The Met and the Color Line, 2: Marian Anderson

Please note: This post is excerpted from Chapter Seven of our book, Grand Opera: The Story of the Met (University of California Press, 2014). In that chapter, we trace the tortured responses of Met management to probing questions concerning the engagement of Black singers from 1927 to 1955.

 

It was Marian Anderson who breached the Met’s color line at her historic debut on January 7, 1955. The proposal that Anderson be the first African American to sing a principal role at the Met had issued from diverse quarters for at least ten years. Before his death in 1940, Paul Cravath, the Board chair, had pressed the suggestion on General Manager Edward Johnson. At that point, Anderson, born in 1897, was forty-three years old. The matter was taken up in 1944 by E. B. Ray of the Afro-American Newspapers, who inquired bluntly “whether or not the Metropolitan Opera Company has a written or unwritten law barring colored artists?” Johnson’s assistant, Edward Ziegler, came up with a feeble dodge. Three years later, he once again equivocated: “Only recently have Negro artists shown interest in operatic singing and there is no doubt that eventually one will emerge who is outstanding in the field of opera alone.” By this time, Anderson was fifty. Newly named General Manager Rudolf Bing’s initial reaction to those promoting Anderson varied little from that of Johnson/Ziegler: “Nobody can admire Marian Anderson more than I do, but I am unaware that she has any operatic experience and it is indeed difficult for a concert singer even of Miss Anderson’s high level just to step onto an opera stage.”

What finally convinced Bing? It was no doubt in large part the pressure of the times: 1954 was the year of Brown vs. Board of Education, 1955 the year that Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. And Anderson was unquestionably the most renowned and, by many,the most beloved of all African American artists. It was also the scheduled revival of Un Ballo in maschera, absent from the Met since 1947, and the “suitable” role of Ulrica, the fortune teller. (In Verdi’s original version set in colonial Boston, Ulrica is an “indovina di razza nera” [fortune-teller of black race]). Crucial also, given the contralto’s by then nearly fifty-eight years, was the fact that Ulrica appears in only one scene and in that scene she is the dominant, mostly static figure.

As Anderson recounts it, on running into her at a party in September 1954, Bing asked her to join the Met that Spring. She was rightly apprehensive; the role’s high tessitura presented difficulties so late in her career. Although the audition for Dimitri Mitropoulos did not go well (as she said, she had had to “squeeze out” the notes above the staff), the conductor assented. Bing lost no time in calling Sol Hurok, her agent, to close the deal—long in coming and now apparently urgent. Her fee of $1,000 per performance was at the top of the Met scale.

To add to the drama of the occasion, the orchestral introduction to Act 1, Scene 2 of Un Ballo in maschera that Friday evening had to be interrupted when the curtain failed to rise on cue. Mitropoulos reprised the music, the curtain finally rose, and the ovation was such that the famously composed Anderson was visibly unsettled. Reviews were respectful, acutely aware of the immense emotional charge of the moment.

 

Marian Anderson’s exceptional interpretive powers lay outside the realm of opera. She had had invitations to perform from European companies in the 1930s; she declined them all. Even in her prime, as we know from her recordings, she lacked the affinity for the operatic canon she demonstrated so remarkably for oratorio, lieder, and spirituals. We have chosen an example drawn from her rich repertoire in each of these genres to illustrate the artistry of Marian Anderson, a consummate concert singer.

 

Anderson regularly programmed sacred music in her solo recitals and engagements with orchestra. Here is an early recording of “He Shall Feed His Flock” from Handel’s Messiah. The quality of the sound of the instrumental accompaniment is poor. The voice emerges, nevertheless, with its wonted velvet timbre, evenness of emission, ease throughout the range. Who can fail to be moved by Anderson’s reverential delivery of the text?

 

 

 

The Philadelphia-born singer doubtless owed her comfort with lieder to the extended periods she spent in Germany and Austria, from the late 1920s until the outbreak of World War II. Anderson renders the drama of Schubert’s “Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden),” first calling upon her light upper register as the girl begs to still the hand of Death, then descending to the lowest notes of the contralto range as Death invites her into a gentle embrace. In this 1951 recording she is accompanied by Franz Rupp.

 The public knew Anderson best for the spirituals that she reserved for the final grouping of her recitals. Here, accompanied by Rupp again in 1951, she sings “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.” Her deeply felt phrasing is overwhelming.

 

 

OperaPost ends 2021 with Beethoven’s arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne,” sung by Dame Felicity Lott (soprano); John Mark Ainsley (tenor); Sir Thomas Allen (baritone). Happy New Year to all.