Henry Lewis: A Bass Player Who Chose to Be First
Henry Lewis picked up the double bass in junior high school not because he loved its sound above all others but because he calculated, correctly, that its scarcity would open doors a more crowded instrument would not. By sixteen he was sitting in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the first Black instrumentalist in a major American orchestra. Thirteen years later he was on the podium in front of that same orchestra, the first Black conductor to lead one. He kept being first for the rest of his career, and the doors never stayed as open behind him as they should have.
An Instrument Chosen for Strategy
Lewis was born October 16, 1932, in Los Angeles, the only child of Henry J. Lewis, an automobile dealer, and Mary Josephine Lewis, a registered nurse. His mother pushed his early musical education — piano lessons started at five, followed by clarinet and various strings — while his father, more skeptical about the professional prospects open to a Black classical musician, needed convincing. In junior high, Lewis settled on double bass specifically because there were so few skilled players competing for the seats; the reasoning worked. His playing earned him a scholarship to the University of Southern California, and in 1948, at sixteen, he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Alfred Wallenstein, becoming the first African American instrumentalist to hold a chair in a major U.S. symphony orchestra.
From the Bass Section to the Podium
Drafted into the Army in 1954, Lewis found an unlikely accelerant for his conducting ambitions: he was assigned to conduct the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, leading it through Stuttgart and the Netherlands in 1955 and 1956 as part of America's postwar cultural diplomacy. He returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic afterward, and in 1961 was appointed its assistant conductor under Zubin Mehta — making him, that February 9, the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra. A *Los Angeles Times* critic, Albert Goldberg, reviewing a program of Verdi arias Lewis led that year, credited him with "a conductor's natural flair for command."
New Jersey and the Met
In 1968, Lewis was named music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, beating out more than 150 other candidates for the post — and becoming the first Black conductor to head a major American symphony. Over eight years there, he rebuilt what had been a part-time community ensemble into an orchestra running full hundred-concert seasons, and made a point of taking the orchestra into poorer neighborhoods for outdoor performances rather than waiting for those audiences to come to it. In 1972 — sources differ on whether it was 1972 or 1974 — he became the first Black conductor to lead a production at the Metropolitan Opera, taking the podium for Puccini's *La bohème* with Anna Moffo and Richard Tucker. The *New York Times* critic Donal Henahan called the debut "highly successful," praising Lewis's "complete understanding of Puccini's broad musical lyricism." Lewis went on to conduct multiple Met productions through 1977 with singers including Luciano Pavarotti and Franco Corelli, and led the Met Orchestra on an international tour to Japan in 1975. He later served as principal conductor of the Netherlands Radio Symphony from 1989 to 1991, and over his career conducted nearly every major American orchestra — Boston, Chicago, New York, Cleveland — along with orchestras in London, Paris, Milan, Copenhagen, and Tokyo.
Marilyn Horne
In 1960 Lewis married the mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, and the marriage became one of the most artistically productive of his career: he conducted many of her recordings, and Horne later credited him as a formative influence on her early development as a performer. Their most famous collaboration, a performance of Rossini's *The Siege of Corinth* at Carnegie Hall, drew what critic Harold C. Schonberg of the *New York Times* described as "pandemonium" from the audience, with ovations running nearly five minutes. The couple had a daughter, Angela, and divorced in 1972 (some accounts give 1974).
Institution-Building
Lewis did not simply occupy positions others had denied Black musicians; he built new ones. He founded the String Society of Los Angeles in 1959, was a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1969, founded the training orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation, and later founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He also served on the California Arts Commission from 1964 and, later, as music director of Los Angeles Opera.
Recordings and Recognition
Across roughly four decades, Lewis recorded more than twenty albums for major labels — Decca, London, RCA Red Seal, EMI — working with singers including Leontyne Price, Plácido Domingo, and Nicolai Gedda. He won a Grammy Award in 1981 for *Great Soprano Arias from Handel and Britten* with Price. He received honorary degrees from Rutgers, Rider, and Saint Peter's, and in 2015, nearly two decades after his death, was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.
Why Henry Is Called a Genius
Lewis's case rests on craft rather than any claim of theoretical or compositional originality: he was, by the testimony of critics across his career, an exceptionally gifted interpreter and technician with the baton, capable of drawing precise, forceful performances out of orchestras and singers alike — the *New York Times*' Robert D. McFadden, summarizing his career, called him "musically brilliant and a commanding figure with the baton." That brilliance was real and repeatedly documented by critics with no reason to inflate it. But it is worth being precise about what kind of achievement it was: conducting genius, where it exists, is a fusion of ear, memory, physical command, and interpretive judgment rather than the kind of solitary conceptual breakthrough associated with, say, a composer or theorist, and nothing in the record suggests Lewis reshaped musical language itself. What made him historically singular was less a superhuman talent than the collision of genuine skill with a professional world that had built almost no path for a Black conductor to reach a major podium at all — McFadden's own framing, that his 1961 debut was "a landmark event in music, for few blacks had even made it into the orchestra pit," makes clear that the barrier being broken was social as much as artistic. Lewis was excellent; whether that excellence alone would have made headlines in a less segregated profession is the honest, unresolved question behind his fame.
Legacy
Lewis died of a heart attack on January 26, 1996, at his New York apartment, having continued conducting even as he dealt with complications from lung cancer. He is remembered less for any single performance than for a career spent forcing open doors — orchestra chair, podium, opera house — that had simply never been opened to a Black musician before, and for the institutions, from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to the rebuilt New Jersey Symphony, that outlasted him.
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