Everett Astor Lee, Trailblazing Conductor and Wheeling Native, Dies at 105
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Everett Astor Lee, a Wheeling native, 2019 inductee of the Wheeling Hall of Fame and internationally acclaimed symphonic conductor, opera music director, violinist and music scholar, died Wednesday in Malmo, Sweden. He was 105.
Maestro Lee was a brilliant conductor and outstanding musician who contributed enormously to classical music. He was the first African American to lead the New York City Opera in its production of Verdi's "La Traviata" in 1955.
He blazed a trail for many others in his career. He was founder of the Cosmopolitan Symphony, and the first African American conductor of a major Broadway production with Leonard Bernstein's "On The Town" in 1945. He also was the first African American conductor of a major symphony orchestra in the south with the Louisville Orchestra, and the first to conduct a major opera company in the United States.
Among his more than 1,000 performances, Lee was conductor of a traveling Munich Opera House in Germany, the Symphony of the New World in New York, the Bogota Philharmonic and Bogota Symphony in Columbia, the Musical Director of Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, and guest conductor at symphony orchestras such as the St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Cordoba, New York Philharmonic, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and the Boston Pops.
Born in Wheeling on Aug. 31, 1916, Lee was the first-born son of Everett Denver Lee and Mamie May Blue Lee, who lived on Eoff Street in East Wheeling.
Lee showed an early aptitude for playing violin. His violin teacher was Walter Rogers of South York Street on Wheeling Island. The family left Wheeling for Cleveland in 1927, but Lee continued studying violin while attending school, according to his biography from his induction into the Wheeling Hall of Fame.
Lee was a graduate of Cleveland Institute of Music, studying violin, and was a conducting student at The Juilliard School. He was awarded a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1946. The following year he founded his own orchestra the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony. The same year he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship he was appointed director of the opera department at Columbia University Music School. He has also conducted for opera companies in England, France, Sweden, Germany and Columbia, as well as in the United States.
Lee's honors include an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from West Virginia University in 2018 and a Wheeling Hall of Fame inductee in Music and Fine Arts in 2019. Maestro Lee will be remembered by his wife, Christin Lee, his daughter, Dr. Eve Lee, from his first marriage to the late Sylvia Olden Lee, the renowned opera vocal coach, and Maestro Lee and Christin's son, Erik Lee.