“The King and Queen of Sweden sent me a Happy Birthday greeting today!”
-Everett A. Lee, 29 Augusti 2016, Malmö, Sweden
“Wheeling-Born Everett Lee Conducts ‘La Traviata’ in New York April 17”
“. . . Local friends of the parents of Everett Lee who have watched the musical progress of young Everett since leaving the city received this bit of news joyfully last week.”
– Wheeling News-Register, 1955
Everett Lee has an impressive resume. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, a student of conducting at Julliard School of Music and Tanglewood, Fulbright Scholar, founder of the Cosmopolitan Symphony, first African American to conduct a major Broadway production, first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the south, first African American to conduct a major opera company in the United States, conductor of a traveling Munich Opera House in Germany, the Symphony of the New World in New York, the Bogota Philharmonic and Bogota Symphony in Columbia, the Musical Director of Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, and guest conductor at symphony orchestras such as the St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Cordoba and New York Philharmonics, the Albany, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Hamburg, Bergen, Barcelona Symphonies, and the Boston Pops, to name a few. And it all started here in Wheeling, West Virginia when a young Everett Lee began taking lessons from a violin teacher on Wheeling Island.
Everett Astor Lee was born 100 years ago today, August 31, 1916, right here in Wheeling, WV. The first-born son of Everett Denver Lee and Mamie May Blue Lee, who lived in East Wheeling, young Everett showed an early aptitude for playing violin.
“I asked him about this violin teacher,” Everett’s son, Everett Lee III commented. “He thought about it, and I always love saying, ‘Dad that was only 90 years ago, what’s the problem that you can’t remember this?’ He came up with Walter.”
It was Walter. Walter Rogers of S. York Street. “[Dad] knows what he’s talking about,” Everett’s son continued, “and there’s nothing in music that you can bring up that he doesn’t remember or know.”
Walter Rogers was born in Boston in 1880 but lived in Wheeling from 1882 until his death in 1962. He helped organize the Wheeling Rotary Orchestra in 1919, he conducted the Young People’s Orchestra, and from his home on 407 S. York St., he taught music lessons, specializing in violin and trumpet. “[Dad] was taking violin,” Everett III relayed, “and Walter told Daddy Lee (Everett’s father), you need to do what you need to do with him because he’s got it.”
Everett’s father had been a barber here in Wheeling, first with Hollinger & Carr at 1149 Main Street in the late teens, then with J. M. Freismuth at 31 14th Street in the 1920s. But the family, which by then included Everett’s younger brother, Kenneth, left Wheeling for Cleveland in 1927 in search of better employment opportunities. Lee continued his studies in violin while attending school in Cleveland. “I told you about Jesse Owens, didn’t I?” Everett’s son asked. “Yeah, Jesse went to the same junior high school. [Dad] was in a lower grade and, on the track team at Fairmont Junior High, Jesse would say, ‘C’mon, Everett, c’mon, c’mon,’ and Jesse would be loping and Dad would be running his heart out.”
After graduating from high school, Lee attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, studying violin. “He had to put himself through school, so he didn’t graduate in three years or four years. It took a little bit because he was [working in a hotel], and I think he did some other things while at college, at the Cleveland Institute of Music.” It was while working at this hotel that Everett met Arthur Rodzinski, conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra.
“Somebody told [Rodzinski] that this kid is a very promising musician, and he just asked me ‘who are you?’” Everett recalled in an interview with the American Music Review in 2013. “And I told him, and he said, ‘well, come to my concerts.’ Every Saturday I could go to the Cleveland Orchestra concerts.” In 1948, Lee told a reporter from the Pittsburgh Courier, “My early conducting aspirations were nurtured by him… Rodzindki helped me in many ways—he would go over scores with me and give me pointers.” [1]
After graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Music, Lee enlisted in the military. He was sent to Tuskegee to train to be a pilot, but an injury in jump school ended his military career.
