Anne Brown
| Anne Brown | |
|---|---|
 Anne Brown with Todd Duncan in 1942.
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| Born |
Annie Wiggins Brown August 9, 1912 |
| Died | March 13, 2009 (aged 96) |
Anne Brown (August 9, 1912 – March 13, 2009) was an African American soprano who created the role of "Bess" in the original production of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess in 1935. She was also a radio and concert singer. She settled in Norway in her 30s and later became a Norwegian citizen.
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Annie Wiggins Brown was the daughter of Dr. Harry F. Brown, a physician, and his wife, the former Mary Allen Wiggins. Her father was the grandson of a slave and her mother's parents were of black, Cherokee Indian, and Scottish-Irish origins. She had three sisters. As a young child, Brown showed a great musical talent and according to family legend she could sing a perfect scale at just 9 months old.
As an African-American, she was not allowed to attend a Roman Catholic elementary school in her native Baltimore. She trained at Morgan College and then applied to the Peabody Institute, but was rejected from the school due to her race. Brown then applied to the Juilliard School in New York at the encouragement of the wife of the owner of The Baltimore Sun. She was admitted to Juilliard when she was 16, becoming the first African-American vocalist to attend there. She was awarded Juilliard's Margaret McGill scholarship when she was 20 years old. At the age of nineteen she married a fellow Juilliard student, but the marriage soon ended in divorce.
In 1933, she was a second-year graduate student at Juilliard. She learned that George Gershwin was going to compose an opera about African Americans in South Carolina. She decided to write him a letter, which led to Gershwin's secretary calling her to come and sing for him. After singing several classical arias and the spiritual "A City Called Heaven" for Gershwin, Brown was frequently invited by the composer to come down and sing parts of the opera for him as he was composing the work's music. As a result, the role of Bess grew from a secondary character, like it was in DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, to one of the opera's leading roles. Brown recalled that:
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