Chapter 8

Breaking with the Past

Race, Gender, and Opera after 1945

When the African American violinist William Kemper Harreld traveled around Austria and Germany in the spring and summer of 1953, he not only recorded the presence of African American troops on German soil. He also proudly shared his life-changing experience participating in one of the most important events in German musical culture: the Bayreuth Festival. Nestled comfortably in his seat inside Wagner’s opera house, Harreld watched the curtain rise for one of the first operas that Bayreuth had been allowed to stage since the Allies shut down the opera house in 1945. “Bayreuth Festival Haus orchestra hidden from audience,” he marvels. “Perfect singing-acting. Wonderful ensemble. Exceptional excellence in strings. Wagner’s two grandsons manage fine in Bayreuth.”¹

Harreld’s humor shines through in that last, modest statement, which conceals as much as it reveals in its judgment of the new directors of the Bayreuth Festival, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner. When Harreld attended the Bayreuth Festival, Wagner’s two grandsons had begun their transformation into new leaders of the opera world, taking on the almost insurmountable task of tackling one of the most contentious opera composers in German history—and only two years after the opera festival had been permitted to open again to boot. A site that had featured prominently in Nazi celebrations, the Bayreuth Festival transitioned under the Wagner brothers to one of the most daring and innovative spaces for operatic performances in postwar Central Europe.

Narratives of postwar West German and Austrian cultural life frequently present Anglo-American actors as the primary agents of change. In the wake of the Holocaust and the Nazi racial state, the Allied powers, often led by the American military, had pursued policies to drastically alter how German musical culture functioned. But West German and Austrian producers and consumers of culture were also capable of initiating their own conversations on cultural transformation and renewal without any Allied meddling. Especially in the world of opera, their forays into aesthetics and politics had little to do with what Allied forces thought of them. In fact, one of the greatest postwar controversies involving race, music, and German national identity occurred under the direction of the West German opera director Wieland Wagner—not because of American influence.

Opera directors may have been unconcerned with Allied politics but they did not lack agendas. Many figures, including Wieland Wagner, Walter Felsenstein, Carl Ebert, and Götz Friedrich, considered it their political responsibility to drastically alter opera and sever it from its previous Nazi-inflected ties. Through the works that they produced, they engaged in lengthy debates about race, national identity, the legacies of National Socialism, and the role of high culture in the public sphere, all while reconsidering the very purpose of high culture and its social responsibilities.

In this chapter, I argue that despite these opera directors’ desire to modernize opera houses, longstanding notions of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of operas featuring Black singers in postwar West Germany and Austria. Opera directors and conductors hired Black singers to demonstrate that their opera houses were once again international and now even racially inclusive. At the same time, however, the ways in which they presented Black bodies on West German and Austrian stages often reinforced longstanding tropes of Black sexuality and racial differences that contradicted their own claims. Audiences, in turn, responded to these new and provocative performances by continuing to use race as the barometer for their interpretation of an opera production. If Black opera singers performed in exotic operas, the majority of listeners heralded the performer for bringing authenticity to the role. However, if Black opera singers performed in so-called white roles, audiences claimed that the performance was unconvincing. Because they relied on a singer’s race and gender to make sense of exotic operas, this methodology failed them when Black singers took on operas by Mozart and Wagner.

Against the backdrop of these operatic performances, different processes were at work disentangling society from the recent Nazi past. In Austria’s case, breaking away from what had been a “Greater Germany” became an important, immediate action spurred on by their new geopolitical context as a neutral territory within an emerging Cold War. If before 1938 Austrians thought of themselves as the “better Germans,” after 1945 they no longer thought of themselves as Germans at all. In West Germany’s case, breaking from the Nazi past was an important performative gesture that cultural institutions initiated to demonstrate that they had moved forward into a better future. Both West Germany and Austria sought to transform their perceptions of themselves. Musical performances featuring racialized bodies were critical to their endeavors.

But using Black musicians to disentangle the Nazi past was a difficult and contradictory process. Austrian and German anti-Blackness shaped and determined the actions of both opera directors and the audiences who attended their stagings. Both the production of racial difference on stage and the reception from audiences suggest that Blackness remained an ever elusive and problematic discourse for white audiences to tackle, even in their pursuit to embrace it.

