Celeste Aida

For years great divas have smeared their ample bodies with cocoa-colored grease paint or pancake make-up to sing Aida, Giuseppe Verdi's Ethiopian princess. This week, an Aida didn't have to bother. In Mexico City's Opera National the role was sung by Ellabelle Davis, a U.S. Negress.

Her Aida was a milestone: few Negroes had ever before sung leading operatic roles with white companies. Most great U.S. companies, like the Metropolitan Opera, had never thought twice about such a possibility; "no suitable roles" had long been their stock dismissal of the notion.

Last year, New York's bargain-priced City Opera Company broke opera's rigid color line by presenting Todd Duncan of Porgy and Bess fame in Carmen and I Pagliacci (TIME, Oct. 8). and followed it this year with Negro Soprano Camilla Williams as Madame Butterfly. Says 32-year-old Ellabelle Davis: "I want to prove that a Negro artist doesn't have to stay in his own backyard. In a singer, it is the color of the voice and not of the face which matters. If I'm a success in Aida I will carry the fight to the doors of the Met."

In New Rochelle, 16 miles from New York City, where she was a grocer's daughter, Ellabelle Davis used to sing hymns in the church choir on Sundays. Weekdays she hummed arias as she sewed for Westchester County suburbanites in the Mattie Bowe Dressmaking Establishment. While pinning a dress on a customer one day, she sang the Depnis le Jour aria from Gustave Charpentier's Louise, an opera whose heroine is a seamstress. The customer, Louise Crane, paper mill heiress, daughter of Massachusetts' late wealthy Governor Winthrop Murray Crane, offered to finance her voice lessons.

The customer also arranged Ellabelle's first professional appearance in an all-Negro opera at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (TIME, Dec. 22, 1941). In subsequent concerts touring the U.S. Ellabelle sang arias and German lieder, but no spirituals ("in New Rochelle I've never even seen an old-fashioned revival meeting").

Only a handful bought tickets to her first concert in Mexico City last year, but at intermission excited Mexicans rushed into the streets to shout the news of a new discovery. For the encores, the theater was filled, even to standees. The newspaper Novedades raved: "Was it an angel? A nightingale? A flute of gold?" During the next four weeks Ellabelle Davis sang five more concerts; all were sellouts. Finally the Nacional signed her for this season's Aida. After the opera season she is booked for 21 concerts in Central and South America.

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