In his ebook Wagnerism (2020), Alex Ross writes about what he calls “Wagner scenes” in literature—episodes through which a younger concertgoer is spiritually remodeled by an encounter with Richard Wagner’s music. One in every of Ross’s most fascinating examples is “Of the Coming of John,” a chapter in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks (1903), through which Du Bois turns to fiction to explain the mental awakening of a younger Black man from a small city in Georgia. John Jones’s epiphany comes when he attends a efficiency of Lohengrin in New York and feels a brand new world opening up: “The infinite fantastic thing about the wail lingered and swept by means of each muscle of his body, and put all of it a-tune.” In his ecstasy, he inadvertently touches the arm of the white girl subsequent to him, whereupon her male companion complains and Jones is ejected from the corridor.
The bitter ethical of Du Bois’s story is that for a Black American of his time, excessive tradition is a lure. Learning Greek and geometry in school provides Jones a “dignity” and “thoughtfulness” which are seen in his look. Nevertheless it additionally makes him “really feel nearly for the primary time the Veil that lay between him and the white world,” Du Bois writes, as Jim Crow America prevents him from utilizing or having fun with his data. “Does it make each one—sad once they examine and be taught numerous issues?” asks Jones’s sister when he returns residence. “I’m afraid it does,” he says. To which she replies, “I want I used to be sad”—conveying Du Bois’s sense that the lifetime of the thoughts is value struggling for.
“Of the Coming of John” helps make sense of Du Bois’s puzzling choice to attend the Bayreuth Competition in 1936, when it was intently related to the Nazi regime. Writing concerning the expertise in his essay “What of the Colour-Line?,” Du Bois acknowledged the ethical problems concerned, noting that on his each day stroll he handed the previous residence of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, who “did extra maybe than anybody to ascertain in Germany the speculation of Nordic superiority.” Chamberlain’s racist, anti-Semitic opus The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was an necessary affect on Hitler, and Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow, had been one of many führer’s essential early supporters. But Du Bois writes admiringly about her and describes Bayreuth as a shrine to “the spirit of Magnificence,” evaluating it to Chartres Cathedral. As for Wagner’s operas, he has little doubt about their humanity and universality: “No human being, white or black, can afford to not know them, if he would know life.”
If Du Bois wasn’t deterred by Nazi Bayreuth, it was partly as a result of he had a lifetime of expertise separating the treasures of the human spirit from the establishments that administered them. For John Jones, the truth that a racist opera home was the one place to listen to Lohengrin didn’t imply that the opera itself was tainted. Quite the opposite, the music was the very best critique of the barbarism that surrounded it.
Du Bois discovered that for an African American, Nazi Germany was truly extra welcoming than the USA. After 5 months visiting the nation, he noticed, “It could have been inconceivable for me to have spent a equally very long time in any a part of the USA, with out some, if not frequent instances of private insult or discrimination. I can’t report a single occasion right here.” “What of the Colour-Line?” initially appeared in Du Bois’s column in an African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and he particulars for his readers the terrifying anti-Semitism that was seen in all places in Germany in 1936, calling it “an assault on civilization” similar to the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave commerce. He insists, nonetheless, that on his travels there, “I’ve been handled with uniform courtesy and consideration.”
The concept that Black artists and intellectuals may escape American racism by transferring to Europe is acquainted from literary historical past: Richard Wright and James Baldwin, for instance, spent their later lives in France. In Singing Like Germans, the historian Kira Thurman provides a brand new dimension to the story by specializing in African American classical musicians who studied, carried out, or settled in German-speaking Europe. A lot of them made avowals similar to Du Bois’s. “In Europe there isn’t any prejudice towards my race,” stated the soprano Sissieretta Jones, who toured Germany within the Eighteen Nineties. “It’s the artist[’s] soul they have a look at there, not the colour of his pores and skin.”