“When he got hurt,” Lee’s son recollected, “he went back to Cleveland, and around April or May, Billy Rose, one of the big-time producers on Broadway called and said, ‘Everett, I’ve heard about you. I’m getting ready to do Carmen Jones and I want you to come to New York and be in my orchestra.’ So he goes to New York, meets my mother in June of ‘43 – the season is in the fall of ‘43, and the story is the conductor got snowed in and dad, who was concertmaster, showed up and they handed him the baton and said, ‘It’s your turn. You get to go. We don’t have a conductor.’ And they knew that he was on top of his game and he knew everything about the stuff he was doing. So, that happened. And then in January, he married my mother and the following November, I came.”
Everett Lee III’s mother, by the way, was Sylvia Olden Lee, another impressive figure in the classical music world – a voice coach, Olden Lee was a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, instructor at the Curtis Institute, Howard, Oberlin, Columbia, and Dillard Universities, also a Fulbright Scholar, and the first African American musician to work at the New York Metropolitan Opera.
“He was – and my mother the same way – they were both prodigies. And I know how to play radio,” the Lees’ son joked. “I was conceived, born, and bred in opera. There’s not an aria I haven’t heard. And [mom] could do about 80 of them by heart. No question. And any key you want to sing it in.” Lee III recalled that, in the early years, his father still made a living predominantly as a violinist and his mom as a voice coach. A connection through one of Sylvia’s students led to Lee’s second conducting engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town in 1944.
“Muriel Smith, who had sung the role of Carmen Jones, was my mother’s student. Muriel told Lennie [Leonard Bernstein] that Sylvia was married to Everett. Lennie remembered him from Carmen Jones and that’s how the ball got rolling for On the Town. Lennie had seen him conduct one of the shows.” Lee became concertmaster for On the Town and when the conductor left, the company couldn’t find a suitable replacement. “So Lennie,” Lee’s son shared, “said, ‘Put Everett up there. He knows the music inside and out.’ And dad closed out the show.”
Following On the Town, Bernstein and Lee continued to work together. “Leonard introduced him to all kinds of folks at Tanglewood, which is an extension of Julliard. Dad went to Julliard for a year or two. He did some work at Tanglewood which is the Boston Symphony’s arm on the west side of Massachusetts.” Following Tanglewood, Lee played first violin for the New York Symphony under Bernstein, who was conductor of the Symphony from 1945-1947.[2] When Arthur Rodzinski, whom Lee had met as a teenager, left Cincinnati in 1943 to became the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he had hired Bernstein as his assistant director. [3] In 1958, Bernstein became Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, “and then in ‘76, dad conducted the New York Philharmonic because of his relationship with Lennie.”
Even with his connections to Rodzinski and Bernstein, opportunities for a black conductor were limited for Lee, so in 1947, he formed the Cosmopolitan Symphony Society, a group that not only included Americans of Chinese, Russian, Jewish, African American, Italian and Slavic descent, but also female musicians. “My own group is coming along fairly well, but of course there is no money in it as yet,” Lee wrote to Bernstein. “I hope to make it grow into something good however and it may be the beginning of breaking down a lot of foolish barriers.” [4]
Lee would conduct the Cosmopolitan Symphony Society–while picking up other jobs–from 1947 into the 1950s, garnering praises from The New York Times as a conductor “who possesses decided talent.” [5] Still, Lee told The American Music Review in a 2013 interview, that navigating a career in the U.S. “was a struggle.”
With limited conducting opportunities at home, Everett and Sylvia, both receiving Fulbright scholarships, left the United States in 1952 for a year, studying music in Rome. “They went to Europe and came back in ’53. They came out to see us [in Cleveland, where Everett III and sister Eve had stayed with their Lee grandparents] in the summer and went back to New York. At Christmas, we came up and we said we’re not going back to Cleveland. We moved to Brooklyn and I spent half of my fourth year and all of my fifth year in Brooklyn.”
