Everett Astor Lee, Trailblazing Conductor and Wheeling Native, Dies at 105 | News, Sports, Jobs
EVERETT ASTOR LEE
Everett Astor Lee, a Wheeler native, inducted into the Wheeling Hall of Fame in 2019 and internationally acclaimed symphonic conductor, operatic music director, violinist and musicologist, died Wednesday in Malmo, Sweden. He was 105.
Maestro Lee was a brilliant conductor and outstanding musician who made a tremendous contribution to classical music. He was the first African American to direct the New York City Opera in their 1955 production of Verdi’s La Traviata.
He paved the way for many others in his career. He was founder of the Cosmopolitan Symphony and the first African American conductor in a major Broadway production with Leonard Bernstein’s On The Town in 1945. He was also the first African American conductor of a major symphony orchestra in the South, with the Louisville Orchestra, and the first to conduct conducted a major opera company in the United States.
Among his more than 1,000 appearances, Lee has conducted a touring Munich opera house in Germany, the Symphony of the New World in New York, the Bogota Philharmonic and the Bogota Symphony in Colombia, musical director of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, and guest conductor with symphony orchestras such as St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Cordoba, New York Philharmonic, Cincinnati, Cleveland and the Boston Pops.
Born in Wheeling on August 31, 1916, Lee was the firstborn 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 the 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 to study the violin while attending school, according to his biography of his induction into the Wheeling Hall of Fame.
A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, Lee studied violin and was a conducting student at the Juilliard School. In 1946 he received an award from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. The following year he formed his own orchestra, the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony. That same year he received a Fulbright scholarship and was appointed director of the opera department at Columbia University Music School. He has also conducted for opera houses in England, France, Sweden, Germany and Colombia, as well as in the United States.
Lee’s honors include an honorary doctorate from West Virginia University in 2018 and induction into the Wheeling Hall of Fame for Music and Visual Arts in 2019. Maestro Lee will succeed his wife Christin Lee, his daughter Dr. Eve Lee, from his first marriage to the late Sylvia Olden Lee, the renowned operatic singing coach, and Maestro Lee and Christin’s son Erik Lee.
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