Marilyn Horne

Marilyn Horne, born in 1934, American opera singer, who reestablished appreciation for mezzo-soprano bel canto and coloratura roles. One of the most influential singers of her generation, Horne concentrated most of her efforts at the peak of her career on the florid music of the baroque era and on the operas of Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini. She became a leader of the late-20th-century reevaluation of much neglected opera repertory.

Horne was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, on January 16, 1934. She sang from childhood onward. Following formal study at the University of Southern California she made her debut in 1954 as Hata in Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride with the Los Angeles Opera Guild. That same year she dubbed the singing voice of actress Dorothy Dandridge in the title role of the film Carmen Jones. Horne subsequently relocated to Germany, where she spent three years at the small opera company in Gelsenkirchen. There the youthful ease of her top voice enabled her to perform soprano roles, among them Mimi in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème.

In 1960 Horne returned to the United States for a debut with the San Francisco Opera as Marie in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. That year she married conductor Henry Lewis, who in 1972 became the first black conductor engaged by the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City. Lewis was the catalyst for Horne’s transition to the mezzo repertory. In 1961 Horne and Australian soprano Joan Sutherland made a joint New York debut in a concert performance of the rarely heard Beatrice di Tenda by Vincenzo Bellini. Their association continued through Sutherland’s farewell appearance at London’s Covent Garden in 1990.

Horne’s debuts in Chicago (1961), Boston (1963), and London (1964) followed her New York performance. She made her debut at La Scala in Milan, Italy, in 1969 as Jocasta in Igor Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. The following year she appeared for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera as Adalgisia in Bellini’s Norma, opposite Sutherland. Horne went on to sing with most major opera companies worldwide. Her vibrant, flexible voice was put to use in uncommon repertory in which she proved peerless in her time. This included roles in ten Rossini operas, some of which she rescued from a century of oblivion; the role of Fidès in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s La Prophète; and the title roles in Antonio Vivaldi’s Orlando and George Frideric Handel’s Rinaldo. Later in her career she assumed character roles such as Dame Quickly in Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff and Samira in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles.

Horne retired from the stage in 1999 with a recital in Chicago. Her autobiography, My Life, was published in 1983. In 1994 she established the Marilyn Horne Foundation to assist young singers.