3 minute read
Literary Lives 12
from 11122021 WEEKEND
by tribune242
trailblazers and artists with concerts, recitals, lectures, panel discussions, and exhibitions hosted by Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, and other sites around New York City.
Jessye Norman served on several boards of directors in her later years: The Carnegie Hall; City-Mealson-Wheels in New York City; the Dance Theatre of Harlem; the New York Botanical Garden; the New York Public Library; the National Music Foundation; and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. She was a member of the board and spokesperson for the SLE Lupus Foundation, and also a spokesperson for the Partnership for the Homeless. As well she served on the Board of Trustees of the Augusta Opera Association and Paine College.
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“There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.”
- Jessye Norman
In March 2013, the Apollo Theater and Manhattan School of Music featured Norman in Ask Your Name, a ninety-minute multimedia show by Laura Karpman, based on Langstan Hughes’s “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz”.
Norman never forgot her jazz roots. In March 2014, she was featured at the Green Music Centre Weill Hall on the campus of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California, in a recital of American standards in tribute to George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. The next year she and pianist Mark Markham presented a programme of mainly Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Rodgers and Hart at Carnegie Hall.
Jessye Norman was flooded with honours throughout her eventful life. In February 2009, she was presented with the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at The White House. In 2018 she was honoured as the twelfth recipient of the Glenn Gould Prize from the Glenn Gould Foundation. She won the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal in 2018; and the 8th Street in Augusta, Georgia was renamed Jessye Norman Boulevard in 2019. She received Honorary Doctorates from more than thirty colleges, universities and conservatories including Harvard University (1988), the University of Cambridge (1989); the Juilliard School of Music (1990); the University of Oxford (2015); and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston (2019).
Jessye Norman suffered a spinalcord injury in 2015, and died at Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital in Manhattan on September 30, 2019. The cause of death was given as “septic shock and multi-organ failure secondary to complications of the spinal cord injury”. In September 2021, it was reported that Norman’s brother was pursuing legal action for alleged medical negligence against the doctors and hospital involved in the 2015 operation.
Norman’s public funeral was held in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia. She was later memorialized with a gala tribute at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City on November 29, 2019. Among the speakers and performers were Anna Deavere Smith, Gloria Steinem, the former Minister of Culture of France, Jack Lang, Eric Owens, The Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Alvin Alley American Dance Theater, Peter Gelb, and Renée Fleming.
NORMAN acknowledges an ovation at Carnegie Hall in May 2008.
NORMAN receives the 2009 National Medal of Arts from US President Barack Obama at the White House.
“I was given the opportunity to write the kind of book that I wanted to write, rather than one that catalogues where I sang and what I sang and what I wore. I wanted to write a book about an American family, the family that has produced me. The longer I live, the more I realise the incredible support and love we were given as children.”
- Jessye Norman
On May 6, 2014, Houghton Mifflin published Norman’s memoir Stand Up Straight and Sing.
Jessye Norman never married. She is survived by two of her siblings, James and Elaine.
