Everett Lee

Everett Lee
Lee in 1948
Background information
Birth name	Everett Astor Lee
Born	(1916-08-31)August 31, 1916 Wheeling, West Virginia, U.S.
Died	January 12, 2022(2022-01-12) (aged 105) Malmö, Sweden
Genres	Orchestral, opera, musical
Occupation(s)	Conductor, opera music director, musician, music scholar
Instrument(s)	Violin, oboe

Everett Astor Lee (August 31, 1916 – January 12, 2022) was an American symphonic conductor, opera music director, violinist and music scholar. He was the first African American to conduct a Broadway musical, the first to "conduct an established symphony orchestra below the Mason–Dixon line", and the first to conduct a performance by a major American opera company.

Life and career

Lee was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on August 31, 1916, to a middle-class family. He moved with his parents to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1927 as part of the Great Migration. While working as a hotel busboy as a teenager, Lee met the conductor Artur Rodziński, who became his mentor. He studied violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he received a Ranney Scholarship. In 1943, Lee was asked to join the orchestra of the Broadway musical Carmen Jones, an all-black contemporary retelling of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen. Lee played violin in the pit and performed the oboe onstage in one scene; he was one of only two African-American musicians in the orchestra. When Carmen Jones's conductor Joseph Lattau fell ill, Lee "got his first break as an emergency pinch-hitter". Leonard Bernstein saw a performance of Carmen Jones with Lee leading the orchestra and asked him to become the permanent conductor of his musical On the Town. When Lee joined the show in September 1945, he was celebrated for being the first African American to regularly conduct a Broadway musical.

In 1946, Lee won a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award to conduct at Tanglewood, and played first violin in the New York City Symphony, conducted by Bernstein. In 1947, he founded an interracial orchestra, the Cosmopolitan Symphony Society, made up of "Americans of Chinese, Russian, Jewish, Negro, Italian and Slavic origin", as well as women. He served as director of Columbia University's opera department in the early 1950s and traveled to Europe on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1953, Lee served as a guest conductor of the Louisville Orchestra, becoming the first African American to conduct a white symphony orchestra in the American South. In 1955, he conducted an acclaimed New York City Opera production of La traviata, becoming "the first Negro to conduct professional grand opera in the U.S."

Lee was met with undisguised racism throughout his career. Oscar Hammerstein II declined to hire Lee to conduct touring productions of his shows, explaining that Southern theaters would refuse to book them. Concert manager Arthur Judson told Lee, "I don't believe in Negro symphony conductors." Deciding that he would find better opportunities outside of America, Lee moved to Germany with his family in 1957. In 1962, he was appointed chief conductor of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, a position he held for a decade. In 1975, he debuted as Music Director of the Symphony of the New World for a series of concerts in Washington, D.C. In 1976, he conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time; the concert was in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and included a work by African-American composer David Baker. In 1979, he became music director of the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra in Colombia. Lee conducted over 1,000 performances in the United States, Europe and South America.

Personal life and death

Lee married the accompanist and vocal coach Sylvia Olden (1917–2004) in 1944. They had two children, the late Everett Lee, III and Dr. Eve Lee. They divorced and Lee later married opera singer Christin Andersson, in 1979. They had one son, opera singer Erik Andersson. At the time of his death, Lee lived in in Malmö, Sweden, where he died on January 12, 2022, at the age of 105.

See also

• Black conductors