Marilyn Berneice "Jackie" Horne (b. Jan. 16, 1934) is known today as one of the most beloved and influential American mezzo-sopranos, both on stage and in the studio as a teacher. Though Horne was best known as being responsible for both the bel canto and the Handel revivals in the United States, with repertoire such as Rossini's Semiramide, Bellini's Norma, and Handel's Rinaldo, she maintained a versatile performing career up until her recent retirement, championing repertoire that spanned all genres.
Horne was born into a musical family in Bradford, Pennsylvania. She began her vocal training at the age of five and took short lessons weekly with various teachers up until her family moved to Long Beach, California, in 1945. While she mentions in her book, Marilyn Horne: The Song Continues, that her first paid gig as a singer was as early as age seven, it was in Long Beach that Horne's more serious work towards a professional singing career began. At age twelve, she joined the Roger Wagner Chorus and St. Luke's Episcopal Church Choir. These ensembles were frequently hired to sing at the Hollywood Bowl and to provide background music for television shows and movies, a world to which Horne would return many times as a soloist, first to dub Dorothy Dandridge's voice for Carmen Jones, and then to sing weekly on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. Horne would continue to appear on television throughout her career, frequenting programs such as The Carol Burnett Show, The Odd Couple, and Sesame Street, among others.
A few years after her family moved to Long Beach, Marilyn Horne decided her name "needed sophistication" and added an extra "n" to the end of her first name. This spelling can be found on the scores she used in the early years of her career, including on her well-worn copy of The Merry Widow, the vehicle for her operatic debut in her junior year of High School. The same spelling is on her copy of The Bartered Bride, the opera in which she sang her first contralto role and through which she met her future husband, the double-bassist and conductor Henry Lewis. Horne was married to Lewis from 1960 to 1979, and they had a daughter, Angela. Horne continued to go by "Marilynn" in the few years she spent at the University of Southern California studying with William Vernard, and as she studied with Lotte Lehmann at the Music Academy of the West (a training festival she would later come to direct). She reverted to using the original spelling of her name around 1956, after arriving in Europe to pursue her opera career.
Settling first in Gelsenkirchen, a city in West Germany, Horne joined its opera company as a soprano. While there, she performed roles such as Mimì in La Bohème, Giulietta in Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Amelia in Simon Boccanegra, and Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. She returned to America for what she described as a "fateful" debut of Marie in Wozzeck with the San Francisco Opera in 1960, although she credits the performance of Beatrice di Tenda with Joan Sutherland at Town Hall as her "big break." Over the next few decades, Marilyn Horne would perform in America and internationally as one of the world's most sought-after mezzo-sopranos. She would spend twenty-six years at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, sing thirty-nine seasons at the San Francisco Opera, and guest star at countless opera houses across the globe. She would perform over 1,300 recitals with artists such as Martin Katz and Don Pippin. She would continue to work with Joan Sutherland, and the other leading opera singers of the time, including Leontyne Price, Montserrat Caballé, Luciano Pavarotti, and Beverly Sills, as well as the best conductors in the world, including Riccardo Muti and Zubin Mehta, among many, many others.
Over the course of her career, Marilyn Horne has been awarded honorary degrees from The Juilliard School, The Johns Hopkins University, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has been inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame and the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. She has won the National Medal of the Arts (1992), The Covent Garden Silver Medal for Outstanding Service, the Fidelio Gold Medal from the International Association of Opera Directors, four GRAMMY awards (1963, 1981, 1983, and 1993), a Lifetime Achievement Award from Gramophone, and has been awarded both the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters from France's Minister of Culture and the Commendatore al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. She was a 1995 Kennedy Center Honors recipient, received the inaugural Rossini Medaglia d'Oro for her work as a Rossini singer, and was presented with an award for excellence in opera from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009.
On her sixtieth birthday, Marilyn Horne announced that she had founded the Marilyn Horne Foundation, which is now a part of Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute. Horne states that the Foundation's mission is "to support, encourage, and preserve the art of singing through the presentation of vocal recitals and related educational activities." Though retired from performance, she frequently gives masterclasses at a number of conservatories and programs, including Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Music Academy of the West (for which she now serves as Honorary Director), the Curtis Institute, and the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Program.
Papers regarding The Marilyn Horne Foundation, as well as recordings and photographs from her personal collection, reside at the Marilyn Horne Museum and Exhibit Center at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, located on Marilyn Horne Way.