Josephine Harreld studied piano and conducting in Salzburg in 1935, when Austria was beneath fascist rule, however “the one expertise of racism she shared got here from white People,” Thurman writes. One fellow scholar, a Smith graduate, refused to sit down together with her at meals as a result of, Harreld associated in a letter to her dad and mom, “her household has Negro servants. So for that motive she can’t overcome her prejudices.”
Many Black musicians felt elated and liberated to be dwelling for the primary time in a rustic with no historical past of slavery and segregation. However the actuality of the German musical world was extra sophisticated, as Thurman reveals on this impressively and thoughtfully researched ebook. Singing Like Germans covers roughly a century beginning within the 1870s, a interval when Germany underwent repeated cataclysmic adjustments, and the experiences of Black musicians various enormously by time and place. Marian Anderson’s lieder evenings in Vienna earlier than the Anschluss belonged to a world totally different from that of Ella Lee’s debut as Tosca in Communist East Berlin in 1961.
What remained fixed was the ideology of German music—the idea that the works of Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, have been the product of a singular nationwide genius. For an African American to carry out that music might be interpreted as a tribute to the German spirit or a desecration of it, a trigger for delighted shock or violent condemnation, however it at all times required some form of interpretation.
When African American artists started to appear on European phases within the late nineteenth century, live performance promoters used their race as a promoting level. Sissieretta Jones might have claimed that in Europe nobody cared concerning the colour of her pores and skin, however when she got here to Berlin in 1895 she was billed as “the Black Patti,” after the favored Italian diva Adelina Patti. Thurman discovers {that a} singer named Jenny Bishop was utilizing the identical nickname in Berlin on the time, a supply of amusement for the native press. “They each look like proper,” one journalist wrote, “as a result of the one is as Black as the opposite, and the one sings [as] superbly as the opposite.”
A part of what these artists have been promoting was their story. Thurman quotes a profile of Jones in a Berlin newspaper that defined how a “easy Negro maiden” was found by Thomas Edison, recorded on his newly invented wax cylinder, after which taken beneath the wing of First Girl Frances Cleveland, who employed a music trainer for her and organized for her debut live performance within the White Home.
Thurman describes this account as “wildly fabricated and sensational.” Actually, Jones, who was raised in Windfall, Rhode Island, was skilled on the New England Conservatory of Music. But when it tells us nothing of worth concerning the singer, it’s fairly informative about German expectations and fantasies. Thurman dwells notably on the element that Mrs. Cleveland challenged Jones’s music trainer to see if correct coaching may “overcome the disagreeable, unusual, and unmelodic guttural sound” of her talking voice. Right here was an ideal colonialist fable of European tradition overcoming African nature.
German critics implicitly affirmed that binary once they insisted, intending it as a praise, that Jones wasn’t actually Black. “The one factor ‘Black’ about her is the gorgeous shining hair,” one reviewer stated, whereas one other protested that the “adjective ‘Black’ appears to us unnecessarily rude.” To insist on the singer’s race could be to recommend that she hadn’t transcended it, as any Black particular person must do with a purpose to take part in German musical tradition. German audiences have been additionally merely unfamiliar with how African People seemed and infrequently expressed shock at how the class “Black” was outlined. “A twist: Miss Jenny Bishop truly has a chocolate-brown coloring, and the epithet ‘Black Patti’ is subsequently misplaced,” one critic wrote about Jones’s rival.
Extra vital than the looks of performers was whether or not the music they made “sounded” Black. Within the chapter “Singing Lieder, Listening to Race,” Thurman reveals that German writers habitually, maybe unconsciously, described Black voices as sounding “black, purple, or blue—all darkish hues.” A assessment of a Marian Anderson live performance in 1930 described the contralto as having “a darkish, blue-black voice” that “sounds considerably uncommon to our ears, unique.” Roland Hayes, a tenor famend within the early twentieth century for his interpretations of lieder, was described by a Viennese critic in 1923 as “considerably guttural.”
