Everett Lee, the first African-American to conduct a Broadway show, died January 12 in Malmö, Sweden. Born August 31, 1916, in Wheeling, W.Va., Everett began violin lessons at 8. His family moved to Cleveland in 1927, and he became concertmaster of the Glenville H.S. orchestra. After a chance meeting in the hotel where he worked, Lee was mentored by Cleveland Orchestra conductor Artur Rodzinski. He went on to study at Cleveland Institute of Music and, upon graduating in 1941, enlisted in the Army but was released after being injured during training. Below is an overview of Lee’s career, featuring a 2016 interview with him on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
In 1943, Lee moved to New York to join Oscar Hammerstein’s Broadway musical Carmen Jones, one of only two African-American musicians in the orchestra. He played the violin in the pit and the oboe onstage in one scene. As concertmaster, Lee was asked to take up the baton when conductor Joseph Lattau missed a performance. In 1944, Lee had another brief conducting opportunity with a New York City Center revival of Porgy and Bess.
When On the Town moved into a new theater, composer Leonard Bernstein (who saw Carmen Jones when Lee conducted) asked Lee to become the show’s new conductor, and in September 1945, Lee ascended the podium to lead the production’s all-white pit orchestra. In 1946, Bernstein then arranged a scholarship for Lee to attend Tanglewood, where he studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky. The following year, Lee founded the interracial Cosmopolitan Symphony Society orchestra.
Lee began the 1950s as director of Columbia University’s opera department and travelled to Europe on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1953, he became the first African-American to conduct a white orchestra in the South, when he served as guest conductor of the Louisville Orchestra. He was also among the first black conductors of a major opera company, conducting the 1955 New York City Opera production of La Traviata.
Despite such breakthroughs, racism still constrained his career, and Lee moved in 1957 to Munich, where he founded the Amerika Haus orchestra and opera company. He was soon offered guest spots with numerous orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic in 1960. In 1962, he became music director of Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, where he spent the next decade. In 1976, he conducted the New York Philharmonic for the first time, and he took his last bow with the Louisville Orchestra in 2005. Below is a concerto grosso for pop group and symphony orchestra, recorded live in 1971, with Lee conducting the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra.