Anne Brown, who put “Bess” into the title of the opera George Gershwin intended to call Porgy, began her life in a classic West Baltimore rowhouse with white marble steps on 1501 Presstman Street, near Stricker Street.

Born on August 9, 1912 (sometimes reported as December 6, 1915), Anne was the first of four daughters born to Harry Francis Brown, a prominent physician, and Mary Allen Wiggins. Descended from a family of singers, her mother, Mary, studied voice and piano in New York. Anne was named for her paternal grandmother, Annie E. Brown, a gifted singer and powerful evangelist who divided her time between her son’s home in Baltimore and her own home in Florida when she was not touring through the Southeast bringing souls to the church with her powerful voice. Her maternal grandfather, William Henry Wiggins, was of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent who was known for his fine lyric tenor voice.

Frederick Douglass High School was still on Dolphin Street when twelve-year-old Anne Wiggins Brown enrolled. The faculty at Douglass was superb and the music program at the school produced many fine musicians. She studied music with W. Llewellyn Wilson and had leading roles in the musical comedies that were mounted at Douglass every year. Brown remembers Wilson with great fondness: “He was a wonderful teacher…very amusing and a great musician and quite a character. He made us laugh all the time. When I see high school productions today, even in Norway, I realize how nearly professional those productions were. I received a good deal of training there.” She also discovered the joy of basketball. After graduating from Douglass, Brown auditioned for Juilliard and won the prestigious Margaret McGill Scholarship, awarded to the school’s best female singer. Brown was sixteen when she began studying with Lucia Dunham at Juilliard.

Gershwin was well into writing the music for an opera based on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, when Brown, still a student at Juilliard and hoping to land a role in the new work, wrote to the composer asking for an audition. Gershwin's secretary called asking her to come to his apartment with lots of music. After hearing Brown sing works by Brahms, Schubert, and Massenet, Gershwin asked her to sing a spiritual. After hearing her sing "City Called Heaven," Gershwin knew he had found the perfect Bess. So perfect, in fact, that he expanded the role. From that time until the opera was finished, Brown visited the composer every week, going through the music, singing all the parts—singing duets with Gershwin or trios with other members of the cast.

Much of Porgy had already been written when Brown walked into Gershwin's New York apartment. Yet her voice and presence would prompt Gershwin to make significant changes to the work. Brown loved the hauntingly beautiful "Summertime," which was to have been Clara's song. Brown recalls asking Gershwin, "Why can't Bess sing "Summertime"? 'Don't' be silly,' he said. 'Bess is practically a street walker and you want her to sing "Summertime"? Well, then one day he called me and said, 'Anne, come down. I've got something to tell you. You are going to sing "Summertime." Clara, who is the mother figure, goes out in the storm to rescue Jake, her husband, and she gives her baby to Bess and she says here Bess, keep my baby until I come back. The next act you are sitting in the window with Porgy's baby, why don't you sing her lullaby "Summertime"?' Well, I was delighted."

Then Gershwin surprised Brown with the news that he had decided to call his new work Porgy and Bess so she would share star billing with the late Todd Duncan (who received the George Peabody Medal in 1984). When Brown asked how he had come to make the change, he told her "Well, there's Tristan and Isolde, there's Romeo and Juliet, why not Porgy and Bess?"

Brown was in many ways ill-suited for the role of Bess. At first Gershwin worried that Brown's complexion was too light and Bess, he pointed out, was little more than a street walker. Brown admitted that mastering the role had been a challenge: "I tried to get under the skin of the role of Bess, which was very difficult for me. I was young and came from a terribly conservative middle-class black family." Brown's father, offended by the way "negroes" were portrayed in Porgy, disliked the idea of his well brought up daughter playing Bess. "My father didn't like the way 'negroes' were portrayed. There was so much drinking and all that sort of thing — killing and fighting. One more stereotype, he thought. We had to accept that sort of thing then."

Brown was twenty-three years old when Porgy and Bess premiered at the Alvin Theatre in New York on October 10, 1935. Gershwin's opera received mixed reviews but critics were unanimous in their praise for Anne Brown and her costar, baritone Todd Duncan. Brown brought another Baltimorean to the cast of Porgy and Bess. When John Bubbles left the show Gershwin asked Brown if she knew anyone who could take on his role. Brown had performed with Avon Long when they were both students at Douglass. Long, a wonderful dancer and superb singer, was, as Brown predicted, the perfect Sportin' Life.

In 1942 she returned to Broadway in a newly mounted production of Porgy and Bess, bringing to the role greater maturity. Brown was asked to play herself in Warner Brothers' film, Rhapsody in Blue, about the life of George Gershwin. She was acclaimed for her performances at Carnegie Hall and in Philadelphia her performance broke all attendance records.

As soon as it was possible to travel after World War II, Brown toured Europe. Brown rejoined Todd Duncan for a special performance of Porgy and Bess in Copenhagen in July 1945. After her Scandinavian concerts, Brown set out on a concert tour of the war-torn Continent. The rigors of travel were more than compensated by her reception in Europe. She won over her Parisian audiences and critics with her accomplished performances of music by Faure and Ravel. In Milan's La Scala she was hailed as "The American Patti."

In 1948 she returned to Norway and married Olympic skier Thorleif Schjelderup, a medalist at the 1948 Winter Olympics. Their first child, Vaar (Spring), was born in May 1951. Brown gave concerts all over Europe. In Oslo she sang the role of Baba in "The Medium." She won the Music Critics Prize for the best performance of the year for her performance in "The Consul." In the 1950s Brown began teaching voice. Her first student was actress Liv Ullman. In the spring of 1998 Anne Brown returned to Baltimore to receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to American Music at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Brown resides and teaches in Oslo.

Note: Much of the information for this entry comes from original source material, including newspaper and microfilm, from the archives of The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Historical Society, and the vertical files at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.