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Everett Lee

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Everett Lee
Everett Lee
Everett Lee in June 2017 at the age of 100
Birth: 31 August 1916
Wheeling, West Virginia, USA
Death: 12 January 2022
Limhamn, Malmo, Skane County, Sweden
Age: 105 years, 134 days
Country: United StatesUSASwedenSWE
Centenarian

Everett Astor Lee (31 August 1916 – 12 January 2022) was an American-Swedish centenarian, conductor, and violinist. 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.

Biography[]

Everett Lee was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, USA on 31 August 1916 to a middle-class family, the first son of Everett Denver Lee and Mamie May Blue Lee. Lee moved with his parents to Cleveland, Ohio, USA in 1927 as part of the Great Migration.

Career[]

While working as a hotel busboy as a teenager, Lee met the conductor Artur Rodzinski, 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 Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, a position he held for a decade. 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 Bogota Philharmonic Orchestra in Colombia.

Personal life[]

In 1944, Lee married the accompanist and vocal coach Sylvia Olden (1917–2004) and had two children: Everett II and Eve. Following their divorce, Lee remarried Christin (born 14 September 1944) in 1979 and had one son: Erik.

In August 2016, Lee celebrated his 100th birthday and became a centenarian.

Everett Lee died in Limhamn, Malmo, Skane County, Sweden on 12 January 2022 at the age of 105 years, 134 days. At the time of his death, he was the sixth-oldest known living man in Sweden, behind Pawel Frydman, Bror Larsson, Evald Holmgren, Sixten Rudengren, and Sven Jansson.

Gallery[]

References[]

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