Performance as a Technology of Forgetting in West German and Austrian Opera Houses

When asked in 1967 what might be a solution to some of opera’s contemporary ailments, the conductor Pierre Boulez scandalized the classical music world by replying, “Blow up the opera houses.”² Boulez’s now-infamous quip might seem glib, but it resonated with a new generation of opera composers, conductors, and directors seeking to rehabilitate, revitalize, revolutionize, or even eradicate opera, depending on their perspectives and beliefs. Much like writers and intellectuals wrestling with Theodor Adorno’s statement that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, opera producers and enthusiasts also struggled with how to compose, stage, and perform operas after WWII and the Holocaust. In an interview shortly before his death, Wieland Wagner said:

New opera houses required new ground and fresh starts. Avoiding frivolity and sentiment, opera directors sought to transform—if not to destroy outright—opera houses and their legacies of bourgeois comfort.⁴ To do so, opera administrators sought to change audiences’ relationship to the operatic canon itself through their stagings of it. How an opera was staged—the directions, lighting, costumes, set design, acting, and musicianship that produce the performance—became an increasingly important method of speaking to a larger public, because by changing the opera’s settings and characters opera directors rethought the work itself. In the postwar era, opera stagings became a powerful way in which opera directors offered social and political commentary. In radically altering the perception of an opera such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, opera stagings could become provocateurs of political and national transformation by scrutinizing and challenging contemporary claims and norms.⁵

One way that opera houses chose to speak to their contemporary moment was by hiring Black singers to fill the main roles, something that had been previously been either unwelcome or, by the late 1930s, unfathomable. In fact, for the first time in German history, Black musicians signed lengthy, competitive, and expensive contracts with German-speaking opera houses. Beginning in 1954, when Camilla Williams became the first Black opera singer to perform with the Vienna State Opera, Black opera singers appeared in major operatic venues throughout German-speaking Europe and they also sang in major festivals. Prior to 1945, the majority of Black musicians had performed lieder in concert halls or instrumental music in orchestra halls or conservatories. But in the postwar period, Austrian and West German opera houses emerged as the most powerful institutions backing Black performers. Some earned annual contracts, such as Lawrence Winters, who was a fixed member of the ensemble of the Hamburg State Opera in the 1950s, or Annabelle Bernard, who became the first Black woman to become part of an ensemble cast when the Deutsche Oper Berlin hired her in 1962. Others took on administrative roles, such as Muriel Rahn, who became the first African American musician to run a German musical institution in 1959.⁶ For seven years, the legendary Sylvia Lee, the wife of the conductor Everett Lee, worked as a staff accompanist and opera coach for two opera houses in Munich and across West Germany in the 1950s.⁷

African Americans were not only successful as American opera singers internationally but they were also some of the only successful American opera singers at the time, and disproportionally so.⁸ There were more African American opera singers at the Vienna State Opera House in the 1950s than there were white American singers, for example, and they dominated regional opera houses and won international competitions hosted in Germany as well. African American mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett reflected on Germany’s special role in the opera world, asserting that American opera houses “are not like Europe, let’s face it. And let’s not even say Europe. It’s still not like Germany.”⁹

It is quite striking that Black women in particular were at the center of opera stagings in West Germany and Austria. Many of our narratives of postwar West Germany and Austria examine the relationship between African Americans and white Germans through a gendered lens that skews masculine.¹⁰ Understandably, secondary scholarship discussing African American encounters with Germans and Austrians in the postwar period focuses on the presence of Black men in the American military stationed in occupied West Germany and Austria.¹¹ Yet a glance at cultural production in German-speaking Europe reveals arenas where Black women were the primary agents of transnational conversation, a gendered distinction that may reflect the nature of their travel and work in Europe. Whereas African American men arrived with tanks, guns, and the power of the military, when Black women arrived in German-speaking Europe, they often came to perform in films, on stages, or in opera halls. In other words, white encounters with Black women in German-speaking Europe came primarily through cultural productions.

