Joyce Mathis

Joyce Mathis (1944 – before April 2009) was an American soprano who built a career as a concert artist, recitalist, and opera singer spanning from the 1960s into the early 1990s. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Ezra and Nellie Mathis, she graduated from the Howard School of Academics and Technology in 1961. She studied voice in Chattanooga under J. Oscar Miller before earning a bachelor's degree in vocal performance from Central State University in 1965. She subsequently pursued graduate studies at the Juilliard School, where her teacher was Florence Kimball, who had also taught Leontyne Price. Price went on to mentor Mathis in the early stages of her professional career. Mathis is recognized as part of the first generation of Black classical singers to achieve significant success in the United States, contributing to the dismantling of racial barriers in classical music.

Her early career was marked by success in major singing competitions. In 1964 she was a regional winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. In 1967 she received the Marian Anderson Award, and the following year she won the Young Concert Artists competition, which led directly to her New York recital debut at the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in March 1969. During this period she took on a range of operatic and concert engagements: in 1967 she served as soprano soloist in Beethoven's Egmont with the Cosmopolitan Young Peoples Symphony Orchestra under conductor Juan Pablo Izquierdo at Philharmonic Hall, performed the role of Clotilda in Bellini's Norma at Carnegie Hall with the American Opera Society alongside Elena Souliotis and Nancy Tatum, and created the role of Gismonda in Thomas Pasatieri's Padrevia at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 1968 she performed with the Symphony of the New World, the first racially integrated orchestra in the United States, in programs featuring Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs and works by John Lewis and Arthur Cunningham. That same year she performed Hugo Weisgall's opera monodrama The Stronger at the 92nd Street Y in a concert organized by the League of Composers. In 1969 she toured nationally as part of the American Airlines-sponsored "American Youth Performs" concert series.

The year 1970 brought several significant engagements. Mathis recorded the role of the High Priestess in Verdi's Aida for a production featuring Leontyne Price in the title role, Luciano Pavarotti as Radamès, Grace Bumbry as Amneris, and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. That same year she was the featured soloist in the inaugural concert of the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra under conductor Leonard Slatkin, performing works by Mozart, Puccini, and Gershwin. In November 1970 she was the soprano soloist in the world premiere of George Rochberg's Symphony No. 3 at Lincoln Center.

Throughout the 1970s Mathis continued to accumulate notable credits. In 1973 she and baritone William Warfield were featured performers at the National Association of Negro Musicians convention in Atlanta, with conductor Everett Lee. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ned Rorem wrote his song cycle Women's Voices for her, describing it as the composition closest to his heart. Mathis gave the work its debut at Alice Tully Hall on November 4, 1976. That same year she created the role of Celestina in the world premiere of Roger Ames's opera Amistad at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In 1977 she performed at Fisk University in celebration of the inauguration of Walter J. Leonard as the institution's ninth president, and in 1979 she gave a recital at Alice Tully Hall.

Her collaborations with the Boys Choir of Harlem and Opera Ebony were a recurring feature of her later career. In 1982 she was the soprano soloist in the world premiere of George Walker's Cantata for Soprano, Tenor, Boys Choir, and Chamber Orchestra, alongside tenor Walter Turnbull, the Boys Choir of Harlem, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and conductor Warren George Wilson. She performed the same work again in 1986 at Orchestra Hall in Chicago with conductor Paul Freeman, the Orchestra of Illinois, and the Boys Choir of Harlem. With Opera Ebony she performed scenes from Mark Fax's opera Til Victory Is Won at Carnegie Hall in February 1983 with the American Symphony Orchestra, sang the role of Siebel in Gounod's Faust at Aaron Davis Hall of the City College of New York in December 1983, and appeared as Irina in Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars in 1987.

In 1993 Mathis appeared on Broadway as the soprano soloist in Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras with the Boys Choir of Harlem at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, a production listed among her Broadway credits alongside The Boys Choir of Harlem and Friends. The following year, in 1994, the Festival Ensemble of the American Academy of Arts and Letters dedicated a performance of Haydn's The Creation to her. An April 2009 obituary for her sister Margaret in The Chattanoogan noted that Joyce Mathis had preceded her sister in death.