Coretti Arle-Titz was a singer and popularizer of the spiritual music genre in Europe and the USSR (Russia). She was also one of most well-known opera performers of the Stalin era. Corette Elizabeth Hardy was born on December 5, 1881, in Churchville, New York, to Carrie Carter and Thomas Hardy. In 1899 Hardy worked as a copyist and sang in the choir of Mount Olivet Church in Churchville. Two years later she auditioned for The Louisiana Amazon Guards, changing her name to Coretti Alefred.
By 1902 Alefred was performing in Europe with the Amazon Guards. She arrived in Russia in 1903 after touring in Warsaw, Poland, Riga, Latvia, and Helsinki, Finland. When she arrived in Russia, she became the first Black singer to perform Russian folk romances on stage. After marrying influential attorney Sergey Utin in 1907, she adopted the stage name, Madame de Utina, performing in venues in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev in the tradition of Italian bel canto opera.
In 1913, the Utins’ marriage ended, and she entered the St. Petersburg music conservatory to study with Professor Elisabeth Zwanziger. On another trip to Finland, she met future husband, pianist Boris Titz. By September 1917, Boris and Coretti, now married, left the chaos of the Russian Revolution for the relative quiet of the Opera House in Kharkov, Ukraine. In 1920, they became part of the Concert Brigade of the Southwestern Front which organized performances in theaters, libraries, clubs, mines, factories, hospitals and military camps of the Red Army throughout Ukraine.
In 1921, Coretti Arle-Titz opened at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. From 1924 to 1932 Coretti and Boris performed in an eight-year concert tour from Leningrad to Vladivostok. During that tour Coretti Titz performed with Frank Withers and his Jazz Kings Band who arrived in Moscow in 1926. Titz became the band’s lead singer as she helped popularize jazz in the new Soviet Union. Titz who had made a reputation over the past two decades performing classical, folk, jazz and even spiritual music in the Russian Empire and later the USSR, never revealed the music she liked best or was most comfortable performing.
In the early 1930s Coretti Titz became the first African American-born musician to record music in the USSR. Her first recordings, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Play on Your Harp,” “Pale Moon,” and “By the Waters of the Minnetonka” were released on the Gramplasttrest label. By the end of the 1930s Titz and her husband had participated in numerous radio broadcasts and toured extensively throughout central Russia and the Central Asian Republics. By one estimate, they visited 200 cities and performed over 1,000 times. With the outbreak of World War II, between 1942 and 1945 Coretti and Boris Titz toured military bases and hospitals where they performed for wounded soldiers.
In 1945 Coretti Titz, starred in her first film, Vasily Zhuravlev’s “The Fifteen-Year-Old Captain.” On June 6, 1945, during a break in the filming they were awarded medals for their “Valiant labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.” In 1946 Coretti Titz retired from the stage. She passed away in Moscow on December 14, 1951, at the age of 70.
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