Grace Bumbry, trailblazing Black opera star and one of world’s most celebrated singers, dies at 86

Grace Bumbry, the trailblazer opera diva who became the first Black singer to perform at the prestigious Bayreuth Festival in Germany, has died. She was 86.

Bumbry, a 2009 Kennedy Center honoree, died Sunday at a hospital in Vienna, Austria. Her death was confirmed by her publicist, David Lee Brewer.

The Saint Louis, Missouri-born mezzo-soprano — hailed by New York’s Metropolitan Opera as an “intense, thrilling performer” and one of its “most illustrious singers of the last century” — had a stroke late last year and was never able to fully recover.

Bumbry suffered an acute ischemic stroke on Oct. 20 during a flight from Vienna to New York City. She was hospitalized in Queens and returned to Vienna on Dec. 8. According to Brewer, she had been in and out of facilities since then.

Bumbry became interested in music as a little girl when her mother took her to see Marian Anderson perform in Saint Louis. The civil rights pioneer was the first Black singer to perform at The Met and inspired Bumbry to “seriously become a singer of classical music,” she told NPR in 1990.

At 16 she won her first prize in a local radio contest, according to a bio on her website.

The contest, sponsored by radio station KMOX included a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music — but because she was Black, the young singer was denied admission.

Her win, however, opened the door to a career that would last for the next 50 years. She was invited to sing on CBS’s “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” and then went on the attend Boston University College of Fine Arts. She later transferred to Northwestern University.

In 1958, Bumbry was one of the winners of the 1958 Met National Council Auditions, and in 1960 she made her operatic debut, singing “Aida” at the Paris Opéra — the first Black singer to perform at the house.

In 1961, Bumbry appeared in a new production of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Her groundbreaking casting led to 200 letters of protest — but also catapulted her to international fame.

She debuted at London’s Royal Opera in 1963 and at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan the following year.

In 1965 her role as Eboli in Verdi’s “Don Carlo” was the first of 216 performances with The Met in New York. Her last appearance with the company was in 1996, when she “astounded the audience with an aria from [Saint-Saëns’] ‘Samson et Dalila’ that showed her voice was still plush and potent some 30 years after her debut.”

With News Wire Services