Books by Jessye Norman

Born in 1945 in Augusta, Georgia, the daughter of an insurance salesman and a school teacher, Jessye Mae Norman was a precocious talent. She was awarded a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where her love and knowledge of music grew and her outstanding natural ability flourished. Subsequently, she followed an increasingly well-trodden route for young American singers and came to Europe, where she established herself by winning a competition in Munich and signing up with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, making her operatic debut later that year in Tannhauser. What followed has been a career encompassing most of opera's great female roles, as she established herself as perhaps the greatest contemporary female voice in the world of classical music.