t supposed to do. If you were doing those things, if you couldn’t get out of the country you would have a tough time.”
Despite, the challenges of race, when Pillips was coming up St. Louis came to be known for producing top-notch artists.
“It was a very fertile time for classical music in the African-American community,” explained Robert Ray, professor of music at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
“There were some very strong music educators who at that time were wonderfully classically trained people. Exposure in St. Louis was just very limited, so often they had to go to Europe to make their name.”
In addition to her Met breakthrough, Phillips was also the first African-American soloist with Dr. E. Franko Goldman’s Band, which played in Central Park in the 1940s and ’50s. During her career she performed everywhere from the St. Louis Opera to Broadway and even as far as Spain.
“When I toured in Germany for the State Department, everywhere I went they would ask me if I knew her,” Hayes recalled. “She was a very great artist.”