In 1953, Lee was asked to guest conduct the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky, making him the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the south. Another first came two years later, while conducting at the New York City Opera Company. The Wheeling-News Register, in a front-page lead article on Tuesday, April 19, 1955, reported, “Wheeling native, Everett Lee, believed to be the first Negro to conduct professional grand opera in this country, scored an overwhelming success Sunday when he directed the New York City Opera Company’s performance of Verdi’s La Traviata.”
In 1956, the family moved to Germany, where Lee became the director of the Münchener Opernbühne, a traveling opera company that performed throughout Germany. [7]
“Dad was told, if you want to be a great conductor, you need to do opera. And that was some of the concentration he did at Tanglewood or Julliard or both,” Lee’s son commented. “He’s a great dad. I had little or no interest in music, and I was reasonably active as a child. I remember we were, when we went over [to Germany] we stayed in a hotel before they got a place to live and the four of us were in two rooms. I remember him studying for music class. The bed’s on one side and he’d put the music on the other bed which was just in a little aisle between us, and I’d say, ‘Okay, dad, draw.’ You know, cowboys, right? He’d put down his score. He would draw, and that would satisfy my three-second attention span. And he’d go right back to [his score].” Lee’s son added his dad conducted symphonic pieces without music, having memorized the music before performances.
In 1962, Lee was appointed conductor of the Norrköping Symphony in Sweden, a position he held for thirteen years. In the years that followed, though Norrköping remained his permanent residence, Lee became involved with and conducted for the Symphony of the New World in New York, the Bogota Philharmonic in Columbia, and Opera North in Philadelphia, while continuing to guest conduct for orchestras worldwide, [8] traveling back and forth to Sweden.
“He’s been through the whole ball game. He had issues in the ‘40s, needless to say, the ‘40s and the ‘50s. He left the country because he wasn’t going to get anywhere. And in Europe, he got on with a traveling opera company, did a whole bunch of those, and then conducted symphonic stuff on three continents: Europe, North America, South America – and those are non-trivial orchestras. The Berlin Philharmonic is a non-trivial, one of the top in the world.”
Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra. Madrid Philharmonic. Boston Pops. New York Philharmonic. Non-trivial orchestras, indeed.
Lee conducted his last orchestra, January 13, 2005, for the Louisville Orchestra – the same symphony orchestra that started his career as a conductor of major symphony orchestras. Today, he still lives in Sweden, in Malmö, with his second wife and son.
“We do Skype,” Lee’s son said, “You know Beethoven? I would run it through speakers in the house and I’d be up waving my arms. I’d be handling the fourth movement of the 7th, waving my arms around like I’m conducting. And he says, ‘You’re conducting in 4/4 and it really should be a 2/4 so the orchestra will keep up with you…,’ and I said, “Dad, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s a 4/4 beat!’ I’m debating with somebody that’s forgotten more about music than I have ever learned. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about dad! That’s 4/4 there, not 2/4, 4/4.’ Oh yeah, yeah. There’s nothing that he doesn’t know. Very little.”
A six-year on-going project, Lee’s son has been working with his father to compile a list of all the works Lee has conducted throughout his career. “We put this, a good part of this together, one email at a time, starting with the ‘A’s, because the scores in his office are arranged in alphabetical order.” Lee wrote where and when he conducted a piece on the opening flap or the back page of a score, most of the time. “Unbelievable, isn’t it?” Lee’s son asked.
“On my Excel spreadsheet, there are over nine hundred lines of orchestral works that he performed. When I sort it, I can tell you how many times he did Stravinsky’s Suite #2. I can tell you how many times he performed Dvorak’s Symphony of the New World. The Ninth. He loved it. He did that, I would guess, eight or nine times. I’m not in front of my computer right now, so I can’t say for sure.” Actually, according to the spreadsheet, it was 14, and there are nearly 1000 lines for orchestral pieces with another 100 if you include choral and operatic and the two Broadway works Lee conducted. Everett Lee, the young boy who started his career taking violin lessons on Wheeling Island, has had a prolific and groundbreaking career.
