{"id":1155,"date":"2012-01-30T14:20:55","date_gmt":"2012-01-30T19:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/musicaltorontodotorg.wordpress.com\/?p=1155"},"modified":"2012-01-30T14:20:55","modified_gmt":"2012-01-30T19:20:55","slug":"camilla-williams-first-african-american-soprano-star-of-the-opera-stage-dead-at-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2012\/01\/30\/camilla-williams-first-african-american-soprano-star-of-the-opera-stage-dead-at-92\/","title":{"rendered":"Camilla Williams, first African-American soprano star of the opera stage, dead at 92"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On May 15, 1946, a soprano named Camilla Williams made her d\u00e9but as Butterfly at the City Center Opera of New York, making her the first African-American woman to star on a major opera stage. Among her many other accomplishments was singing the role of Bess in the first complete recording of George Gershwin&#8217;s Porgy and Bess.<\/p>\n<p>In 1977, Williams became the first African-American voice professor at Indiana University&#8217;s prestigious music school in Bloomington. She died there on Sunday, of complications from cancer. She was 92.<\/p>\n<p>Here is a wonderful, 10-minute documentary shown at a New York City Opera opera tribute to Williams in 2009:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JHEM5-tTPE0?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On May 15, 1946, a soprano named Camilla Williams made her d\u00e9but as Butterfly at the City Center Opera of New York, making her the first African-American woman to star on a major opera stage. Among her many other accomplishments was singing the role of Bess in the first complete recording of George Gershwin&#8217;s Porgy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,39,41,42,43,70],"tags":[184,185,610,981,2384,6467,2507,3071],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-iD","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=1155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}