In the context of opera, Black women outnumbered Black men for one important reason: romantic entanglements between a Black man and a white woman remained taboo in the operatic world on both sides of the Atlantic—including after 1945, when white German and Austrian women became romantically involved with African American soldiers. Black male opera singers were well aware of this discrepancy. Before the baritone Simon Estes became the first Black male singer to perform at Bayreuth in 1974, for example, Leontyne Price warned him that he would have difficulties finding acceptance in the opera world as a Black man. “Simon,” she told him, “it’s going to be even more difficult for you. Because you are a Black male, the discrimination will be greater. You have a beautiful voice, you are musical, intelligent, independent, and handsome. With all of those ingredients, you are a threat. It will be more difficult for you than it was for me.”¹² The tenor George Shirley recalled in an interview the difficulties that he and other Black men experienced in German opera houses specifically. “I think of Jim Wagner, a fine tenor, who for years tried to find a place for himself in Germany,” Shirley recalled, continuing, “He finally did. There were many refusals, however: ‘Thank you very much.’ ‘We like your voice, but we don’t have a position for you now.’ Jim says that finally someone just came out and told him point-blank, ‘I like your voice, but I won’t hire you because you’re Black.’¹³ Because of their gender, Black men were not part of the new wave of hires that brought African American opera singers to German-speaking Europe. The majority of racial barriers broken at opera houses in the postwar era were at the hands (or voices) of Black women.

Although opera directors and conductors frequently argued that they were hiring Black women solely because of their talent, their statements must be treated with a strong degree of skepticism. After all, classically trained Black singers had performed in German-speaking Europe before WWII, including Luranah Aldridge, Sissieretta Jones, and Marian Anderson. Their voices were no less exceptional and well-trained than the dozens of Black singers who sang in West Germany and Austria after 1945. Rather, the practice of hiring and staging Black singers after 1945 was always a political decision as much as an aesthetic choice. Black opera singers, by virtue of their performances, challenged audiences to ask themselves what roles were acceptable for Black singers to perform on stage, what opera meant, and how operas could speak to a postwar audience. Hiring a Black singer such as Price to perform in Don Giovanni, then, became a method of confronting audiences’ notions about race and identity on the German opera stage and in the German public sphere.

There was, however, a fundamental problem with opera houses’ use of racial hiring and typecasting to overcome their Nazi pasts. Practices of confronting the past frequently demanded the presence of people of color in order for white audiences to enact their guilt and emotional catharsis. White producers and listeners thus imbricated people of color into their processes of historical remembering. Having excised the word “race” from public vocabulary and unable to mention their recent genocide against Jews, white Germans and Austrians rendered Black people symbols of rehabilitation and repentance in order to process their past. Opera houses were no less guilty of this practice, for they, too, depended on Black bodies to transform their image of themselves.

In postwar Austria, the newly emergent status of Austrians as the victims of Nazism became an essential tool they wielded to sever any ties to Germany and to deny the complicity of Austrians in WWII and the Holocaust. They clung to the label “Hitler’s First Victim,” a term that Allied forces had ascribed to Austria in the Moscow Declaration of 1943 in the hopes of turning Austria against Nazi Germany during the war.¹⁴ The label stuck after 1945, when it became clear that Austria’s geopolitical position along the Iron Curtain made it an invaluable and necessary ally. Austrians embraced their newly anointed Cold War–inflected status as victims of Nazi aggression to absolve themselves of having to confront their roles during the Third Reich. Moreover, they not only participated in narratives of selective victimization but also valorized Austrian soldiers of the Wehrmacht. By memorializing Austrian soldiers as fallen heroes of WWII, Heidemarie Uhl argues, Austrians became “not victims of Nazism, but rather victims of the war against Nazism.”¹⁵

