Volume 24 Issue 5 - February 2019

FEATURE
CELEBRATING
JESSYE
NORMAN
12TH GLENN GOULD PRIZE LAUREATE
TORONTO, FEBRUARY 11 TO 20, 2019
DAVID PERLMAN
CAROL FRIEDMAN
Jessye Norman (singing), New York City.
Hunt down the photograph of Jessye Norman that
graces our cover in the Prints & Photographs Online
Catalog of the US Library of Congress in Washington
D.C. and you will discover that it was taken in 1988 by
acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz and titled “Jessye
Norman (singing), New York City.” (The cutline for the
image in the version we received from Universal Music to
make our cover from is titled “Jessye Norman is Carmen,”
but we’ll get back to that factoid once we’ve browsed the
Library’s holdings a little further.)
The photo on our cover seems to be the only Leibovitz photo in the
library’s print and photo online catalogue. But it’s far from the only
Jessye Norman image listed there: there are photos of her singing
during Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration and, the previous year, at the
1996 Democratic National Convention; there are sketches of her, alone
and with conductor Seiji Ozawa, by illustrator Tracy Sugarman; and
there is a photograph listed of her singing, in the Capitol Rotunda in
June 1999, during a ceremony to award the Congressional Medal of
Honour to Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose 1955 refusal
to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man could be
said to have sparked the campaign of disobedience that launched the
American civil rights movement. ‘’This will be encouragement for all
of us to continue until all people have equal rights,’’ the then-86-yearold
Parks said in accepting the medal, just moments after Norman’s
voice filled the Rotunda with the strains of John Rosamond Johnson
and James Weldon Johnson’s anthemic Lift Every Voice and Sing.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
let us march on till victory is won.
“Jessye Norman is Carmen”
If one searches a list of all the Library’s holdings beyond prints and
photographs, a sense of the full scope and scale of Norman’s artistic
contribution over the decades starts to emerge: films, interviews, her
own 2014 memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!, and almost 100 audio
recordings, from spirituals to song cycles, from sacred works to the
grandest of grand opera, reflective of an astounding technical range
(she has sung soprano, mezzo-soprano and alto roles throughout
her career), broad and adventurous musical tastes, and a lifetime of
collaboration with artistic colleagues who, like her, are among the
greatest of the great.
Tucked away among these recordings
is one from 1988, the year in which
our cover photo was taken, which sheds
light on the “Jessie Norman Is Carmen”
cutline under the file of the photograph
sent to us by Universal Music for
our cover use. It is a Philips recording
of Bizet’s Carmen, with Norman in the
title role, and Mirella Freni, Neil Shicoff,
and Simon Estes, among others, in
the cast. It was made between July 13
and 22 1988, in the Grand Auditorium de Radio France, with Seiji
Ozawa conducting the Orchestre national de France. Sure enough, if
you hunt out images of the cover of that record, you will find yourself
face to face with this same photograph, only in colour. You would
never think, though, looking at the photograph in that context, that
it was ever intended for any other purpose. It seems to be a picture
of Norman inhabiting a role as fully and easily as the blanket drawn
around her.
8 | February 2019 thewholenote.com