Marian Anderson: The Voice of Freedom (WGBH, PBS, aired February 15, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I screened for Charles and I a recent (February 13, 2021) PBS American Experience show called “Marian Anderson: Voice of Freedom,” written and directed by Rob Rapley and first aired last February. (One wonders how PBS decides who gets to be an “American Experience” and who gets to be an “American Master.”) Marian Anderson was an African-American contralto from Philadelphia, born in 1897, who is best known today for two legendary appearances that broke the racist barriers that had kept prevous Black classical and opera singers from stardom. On April 9, 1939, she gave a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after she had been barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from appearing at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, virtually the only venue of sufficient size and quality for the kind of audience she could be expected to draw. The concert was arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been admitted to membership in the D.A.R. even though she had zero interest in the organization or its activities, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, both of whom were appalled not only that Anderson had been barred from giving a concert in the nation’s capital (Anderson herself was not noted for making anti-racist comments in public, but she did issue a rather testy statement – almost certainly drafted for her by her manager, the legendary Sol Hurok – to the effect that she found it shameful that she was banned from singing in her own country’s capital after having performed in many foreign countries’ capitals) but the adding-insult-to-injury irony that the people banning her were the Daughters of the American Revolution and the venue she was prevented from performing in was called Constitution Hall. (Unmentioned in this show, but noted on Anderson’s Wikipedia page, is that in 1943 she finally got to sing at Constitution Hall before a racially mixed audience.)

Anderson’s other anti-racist breakthrough came on January 7, 1955, when at the age of 57 she sang Ulrica the fortuneteller in Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera (“A Masked Ball”) on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City and thereby became the first African-American to perform there – even though she had never sung in a staged opera performance before (nor had she particularly wanted to – her chosen vocation was the now virtually nonexistent one of “concert singer,” performing as a soloist, usually with just a piano accompaniment, in concert halls and singing art songs, light semi-classical pieces and, since she was Black, a group of highly arranged Black spirituals that usually ended her programs; future African-American artists like Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and Jessye Norman would also be forced to sing spirituals at their concerts and record albums of them whether they wanted to or not) and by then she was already past her vocal prime. The documentary was a fascinating study of a woman who became a civil-rights icon almost in spite of herself. Marian Anderson was the daughter of a man who sold ice, coal and liquor at the Reading railroad station in Pennsylvania. Her mother had been a schoolteacher in Virginia, but because she had never completed an official teachers’ training course she was prohibited from teaching in Philadelphia under a Pennsylvania state law that, according to Anderson’s Wikipedia page, was applied only to Black teachers, not white ones.

Her family regularly attended the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia in a building that had been funded by the congregants themselves, so like so many other great Black singers in all genres of music, Anderson got her start (and her initial vocal training) in church. When her dad died in a work injury while Marian was 12, she was forced to go to work to help support her mom and two younger sisters, but she continued to aspire to a musical career. The show details her attempt to enter the Philadelphia Academy of Music, where she waited for an entire day while all the white girls there were permitted to enroll, and only at the end of the day, when everyone else had been called, was she told that the school didn’t accept Black pupils. She was able to study music only through a collection taken up in the Black community, and she found a music teacher named Giuseppe Boghetti, who taught her not only vocal technique but music theory and languages – though for some reason he did not teach her German, ironically because German art songs (Lieder) would become her favorite form of music and the songs she most liked to perform. Anderson pursued a career in churches and small halls in the Black community, and she was scared (with good reason) the first time she had to travel to the South. In 1923 Anderson recorded for the first time, doing Harry T. Burleigh’s arrangements of the spirituals “Deep River” and “My Way’s Cloudy” for the Victor company, though they were released on Victor’s black popular-music label instead of the classical Red Seal division that would be her recorded home for most of her career.

In 1924 Boghetti booked New York’s Town Hall for a recital that was supposed to launch her into the big time, but the concert was a dismal failure: the hall was only about one-tenth full (the way it’s depicted in this documentary makes it seem very much like Greta Garbo’s performance as the ballerina in Grand Hotel, where she’s assured her performance is a sell-out until she walks on stage and can see only a handful of people in the hall). Anderson pulled out of music for several months, with no clear idea of what else she might do with her life, until she was rescued by an offer to go to Europe. She toured all the major countries and was a sensation, especially in Scandinavia, where (according to Rapley’s description) she received the sort of adulation usually reserved in the 1920’s for movie stars and more recently for pop-music divas. Anderson also had to deal with less of the piss-ant racism she’d had to cope with in the U.S. – though she still had incidents like the time in which the main hall of the Salzburg Music Festival refused to allow her to perform there and she had to find a smaller venue, not officially connected with the festival, for her concert. But there was an unexpected silver lining in that anti-fascist and anti-racist musicians like Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter were drawn to hear her, and were moved not only by her story but by the sheer artistry and power of her singing.