Austria’s new postwar project of nationalization, built on the myth of victimization, excluded Jews and people of color. A stoic silence surrounded white Austrian resistance fighters against Nazism, for example, and an even greater silence clouded Jewish survivors, who so easily threatened white Austrians’ claims of victimization. After 1945, Matti Bunzl writes, “Jews had no space in the Austrian state’s ritualized narrations of Self.”¹⁶ For these reasons, Jews were absent from public discourse, or appeared marginally at best. At the reopening of the Vienna State Opera House in 1955, the conductor Karl Böhm—who had led concerts celebrating Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938—lent his musical direction to Vienna’s new moment of memorialization and celebration. No Jewish survivors were invited to participate.¹⁷

Anti-Blackness also ran through Austrian modes of victimization and memorialization during American occupation and the early years of the Cold War. Decrying their downgraded status under American military occupation, many Austrians called themselves “Austrian Negroes.”¹⁸ Just like how African Americans were second class citizens in the United States, one Austrian said in an interview, “us Austrians are also [second class] because we lost the war.”¹⁹ Similarly, Austrians also compared their situation to colonized peoples in Africa, using images and rhetoric to call attention to what they perceived to be their downgraded status in geopolitical affairs.

These kinds of comparisons, however, showed little sympathy for actual Black people in Africa or in the United States. Rather, white Austrians perpetuated long-standing anti-Black biases, reproducing the very logics of racism that had existed under the Nazis.²⁰ They called soldiers of color sleeping with white Austrian women “Jonnys,” for example, a derogatory term taken from Krenek’s 1920s opera Jonny spielt auf that coded Black men as sexually promiscuous, and they compared Black troops to orangutans who had “just hopped down from the tree.”²¹ Following an incident in 1952 involving two African American GIs who had become involved in an altercation with Swedish tourists in Salzburg, the city’s residents campaigned against “these Negro-troops” and their “Congo mentality.”²² White Austrians also reinforced the long-standing idea that Black people were antithetical to Europe. Austrian organizations sent Black Austrian children born of African American soldiers and white German-speaking women to the United States on the grounds that “there is no chance for the child in Europe.”²³

White Austrian silence, denial, and practices of victimization meant that performances featuring Black women on stage were both celebrated and contested in a whole host of complicated and contradictory ways. Eager to disassociate from Nazi Germany, opera houses hired Black opera singers early and quickly, even if their administrators had actively participated and even celebrated in the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Unlike Austrian Jews, African American opera singers could be comfortably exotic, foreign, and different enough to be welcome on stage even while these productions, as we will see, fetishized them and caused outcry.

In postwar West Germany, on the other hand, a different kind of deafening silence surrounded the Nazi past, imposed by the challenge of answering for a litany of horrifying crimes.²⁴ Katrin Sieg argues that because of the terror and shame that wracked West German society, the Nazi past “required a sophisticated orchestration of ‘forgetting.’ ” Yet the act of forgetting, she writes, created an even greater conundrum: “how to forget something you cannot acknowledge knowing, since that acknowledgment would consign matter to memory rather than oblivion?”²⁵ The solution was to develop a pattern of silence and denial that formed a near continuous loop.

In that silence a particular triangulation between white Germans, Jews, and other racial minorities emerged. Indeed, one of the primary methods for breaking from the past was through an encounter with another racial or ethnic minority. Leslie Adelson has dubbed interracial engagements such as these a “riddle of referentiality,” which describes how racial and ethnic minorities such as Turks become stand-ins for Jews.²⁶ African American soldiers and Afro-German children born during the occupation years also often functioned as litmus tests of changing race relations after WWII. They, too, were supposed to be proof that Germans had overcome their Nazi past.²⁷

Performances in postwar West Germany could be messy sites of negotiation and identity formation precisely because they offered temporary moments of collective catharsis. One example of this metonymical mixing in German musical culture concerns the production and reception of Schoenberg’s Holocaust cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw, at the now-famous avant-garde Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in 1950. Many members of the orchestra simply did not want to perform Schoenberg’s cantata—in fact, the decision to play it won by a slim margin. Rather, an orchestra member stated in an interview with the musicologist Anne Shreffler, “The Amis [Americans] should play it themselves.” When Shreffler prodded a little bit more by asking if “ ‘the Amis’ were stand-ins for ‘the Jews,” the interview subject confirmed that was indeed what he had meant.²⁸ Metonyms, equivalences, and references shaped and occluded postwar West German cultural formation.

