Sunday, July 23, 1961 The Bavarian city of Bayreuth is engulfed in unrest. Its famous music festival begins and its centerpiece is the impressive opera house that Richard Wagner built here at the end of the 19th century. A procession of luxury cars arrives at the premiere along a tree-lined boulevard that ends at the monumental theatre. When the doors of the impressive Mercedes are opened, the music-loving townspeople of the Old World come out smugly in expensive suits, imposing dresses and snobbish looks. A few minutes later, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, they fill the impressive 1925-seat concert hall and witness an event that has gone down in history.

Just sixteen years after the end of the war, the festival director (who is none other than Wagner’s own grandson) puts on a modern version of Tannhäuser, written by his grandfather in 1845, reducing the sets to extreme minimalism and introducing the stage, starring Aphrodite, African American singer. Artistically daring and communicatively resourceful, the show has become a symbol of post-war Germany’s guilt, as well as the beginning of the brilliance of a new opera star, the exuberant Grace Babri, who died in Vienna last Sunday at the age of 86.

She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1937. She grew up admiring the contralto Marian Anderson, the first famous African-American opera singer. Babri played the piano and sang from a young age, and as a teenager, she excelled in a radio singing competition and later on the popular TV show Talents. There she sang a touching aria from Verdi’s Don Carlos, earning her a scholarship to Boston University. Her musical education continued at the prestigious Northwestern University in Illinois, where she was taught by the legendary German violinist Lotte Lehmann, who believed in her talent and became her mentor.

In the summer of 1961, dozens of letters of protest arrived at the Bayreuth offices, and some newspapers wrote: “Let’s not allow blacks into Bayreuth” …

In 1960, at the age of twenty-three, she crossed the Atlantic and made her debut at the Paris Opera as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida. The door to this impressive start was opened to her by another woman who admired her talents: Jackie Kennedy, who worked with the American embassy in Paris to secure her an audition. A year later, the role of Aphrodite followed in that “neo-Wagnerian” performance in Germany, still tormented by its bad past. The domestic press nicknamed her “Black Venus”, often without even mentioning her name, as if it was unimportant. At the same time, throughout the summer of 1961, dozens of protest letters arrived at the festival’s offices, with some newspapers writing: “Let’s not let blacks into Bayreuth.”

The arrival of a charismatic young singer from America dispelled the shadow of Nazism. But she herself was not affected by the negative climate. At her performance, the crowd in tuxedos and well-tailored summer dresses gave a half-hour standing ovation, while the performers gave twenty-seven bows. “Black Venus” conquered the “holy lands” of traditional, conservative Germany.

And although in 1961 she became the first African-American woman to sing in Bayreuth, a year later she celebrated the same first, singing at the White House, being invited to a formal dinner by her “patron” Jackie Kennedy. This was followed by her debuts at Carnegie Hall in 1962, at the Royal Opera House in London in 1965 and at La Scala in Milan in 1964. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1965, the first of a total of 216 performances there. However, what equally characterized her career was not only large roles on the leading stages of the world, but also the fact that by the end of the 60s she began to work as a mezzo-soprano, discovering for herself a rare, large interpretive range that enriched her repertoire, bringing great performances in iconic scenes and major works such as Puccini’s Tosca, Verdi’s The Force of Destiny and Il trovatore or Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. At the opening of the new Parisian opera house, the long-awaited Opéra Bastille, in 1990 she sang the role of Cassandra in Berlioz’s Troyes, and in 1997 gave a farewell performance at the Opéra de Lyon as Clytemnestra in Richard Strauss. Elektra.

He lived on top of the world wearing expensive clothes and driving a Lamborghini, was awarded a UNESCO award, received a Grammy, was awarded a Knight of Literature and Arts by the French government, and in 2009 he received an award from the Kennedy Center. the highest honor given by the President of the United States for contributions to the arts. In the last years of her life, she lived in Vienna and organized a seminar for aspiring young performers “The Babri Method”. In one of the videos, we see her sitting next to a piano and speaking in a booming, impressive voice. You can’t ignore her every word. “A good voice is not enough,” he tells us. “It also takes courage. Shyness and humility have no place on stage,” she confidently adds, recalling herself sixty years ago, when she answered questions from a journalist on the RTF channel of French television immediately after her triumph in Bayreuth. “You know that you made a small revolution yesterday, right?” the journalist asks her, and she replies: “Yes, of course I know.” He asks her again: “Why did you do it?” and she replies, “Because it’s my character.”