It’s doable that German listeners actually have been listening to one thing new and distinctive in these performances. For audiences used to singers who have been native German audio system, Anderson and Hayes may nicely have sounded “unique” in ways in which have been laborious to specify. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, as Thurman writes, “audiences usually relied on organic notions of racial distinction to know a efficiency of classical music.” In one of many ebook’s uncommon passages of direct musical description, Thurman—a classically skilled pianist who grew up in Vienna—analyzes Hayes’s recording of Schubert’s music “Du bist die Ruh,” which was made late in his life and “doesn’t symbolize the African American tenor in his prime.” Even so, anybody who listens to it could hear that “guttural” is the final phrase that describes Hayes’s singing; Thurman notes its “feathery delicate smoothness.” That is one among many examples in Singing Like Germans of how troublesome it’s to easily hear music, with out distorting preconceptions.
Earlier than World Warfare I, German reactions to Black musicians have been typically condescending or disdainful, however within the interwar interval they turned menacing. After the Treaty of Versailles, German resentment crystallized across the presence of troopers from Algeria and Senegal within the French forces occupying the Rhineland. Giving Black troops authority over white Europeans was considered in Germany as against the law towards nature, a “Black Horror.”
When Hayes got here to Berlin to carry out in 1924, he turned a spotlight for this anger. A Black man singing Schubert in a corridor named after Beethoven appeared to some Germans like a cultural reprise of the occupation, and the American consul warned Hayes to not come. He did anyway, taking the stage to “the sounds of booing and jeering,” Thurman writes. However in response to press studies, when he started by singing the mild “Du bist die Ruh,” his efficiency instantly disarmed the viewers, and by the top of the evening he was loudly cheered. Right here was a narrative to be ok with, exhibiting that music might be a common language, transcending the illusory variations of race.
The Nazis, nonetheless, weren’t curious about such blissful endings, and as they gained energy, protests towards Black musicians turned extra aggressive. Thurman contrasts Hayes’s live performance with one given by the Pittsburgh-born singer Aubrey Pankey in Salzburg in 1932. Native Nazis posted flyers urging individuals “to not allow a Negro to take the each day bread of German artists,” and whereas Pankey carried out, a crowd exterior sang nationalist songs and “tried repeatedly to storm the constructing however have been blocked by the police.”
Thurman quotes a assessment of the live performance revealed in a right-wing newspaper the subsequent day: “Everytime you see a Negro, you get the sensation that he has a quiet eager for his grasslands…. You imagine him straight away that he—within the true sense of the phrase—feels completely misplaced in Europe.” It’s laborious to reconcile such abuse with Du Bois’s testimony that he skilled no racism in Nazi Germany.
After the Allied victory in World Warfare II, Black efficiency in Germany took on new political meanings. One of the vital fascinating episodes Thurman writes about got here in September 1945, when the Berlin Philharmonic carried out beneath the baton of a Black conductor for the primary time. (The pianist Hazel Harrison had grow to be the primary Black girl to carry out with the orchestra in 1904, however this milestone was forgotten.) Rudolph Dunbar, a local of British Guiana who studied at Juilliard and made his profession in London, was invited with the approval of the occupying People as a pointed rejection of Nazi racism and the cult of German music. Thurman quotes an American official who known as Black musicians “the very best belongings within the reorientation of Germans.” To make the message even clearer, Dunbar carried out in uniform—he had been a warfare correspondent for the Related Negro Press—and this system included the Afro-American Symphony by the Black composer William Grant Nonetheless.
The live shows have been successful, however Dunbar was skeptical concerning the viewers. “They flock to my live shows not as a result of they wish to hear my music, however as a result of they wish to hear how a Negro makes music,” he noticed to the author Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, who recorded their dialog in her diary. She wrote that Dunbar was “lovely like a panther,” one other instance of language inadvertently betraying German assumptions about Africa and Europe, nature and tradition.
