Everett Lee, a conductor who broke through racial barriers but then fled the prejudice faced by black classical musicians in the United States to make a significant career in Europe, died Jan. 12 at a hospital near his home in Malmo, Sweden. He was 105.
Mr. Lee’s daughter, Eve, confirmed the death.
By 1943, Mr. Lee was already concertmaster and conducted white theater orchestras. He had a major breakthrough on Broadway when he was appointed music director of Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town” in September 1945. The Chicago Defender called him the first black conductor “to bat over a white orchestra in a Broadway production.”
In 1953 Mr. Lee the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky, a nerve-wracking afternoon for him due to the short rehearsal time and the pressure of history. United Press reported that Mr. Lee was “one of the first” to have a black man lead a white orchestra in the south; other outlets went further and claimed it was the very first time. The Courier-Journal critic said he made “a very favorable first impression”.
Then, in 1955, shortly after Marian Anderson made her Metropolitan Opera debut, Mr. Lee the New York City Opera, another first. (His wife, Sylvia Olden Lee, a singing coach, had been named the first black musician on the staff of the Met around that time.)
“Not only was his conducting expert in all its technical aspects,” wrote a DailyExpertNews critic of his “La Traviata,” “but it was musically informed and an exceptionally keen understanding of the opera’s character.”
Despite the breakthroughs, racism limited Lee’s career in the US, although he refused to let it define his work. “A Negro, standing in front of a white symphony group?” the artist manager Arthur Judson asked him, according to Mrs. Lee, in the late 1940s, refusing to enroll him. “No, I’m sorry.”
Judson suggested that Mr. Lee would follow other black musicians into exile abroad. Lee initially did not leave, but eventually did in 1957 and flourished in Germany, Colombia and especially Sweden, where he succeeded Herbert Blomstedt as musical director of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra from 1962 to 1972.
Mr. Lee often said that he longed to return to the United States, but would only do so to become the music director of a major orchestra.
“I didn’t have much hope at home despite some success,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1970, saying that racism was less of a factor in his life and work in Europe. “It would be nice to work from home. I’m American – why not?” If he could make it in Europe, he concluded, “I should be able to make it here.”
Only one top ensemble, the Oregon Symphony, has ever given such a post to a black conductor: James DePreist.
Everett Astor Lee was born on August 31, 1916 in Wheeling, W.Va., the first son of Everett Denver Lee, a hairdresser, and Mamie Amanda (Blue) Lee, a homemaker. He started playing the violin at age 8, and his talent led the family to move to Cleveland in 1927.
mr. Lee ran in high school, a few years behind Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens, and led the Glenville High School Orchestra as concertmaster. He came under the mentorship of Cleveland Orchestra conductor Artur Rodzinski after a chance meeting at the hotel where Mr. Lee worked as an elevator operator. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music with the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, Joseph Fuchs.
He graduated in 1941, enlisted in the military and trained as a Tuskegee aviator in Alabama, but injured himself and was released.
Lee moved to New York in 1943 to play in the orchestra for “Carmen Jones,” an Oscar Hammerstein II rewrite of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” with an all-black cast but a predominantly white orchestra. When the conductor was snowed in in early 1944, Mr. Lee stepped out of the concertmaster’s chair to conduct Bizet’s music. Then came spells conducting George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” before Bernstein hired him as concertmaster and later musical director of “On the Town.”
“In an era of Jim Crow segregation in performances,” wrote musicologist Carol J. Oja, “Lee’s appointment was nothing short of remarkable.”
Mr. Lee next played in the violin section of the New York City Symphony for Bernstein, who in 1946 arranged a scholarship to Tanglewood, where Mr. Lee studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony; he conducted the Boston Pops in 1949.
“Like most young people,” Mr. Lee told New York Amsterdam News in 1977, “I thought I could go out and conquer the world.”
But there was a line of color that Mr. Lee couldn’t exceed. Rodzinski, now conductor of the New York Philharmonic, refused to let him audition for the violin section, knowing the inevitable result. Hammerstein considered it a touring production, but told him that “if a boy of color is the conductor and we go south,” it would cause a stir and cancel bookings.
Mr. Lee responded by creating the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony in 1947, an integrated ensemble that rehearsed at Harlem’s Grace Congregational Church. It made its downtown debut with him on the Town Hall stage in May 1948, featuring a poster showing the premiere of “Brief Elegy” by Ulysses Kay, one of the many black composers Mr. Lee had programmed during his career.
In 1952, the Cosmopolitan gave a concert performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” before 2,100 people at City College, with the Met’s Regina Resnik as Leonora.
“My own group gets along pretty well,” wrote Mr. Lee Bernstein, suggesting that “it might be the start of breaking down a lot of silly barriers.” But starting an ensemble back then was difficult, let alone an integrated ensemble. Recruitment had been difficult because trained black musicians now believed “there was ‘no future’ in achieving high skill levels,” wrote Mr. Lee in The Times in Dec 1948.
Despite signing with the New York City Opera staff in 1955, Mr. Lee to Europe. He moved to Munich in 1957, founded an orchestra at the Amerika Haus and led a traveling opera company. Guest spots came quickly; he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in June 1960, one of many European dates.
Like Dean Dixon, a black conductor who led the Gothenburg Symphony from 1953 to 1960, Mr. Lee takes refuge in Sweden. He maintained an ambitious repertoire in Norrköping, performing operas from “Aida” to “Porgy”, conducting large amounts of Swedish music, favoring Hans Eklund’s “Music for Orchestra” and often collaborating with jazz players led by saxophonist Arne Domnerus. It was a balance of new and old, local and otherwise, that Mr. Lee repeated as chief conductor of the Bogotá Philharmonic from 1985 to 1987.
Yet Mr. Lee never completely gave up on American orchestras. He started making guest appearances again. “The inevitable conclusion is that he should be there more often,” wrote a Times critic in 1966. In 1973, he took command of the Symphony of the New World, a New York ensemble founded in 1965 as an integrated orchestra. such as his now-defunct Cosmopolitan. After a collaboration with the Philadelphia-based Opera Ebony, he took a final bow with the Louisville Orchestra in 2005.
“There hasn’t been a big change in my field,” he told The Afro-American Newspaper in 1972. “Orchestra companies feel that if they had a black orchestra leader last year, they don’t need one this year.”
Mr. Lee fulfilled a dream of conducting the New York Philharmonic on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1976, with Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jean Sibelius and David Baker’s “Kosbro” – short for “Keep on Steppin’ Brothers”.”
Mr. Lee’s marriage to Mrs. Lee ended in divorce. He married Christin Andersson in 1979. She outlives him, like Eve Lee, his daughter from his first marriage; a son by his second, Erik Lee; two granddaughters; and a great-granddaughter.
Despite the barriers Mr Lee faced, he said in an interview published in 1997 that he was not “bitter.”
He recalled being refused violin auditions with two major American orchestras.
‘I then decided that if I cannot join you, I will lead you. I kept that promise to myself. I conducted those two orchestras that even denied me an audition,” he said. “I just had to. I just had to show them I was there.”
