Tim Ashley picks 10 performances that reveal the best of the singer’s extraordinary talent and charisma

‘Sometimes when I hear your voice, it breaks my heart,” the novelist Toni Morrison told Jessye Norman at a lunch in the singer’s honour in 2014. “But all of the time when I hear your voice,” she added, “it healed my soul.” Morrison’s words reflect the impact Norman’s singing had on so many of us. She had, quite simply, one of the most beautiful voices in the world, distinctive in its range, glorious tonal warmth, range and power, which enabled her to encompass a wide repertory, which she very much made her own.

Here are 10 video clips drawn from the many performances and recordings that form her legacy. Everyone has their own memories of her artistry, their own private playlists of her work. This list is by no means definitive, and I’m aware of how much I’ve had to omit.

Strauss’s Ariadne was arguably Norman’s greatest operatic role, and at her peak few could match her in it. A televised performance from the Met in 1988, this captures the majesty and exaltation of her singing at its finest.

Norman’s 1983 recording of the Four Last Songs with Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, grand in approach yet deeply heartfelt, is deemed as definitive by many.

In 1969, at the start of her career, Norman was a lovely, dignified Countess on Colin Davis’s first recording of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

Norman recorded Wagner’s song cycle twice, with pianist Irwin Gage in 1970, then the orchestral version, again with Colin Davis, in 1975. The latter is notably beautiful and reflective, the former perhaps more intense and incisive. Both are included here.

The richness of Norman’s lower registers enabled her to sing both mezzo-soprano and soprano roles. As a mezzo, she gave a magnificent performance of Das Lied von der Erde at the 1985 Proms, conducted by the young Simon Rattle.

Norman was also very much associated with the alto solos in Mahler’s Second Symphony. This, however, is her extraordinarily touching performance of the original piano version of Urlicht, which Mahler later orchestrated to form the symphony’s fourth movement.



Stravinsky’s Jocasta, in Oedipus rex, was another of Norman’s finest operatic roles. She recorded it twice, but it’s the film of her performance in Julie Taymor’s stylised 1992 Saito Kinen festival production that lingers most strongly in the memory.

Brahms’s elegiac Op 91 songs for alto, piano and viola suited Norman down to the ground. Here, she’s joined by Daniel Barenboim and violist Wolfram Christ in the first of them, its mood of refined melancholy immaculately sustained.

Norman also possessed a fine gift for comedy, and in 1985 recorded Offenbach’s delightfully risqué operetta La Belle Hélène, with Michel Plasson and his Toulouse orchestra, scaling down her generous tone and having fun with all the double entendres.

Norman grew up in Augusta, Georgia, in segregationist times and was singing gospel songs in church by the time she was four. Later, spirituals often formed an integral part of her recital programmes, and her 1991 Carnegie Hall performance of Deep River is beautiful and poignant in the extreme.