However essentially the most evident irony was that Dunbar had alternatives in American-occupied Berlin that he would by no means have present in America itself. (The Metropolitan Opera didn’t carry out beneath a Black conductor till 1972, when Henry Lewis led a efficiency of La Bohème.) Throughout the chilly warfare, Communist East Germany embraced Black musicians to rebuke American racism, a lot because the People embraced Dunbar to rebuke German racism.
Paul Robeson, an outspoken Communist sympathizer, carried out a lieder live performance in East Berlin in 1960, with “Ol’ Man River” on this system alongside Bach and Bartók. The East German press performed up the occasion as proof of Communist antiracism, however Thurman writes that this technique had its personal pitfalls. A staged press {photograph} confirmed Robeson speaking to an eight-year-old woman named Anka, who supposedly requested him to remain within the GDR; it was revealed in a single East Berlin newspaper with the caption “Paul Robeson, Your Huge Black Buddy,” condescending absurdly to each Robeson and the reader.
This factors to the central, unanswered query in Singing Like Germans. Thurman has uncovered an awesome number of German responses to Black musicians, and he or she interprets nearly all of them as expressions of racism. This contains not simply the express hatred of Nazis and the unfairness of provincial nineteenth-century critics, but additionally responses that have been meant to be affirmative and enthusiastic. Thus, after condemning German listeners who thought that singers like Anderson and Hayes sounded Black, Thurman additionally condemns those that thought they didn’t sound Black, resembling one Viennese critic who praised Hayes: “Not as a Negro, however as an awesome artist, he captured and moved the viewers.”
Thurman argues that such a praise assumes “that no matter was Black couldn’t even be common.” But when one other Viennese critic writes that Anderson’s singing confirmed “how the human coronary heart speaks intelligibly to all people,” Thurman criticizes the remark’s “universalizing tones” as predicated on a perception within the “supposed foreignness of [Anderson’s] musicianship.” As in lots of present discussions of race and cultural appropriation, there’s a vicious circle at work right here: insisting on distinction is an issue, however so is insisting on the absence of distinction.
A part of the issue is that Singing Like Germans is usually about how Germans thought of Black musicians, not the opposite approach round. This will merely be as a result of nature of the obtainable proof: musicians typically don’t theorize about their calling, so there’ll at all times be extra written about them than by them. What Thurman does quote from letters, diaries, and memoirs, nonetheless, means that many African American musicians shared the idea that German artwork music represented the next religious realm. About his alma mater, Fisk College, the traditionally Black school in Tennessee, Du Bois wrote that “no scholar ever left Fisk with no deep and abiding appreciation of actual music.” “Actual music, after all, meant classical music, and normally the music of German composers,” Thurman notes.
Certainly, the Black classical musicians we meet in Singing Like Germans have been at pains to tell apart themselves from fashionable and folks musicians. Thurman reveals that within the Twenties, Anderson’s public picture was fashioned in opposition to that of Josephine Baker. Each singers turned well-known in Europe on the identical time, however the latter represented “erotic primitivism,” whereas the previous was “pious, modest, respectable.” The distinction needed to don’t simply with their personalities however with their genres: classical music was refined, bourgeois, and European, holding itself aloof from the vulgar American power of jazz.
A extra fascinating distinction, maybe, could be between Anderson and Bessie Smith. The 2 singers have been contemporaries—Anderson was born in 1897, Smith in 1894—and each made their first recordings in 1923. However whereas success for Anderson meant performing Brahms and Wolf for an viewers of some hundred Viennese connoisseurs, Smith’s blues data bought by the a whole bunch of hundreds, and he or she turned the highest-paid Black entertainer in America. Within the course of, she helped redefine American music as African American music, as it will stay by means of the 20 th century with blues, jazz, rock and roll, R&B, soul, and hip-hop.
By comparability, Anderson, Hayes, and different classical musicians in Singing Like Germans look a bit of just like the neo-Latin writers of the Renaissance, who staked their fame on a historically prestigious language at simply the second when nearly everybody stopped studying it. Thurman provides helpful insights into how Germans considered these Black artists, however it will be nonetheless extra fascinating to understand how they considered themselves.