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.

 

 

Macbeth at the Met

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It was general manager Rudolf Bing who, in January 1959, first brought Giuseppe Verdi’s opera to the Metropolitan. He had launched his stewardship eight seasons earlier with the Met premiere of the composer’s Don Carlo.

The Macbeth production promised to be the hit of the season, a starry affair, a spectacular vehicle for Leonard Warren and Maria Callas. Callas had sung at the Met in the previous two seasons to great acclaim. In November of what would have been the third, Bing fired her in as public a manner as he could contrive. She had committed herself to alternating Lady Macbeth with Violetta and, for the first time, to the national tour. But the diva changed her mind, presenting the excuse that toggling between the heavier and the lighter Verdi roles, even with a week’s rest in between, would invite vocal strain. Bing suggested she replace Violetta with Tosca or Lucia, upon which Callas retorted: “My voice is not an elevator, going up and down.” When she failed to comply with her agreement by the deadline Bing set, he sacked her for breach of contract, to the outrage of the press and the public.

That was not all. Shakespeare’s unlucky “Scottish play” lived up to its reputation when in January 1959, the very month Macbeth was to open, the conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos, suffered a heart attack. Leonie Rysanek, in her Met debut, took over for Callas, Erich Leinsdorf for Mitropoulos. As the Viennese soprano made her entrance, there came from the audience the shout of “Brava Callas.” Bing later confessed that it was he who had arranged for the offensive outburst; he had wanted to win sympathy for his substitute. Despite uncertain lower and middle registers, and a frequently ill-tuned though resplendent top, the charismatic Rysanek notched a great success. Warren and Carlo Bergonzi (in the essentially one-aria role of Macduff) acknowledged the belcantist traces of Verdi’s score. This was the third Macbeth with which Bing was intimately involved, all three directed by Carl Ebert and designed by Caspar Neher. But by 1959, their expressionistic concept had had its day. 

The Met’s next Macbeth came in 1982 and set off one of the most boisterous receptions in memory. Peter Hall and John Bury had had the ingenious notion of returning Macbeth to the theatre practice of Verdi’s youth, with flying witches and a giant cauldron from which emerged a nearly nude Hecate and effigies of the apparitions. James Levine conducted Verdi’s complete 1865 Paris revision of his 1847 score; it included a ballet danced by sylphs in tutus as Macbeth lay dying. The public saw it as Gothic gone amok; it responded with laughter, boos, and a few altercations. During the third and last revival of the Hall/Bury show, the Macbeth curse struck again. On January 23, 1988, the Saturday matinée was suspended at the second-act intermission by the suicide of Bantcho Bantchevsky, an eighty-two-year-old Bulgarian singing coach and Met habitué, who jumped eighty feet to his death from the family circle. 

The current blood-splattered, black and white production of Macbeth dates back to 2007, Peter Gelb’s second year. It will be seen “Live in HD” on Saturday, October 11. Adrian Noble’s provocative updating to the 20^th century eschews both the picturesque rendering of Scotland and the literal enactment of the scenario: the witches sport the pocketbooks and bobby socks of 1950s bag ladies, Macduff sings from a Jeep, Lady Macbeth teeters on a row of chairs in the “Sleepwalking” scene. The Met’s luxury casting for the 2014 revival has had rapturous reviews: Zeljko Lucic in the title role, Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth, René Pape as Banquo, and Joseph Calleja as Macduff.

The clips that follow feature four sopranos in two of Lady Macbeth’s arias, and a baritone in Macbeth’s death scene: Anna Netrebko and Shirley Verrett, Maria Callas and Martha Mödl, Leonard Warren.

Here Netrebko sings Lady Macbeth’s entrance aria, recorded in the 2012 concert that inaugurated St. Petersburg’s new Mariinsky Theatre. While she conveys ferocity with dramatic coloratura, abrupt descents to the lower register, incisive attacks on high, and a powerful, dark sound, Netrebko's character remains generalized. This is early in the transformation of the erstwhile belcanto soubrette of L’Elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale into the heavy-duty dramatic soprano she is becoming. (Netrebko will open the Met's 2017-18 season in a new production of Norma.) Viewers of this Saturday's simulcast will be able to contrast the two versions for themselves, as they will be able to contrast Netrebko’s representation of Verdi’s monstrous heroine with Shirley Verrett’s iconic interpretation in the subsequent clip.

 

In 1988, near the end of her more than two-decade career with the company, Verrett sang her sole Met Lady Macbeth. By that time, she had seesawed between mezzo-soprano and soprano roles, with the result that register breaks had become all too pronounced. Seen here in 1978, in Giorgio Strehler’s remarkable La Scala production of Verdi’s opera, she is at the peak of her powers, her scale even, and as always, her presence and her intensity fully deployed. Masterfully conducted by Claudio Abbado, Verrett brings the full force of her concentration to this portrait of untrammeled ambition. The clip ends with the two-minute-long ovation she received from the Milan public.

 

With her abrupt exit in 1959, the Met lost the chance to hear the Callas version of the role. The recording of the “Sleepwalking” scene released that very year is evidence that she would have registered a triumph in New York. Callas’s temperament and musical imagination were made for Lady Macbeth. The horrific murder of King Duncan and the overwhelming guilt that followed are vivid in the soprano’s timbre, by turns veiled, as in a trance, and exposed in naked pain. Please note: the orchestral introduction to the "Sleepwalking" scene lasts approximately three minutes.

In Martha Mödl’s 1952 German-language recording of the “Sleepwalking” scene, Verdi’s phrases are altered by the preponderance of final consonants. If neither the singer’s sound nor highly expressionistic approach can be called Italianate, her voice approximates the composer’s specifications--“una voce aspra ... vorrei che la voce di Lady Macbeth fosse qualcosa di diabolico! [a bitter voice ... I would like Lady Macbeth's voice to have something of the diabolic].” Many have found her reading mesmerizing, beautiful in its own terms. Mödl, who never sang Italian opera in her brief Met career, was, like Verrett, a mezzo who, for a time, took on soprano roles, mostly in Wagner. Here she is caught at her best, before the cost of dramatic utterance, often at the highest emotional pitch in the top register, caught up with her. Mödl eventually returned to the mezzo realm and sang character roles brilliantly well into the 1980s.

In opposition to Lady Macbeth’s noctambulist bravura, Macbeth’s final aria, “Pietà, rispetto, amore [Pity, respect, love],” reflects a calm acceptance that his misdeeds have deprived him of respect and that no kind words will be engraved on his tombstone. Leonard Warren, the Met’s first Thane of Cawdor, evinces the dynamic range and the perfectly calibrated legato that place him in the very top rank of 20th-century Verdi baritones.

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