Black bodies and “Black music” also participated in a complicated triangulation where West Germans worked out the Nazi past without often directly alluding to it or to the matter of race. Examining Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, The Tin Drum, Priscilla Layne argues that the protagonist, a jazz musician, “plays music not for money but to help white Germans deal with their fascist past.”²⁹ The jazz band that plays music in the Onion Cellar, a place where Germans peel onions so they can finally cry, was necessary for white Germans to experience collective catharsis, Layne argues. After the band gets fired, it is replaced by a violinist “who, if you squinted a little, might have been taken for a gypsy.” Foreign music, “Black music,” was necessary to induce white German mourning. Angelica Fenner finds a similar emotional process underway in the 1952 film Toxi, a story about an Afro-German girl who is temporarily adopted by a white, middle class German family. She attributes the film’s overwhelming popularity in West Germany to its ability to permit white Germans to indulge in feelings of a collective catharsis. Through the character of Toxi, they satisfactorily mourned their own perceived rejections or displacements in society, “misrecognizing in their plight their own sense of dislocation,” she writes.³⁰ Through the medium of performance, Blackness frequently functioned as an initiator of mourning and catharsis.

There are many problems with this process of using people of color to work out the Nazi past. First, it is not clear, Adelson writes, what this triangulation is meant to accomplish.³¹ What, exactly, is being worked out in these moments? What is actually achievable in these performances? Indeed, many historians argue that the problem with employing people of color as a solution to dealing with the past was the very notion that the past could be overcome at all.³² Moreover, trying to perform racial reconciliation through musical performances featuring Black bodies allowed West Germans to seek comfort in symbolic gestures and to avoid the more difficult work of material reparation.³³

Such was the case for many opera houses, which operated under the assumption that breaking with the past required hiring non-white musicians. When protest erupted over Wieland Wagner’s decision to cast the African American soprano Grace Bumbry in the role of Venus at the Bayreuth Festival, for example, Wieland argued vociferously that it did not matter to him “which nation, religion, or race a soloist belongs to.”³⁴ He accused protesters of not understanding Richard Wagner’s music, and he proclaimed to the international press that he would “take black, yellow, or brown artists if the production needs them.” He argued, somewhat disingenuously, that “my grandfather did not write for skin color, but for voice color.”³⁵ As we will see below, however, it had always been Wieland’s plan to hire a Black woman to sing the role of Venus for his 1961 production of Tannhäuser. While preaching a color-blind mythology, Wieland himself practiced a race-based approach to operatic stagings, even if it was in the service of moving West German audiences into what Wieland deemed to be a more progressive and open democratic society.

Similarly, Herbert von Karajan was insistent upon hiring Price to perform in Don Giovanni at the Salzburg Festival in 1961 in part to rebuke what he thought was a small-minded provincialism that had clung to the Salzburg Festival in the postwar years.³⁶ Yet Price paid the cost of von Karajan’s decision when someone threw a stone in her hotel window out of spite.³⁷ In both cases, a German conductor or director insisted on his right to employ a Black woman as he saw fit. And in both cases, the leaders had hired the singer all along as a means of dragging the audience into their definition of a more open and progressive German musical culture.

Black opera singers, then, fulfilled a variety of goals for opera houses invested in pursuing new audiences and in cultivating new legacies for themselves. First, they became a symbol by which cultural institutions could demonstrate their readiness and eagerness to break from their Nazi past, regardless of their motives for doing so. Second, hosting Black opera singers became a means through which German and Austrian opera houses could then educate the public on becoming better members of civil society. Regardless of the reasoning behind their respective silences—Austrian or West German—showcasing Black musicians was a complex and often hidden process of (mis)recognizing their own recent pasts.

Figure 26. The African American opera singer Leontyne Price meets with the conductor Herbert von Karajan in a recording studio in Vienna, 1962. Photo: FO600048/21, The Austrian National Library, Bildarchiv, Vienna, Austria.