Toscanini called her “the voice of the century,” and he was such a superstar in the emerging market for classical music on radio that his endorsement was a powerful promotional tool. She also acquired the most famous manager in classical music then, Sol Hurok, after she returned to the U.S. in 1934 – largely, at least according to this program, because with the rise of Nazism racists throughout Europe felt encouraged to target not only Jews (the principal hate objects of the Nazis) but also Blacks. The Nazi regime actually cited U.S. racial segregation laws as models for what they hoped to do to Jews in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which systematically denied Jews equality, barred them from many professions and were the first step towards the Holocaust. (U.S. policies were models for quite a lot of the horrors of Nazism, including eugenics and genocide; I’m fond of quoting Hitler’s comment to Edward R. Murrow in a 1940 interview, “I don’t know why you Americans are so upset about the Jews. I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”) Anderson returned to the U.S. as an internationally acclaimed singer, but she still had to deal with the usual racist nonsense.

Her 1939 Washington, D.C. concert began as an attempt to do an Easter Sunday benefit for Howard University, the first and most important of the historically Black colleges and alma mater of some of the greatest minds in African-American history, including Thurgood Marshall and all the other lawyers who won the Brown v. Board of Education cases at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. When the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall, she and Hurok tried to book the big hall at Central High School – and they wouldn’t let a Black singer perform there, either. Eleanor Roosevelt managed to make the ban on Marian Anderson a cause célèbre through her newspaper column, My Day, and she got her husband and his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, to approve Anderson’s free concert at the Lincoln Memorial. There’s a fascinating sideline story in Rapley’s script on the Lincoln Memorial itself and its dedication in 1922 – a totally segregated affair in which the few Black people invited to attend were shoved off to one side and forced in a section near the mud, and the one African-American speaker, Robert Russa Moton – who had taken over as president of Tuskegee University after the death of its founder, Booker T. Washington, and had mostly continued Washington’s policy of accepting segregation (all that “we can be separate as the fingers and united as the hand” stuff) – wasn’t allowed even to mention the contradiction between President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the second-class citizenship enforced on African-Americans in 1922 (and still, albeit far less extensively and systematically, today).

Indeed, the whole event presented the Civil War as exclusively a struggle between whites over national unity vs. “states’ rights” and left slavery out of it atogetherl – even though, as late-night TV host John Oliver pointed out in a segment about a year ago I saw on YouTube, if you don’t believe the Civil War and the formation of the Confederacy were about preserving slavery, all you have to do is read the actual ordinances of secession, where the real Confederates made it clear what the war was about to them. Rapley portrays Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial as a sort of re-sanctification of the Lincoln Memorial, bringing it more in line with Lincoln’s actual legacy and the real history of the war he led. He also makes the point that when Martin Luther King, Jr. – who as a boy of 10 had listened to NBC’s national radio broadcast of Anderson’s 1939 concert – was involved with the March on Washington, its program began with Marian Anderson, standing on the same steps from which she had sung 24 years earlier, performing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She also had an odd run-in with the NAACP, who had taken a major role in the Constitution Hall controversy, when in 1951 she defied their call for African-American performers to boycott segregated venues – though she relented four years later.

Anderson emerges from this program as an unlikely civil-rights activist, someone who mostly wanted to be left alone and pursue her art free from racial politics – which proved impossible – and other things I’ve heard about her include that though she felt compelled to perform them, she really didn’t care for the Burleigh arrangements of Black spirituals; her favorite composer was Schubert and she was proud of her ability to perform music of all cultures instead of being pigeonholed by her ethnicity into “Black music.” And as I noted above, though Anderson was the first African-American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, she hadn’t been interested in opera as a career path (there were all-Black opera companies which performed standard operas with all-Black casts and orchestra members in Black venues, but Anderson never sang with them) and had wanted instead to be what she became quite successfully: a concert singer of classical and light-classical music to mostly middle-class audiences. Just a few more thoughts about her: she really had a quite remarkable voice and a gift for phrasing, and she was also lucky to live in a time when there was a market for contraltos even though she had enough of a high register she could probably have “pushed up” to mezzo-soprano if she’d wanted to – today singers who show up to voice teachers with contralto voices are usually “pushed up” to mezzos, and singers who show up as mezzos are “pushed up” to soprano because that’s where the money is for a female classical or opera singer.