MARILYN HORNE: It’s been awhile since we’ve typed the name
Marilyn Horne, world-famous opera star and Bradford native.

But the Washington Post carried a report in mid-November about
the latest in a long list of awards Marilyn has received, this time
Opera Honors bestowed by the National Endowment for the Arts. She
was one of five “opera greats” to receive the award in a ceremony
in Washington.

“Among this year’s five honorees were artists whose huge
contributions to the field have been receding into the past; it was
lovely and fitting that a national award should honor their work
while they are still around to enjoy the applause,” according to
the copyrighted story by staff writer Anne Midgette.

“And the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne is so universally beloved,
that Saturday’s awards were simply more accolades in a long line
that includes the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995. …”

The ceremony included short films about each honoree and, in the
one on Horne, black opera star Shirley Verrett had said of Horne:
“When I first heard Marilyn, I was shocked out of my boots when I
looked at her and she was Caucasian.”

With this second crop of winners, the NEA awards come a step
closer to reaching the goal of former NEA chairman Dana Gioia to
create a kind of American opera Hall of Fame, the story noted.

“Certainly the five winners present a broader cross-section of
the field — and of American opera in particular — than last year’s
four, among whom Leontyne Price and James Levine are so widely
awarded and feted that giving them an another honor seemed business
as usual.

“Horne could be placed in the same category as Price and Levine.
But in addition to her celebrated international career as a singer,
she has also remained active by training rising young artists,
particularly through the Marilyn Horne Foundation program On Wings
of Song, which selects and promotes a new crop of young singers
every year in art-song recitals around the country,” the story
said.