When asked about his dad’s reaction to being told people from Wheeling were inquiring about him, Lee’s son responded, “He couldn’t believe it. He’s been getting calls from the embassies in Europe congratulating him on getting to be a 100. And then I get an email from Wheeling, West Virginia. Amazing.”
Wheeling, WV has not forgotten Everett Lee, and we think that he is truly amazing.
This story would not be complete without a very happy birthday wish to Everett A. Lee – Happy 100th Birthday from all of Wheeling, West Virginia, Maestro Lee! – and many thanks to Everett’s son, Everett Lee III, for sharing his knowledge and memories with us.
Special thanks also to my predecessor in the Ohio County Public Library Archives, former Assistant Director Lou Horacek, who, after finding two News-Register clippings in our Mabel Hull scrapbooks, did the initial research on Everett Lee and left a file behind for me to find, piquing my interest and getting me started down the path to writing this story.
Notes:
[1] “Everett Lee and the Racial Politics of Orchestral Conducting,” Oja, Carol J., American Music Review, Volume XLIII, Number 1, Fall 2013.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Symphony Group in Formal Debut,” New York Times, May 22, 1948.
[6] “Everett Lee and the Racial Politics of Orchestral Conducting,” Oja, Carol J., American Music Review, Volume XLIII, Number 1, Fall 2013.
[7] Dialogues on the Opera and the African-American Experience, Cheatham, Wallace McClain Cheatham, 1997.
[8] Ibid.
Update
THE POWER OF ARCHIVES
-From Linda Comins’s Grapevine column, May 20, 2018
“The importance of maintaining archives and conducting research was demonstrated during the West Virginia University College of Creative Arts’ commencement last weekend.
Erin Rothenbuehler, head of programming and archives coordinator for the Ohio County Public Library, was on hand to see WVU President E. Gordon Gee award an honorary Doctor of Music degree for Wheeling native Everett Lee, a barrier-breaking African American music conductor and violinist.
Lee, who is 101 and lives in Sweden, could not attend the ceremony. His daughter, Eve Lee, traveled from California to accept the honorary doctorate for her father.
Sean Duffy, executive director of the Wheeling Academy of Law & Science (WALS) Foundation and Rothenbuehler’s predecessor at the library, noted Rothenbuehler’s role in rediscovering Lee’s legacy and his remarkable career.
“Yet he (Lee) had been all but forgotten in his hometown and home state, until Erin found a photo of Mr. Lee in the OCPL Archive and from there did a massive amount of research to create a blog post about Mr. Lee’s life that was published on Archiving Wheeling.org,” Duffy said.
Regarding the impact of Rothenbuehler’s work, Duffy commented, “This honorary doctorate would not have happened but for Erin’s research and story, and it serves as the best example I’ve yet seen of the power of archives, when accessible to great researchers like Erin, to illuminate history and bring it to life. This blog post had a profound impact. Not only did it warm Mr. Lee’s heart (and those of his family), but hundreds of students of the arts on the verge of graduation got to hear this fellow West Virginian’s inspiring life story. That sort of thing can have a ripple effect.”
Duffy said Rothenbuehler was mentioned by Gee when he presented the award to Eve Lee. “Erin was then thanked by Eve and was mentioned a third time by Mr. Everett Lee himself in a video made in his home in Sweden,” he related.
In addition, Duffy said, “After the ceremony, Erin got to meet Eve and shared with her some of the documents she had found about Everett Lee’s life in Wheeling. Eve Lee was visibly impressed and had not seen any of the documents before despite doing a lot of genealogical research herself. She said she would love to visit Wheeling some day to see her father’s hometown.”
Congratulations, Erin, on this fascinating article. I am ashamed that I have never heard of Everett Lee and so glad that more people will know about him now.
Thanks to you and Lou for bringing this to us. I hope a member of the Wheeling Hall of Fame sees this.
Fantastic suggestion. Laura!
It is really about time Maestro Everett Lee received more of the acclaim which he has earned and so rightfully deserves. Thank you Ms. Rothenbuehler for undertaking this beautiful project. Also thank you Everett III for providing her with the necessary information.