Anne Brown, Soprano Who Was Gershwin’s Bess, Is Dead at 96
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Anne Brown, a penetratingly pure soprano who literally put the Bess in “Porgy and Bess” by inspiring George Gershwin to expand that character’s part in a folk opera that originally was to be called “Porgy,” died Friday in Oslo. She was 96.

Her daughter Paula Schjelderup announced the death.

“Porgy and Bess” burst into the American consciousness in 1935 as a sophisticated musical treatment of poor but colorful black people. Critics could not make out whether it was a musical comedy, a jazz drama, a folk opera or something quite different. Time told: “Porgy and Bess” became part of the standard operatic repertoire, including that of the Metropolitan Opera.

The ground-breaking opera, drawing from the gritty experiences of South Carolina blacks as tempered by Gershwin’s musical genius, introduced songs that came to be lodged deep in America’s soul. Ms. Brown was the first person Gershwin heard singing the part of Bess, a morally challenged but achingly human character who was relatively minor in the original 1925 DuBose Heyward novel and the 1927 hit stage play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward.

As he composed the opera, often with Ms. Brown at his side, the composer kept adding more and more music for her. Her voice was also the first he heard singing several other parts in the opera.

“Porgy and Bess” went on to be produced on uncountable amateur and professional stages all over the world. Because Gershwin died at the age of 38 in 1937, Ms. Brown is the only Bess he ever knew.

Her own story has an operatic flavor. She grew up in a protective middle-class home with crystal chandeliers and music; her father later worried about her going to Juilliard, much less playing the part of a tawdry woman like Bess. She was lauded for her talent, but was rejected from a Baltimore Catholic elementary school because she was African-American.

Even after winning the Margaret McGill prize as the best singer at Juilliard, she had no hope in those days of reaching the top tiers of opera. Not until 1955 did the Met feature a black singer, Marian Anderson.

Ms. Brown ultimately moved to Oslo.

“To put it bluntly, I was fed up with racial prejudice,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.

Anne Wiggins Brown was born in Baltimore on Aug. 9, 1912. Her father, a surgeon, was the grandson of slaves, and her mother was a music lover who played the piano daily. Family legend had it that Ms. Brown could sing a perfect scale when she was 9 months old, The Washington Post reported in 1994.

After attending Morgan College, Ms. Brown was rejected by the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, a leading conservatory. She was encouraged by the wife of the owner of The Baltimore Sun to apply to Juilliard. She was earned an undergraduate degree and was in her second year of graduate studies at Juilliard when she read that Gershwin was writing his opera. She wrote to ask for an interview. His secretary called to ask her to go to his apartment, with lots of music.

She brought music by Brahms, Schubert and other classical composers, which Gershwin played as she sang. When he asked her to sing a Negro spiritual, she blanched. She considered the request racial stereotyping, but finally sang “A City Called Heaven” without accompaniment.

Gershwin was quiet after she finished. He finally told her that it was the most beautiful spiritual he ever heard. They hugged.

Soon, Gershwin telephoned to say, “I’ve finished up to page 33 or so,” and asked her to come over to sing it. Finally, in the last days of rehearsals, Gershwin took her to a restaurant to have an orange juice and told her he was expanding the title of the opera to include Bess, her part. Ms. Brown talked Gershwin into letting Bess sing “Summertime” in the third act, reprising the song the character Clara sings earlier.

Although the show received mixed reviews in October 1935, Ms. Brown was praised. Olin Downes in The Times said her work was “a high point of interpretation.” She went on to appear in the Broadway play “Mamba’s Daughters” (1939), a revival of “Porgy” in 1942 and the Gershwin movie biography “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945), playing herself.

She performed extensively in Europe, South America and elsewhere, and taught voice for many years in a drama school in Oslo, at which one of her students was Liv Ullmann. Her own singing career was cut short by a lung illness in the 1950s.

In 1948, Ms. Brown made a concert tour of European capitals and settled in Oslo, where she became a Norwegian citizen and married Thorleif Schjelderup, who won third place in ski jumping at the 1948 Winter Olympics. The marriage ended in divorce, as did two previous marriages.

Ms. Brown is survived by her daughters Paula and Vaar Schjelderup; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

In 1998, Ms. Brown received the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to American Music from the Peabody Institute, which has operated as a division of Johns Hopkins University since 1977.

In the interview with The Times, Ms. Brown suggested that she was born 30 years too soon.

“If I had been born even 20 years later I might have sung at the Metropolitan Opera,” she mused. “I might have marched for civil rights. I would have been here for that. I would certainly not have lived in Norway, and my life would have been very different.”

With bright eyes, she added, “Of course, I would not have met Mr. Gershwin, and that would have been a shame.”