Racial Typecasting and the Production of Race on the Opera Stage

Yet how opera houses presented Black singers on the opera stage in front of thousands of listeners often demonstrated that one step forward could mean two steps back. The majority of Black women were cast in exotic operas, for example, either because administrators believed that it was a “natural fit” for them to play non-white characters or because their Blackness was expected to lend itself to the performance somehow. Opera directors, dramaturges, and conductors repeatedly chose to showcase Black musicians’ racial difference, even while maintaining their own professions of color-blindness.

Casting African American women to sing in exotic operas had a precedent in European history, one from which postwar opera directors chose not to depart. Lillian Evanti, for example, was the first Black singer to perform in a European opera house in 1925 at the Casino Theater in Nice, France. She sang the title role in Léo Delibes’s exotic opera Lakmé, set in faraway India and featuring a Hindu princess who commits suicide when she learns that her lover, a British officer named Gerald, has ended the affair. Florence Cole Talbert followed suit, becoming the first Black singer to land a major recurring role with an opera company in Europe. She performed in March of 1927 at the Teatro Comunale in Cosenza, Italy, in the title role of Verdi’s exotic opera, Aida. Likewise, the soprano Caterina Jarboro also sang Aida throughout Europe, followed by Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine and Karl Goldmark’s The Queen of Sheba, which she sang throughout Central and Eastern Europe.³⁸ Tellingly, for Jarboro’s performance of Aida in Riga, Latvia, the Italian conductor, “afraid of a vendetta because of Mussolini’s assault on Ethiopia, refused to start Aida until he had assurances that the soprano wasn’t a real Ethiopian.”³⁹ In other words, the conductor conflated the singer with the role she had been hired to perform.

It is no wonder then that the first Black woman to perform in a major opera house in German-speaking Europe appeared in an exotic role. The soprano Camilla Williams was the first Black woman to perform at the Vienna State Opera House in 1956, where she sang the title role in Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly. Her debut offers a striking example of racial hiring and typecasting. Born and raised in Virginia, Williams studied at Virginia State College for Negroes before moving to Philadelphia on a scholarship to study with Marion Freschl, a contralto who had been an attendee at Anderson’s Salzburg recital in 1935.⁴⁰ After performing in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, Williams traveled to Vienna where, under Erich von Wymetal’s direction, she made her debut in Madame Butterfly. Virtually all Viennese newspapers reported this stunning news, noting, “It was the first time that a Negro singer graced the stage of the [Vienna] State Opera.”⁴¹

A few factors may explain why Williams’s debut went so smoothly. First, Williams had already sung the title role in Madame Butterfly, having received accolades for her debut performance at the City Center Opera Company in New York City in 1946. This opera was clearly one Williams could sing, and sing well. Second, Viennese audiences already knew Williams and liked her. A critic for the Wiener Journal proudly pointed out that Williams had given a Liederabend in Vienna before her turn as the “Black butterfly,” and claimed her Liederabend in Vienna had prepared her for the Vienna State Opera.⁴² What had brought Williams to the musical capital, actually, was the encouragement of Roland Hayes. “It’s time for you to go to Europe,” Hayes purportedly told Williams, “and I want you to see how you will be accepted.”⁴³ And like Hayes, Williams eventually returned to the United States with glowing words of praise from Viennese critics.

But most important for this chapter, a primary reason why Williams as Butterfly might not have caused any headshaking is because audiences were willing to make the racial leap and believe that a Black singer could play an Asian role. A critic for Neues Österreich wrote, “The dark-skinned artist fulfilled all demands (including the optical ones).”⁴⁴ Naomi André argues that these kinds of remarks are not incidental. When Marian Anderson debuted at the Metropolitan Opera House just a year earlier than Williams in Vienna, she also played an “exotic” character, that of Ulrica in Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera. “For the first Black voice featured on the Met opera stage,” André writes, “Anderson fulfilled and mirrored the role of a foreign character, invited as a featured presence to peer into an alternate plane of reality and predict a new future.”⁴⁵ Only in a foreign role could a Black woman like Anderson or Williams have made their debuts.

Following Williams’s turn as Madame Butterfly, other Black women also took on title roles in operas—above all, Verdi’s opera, Aida. While Madame Butterfly is an opera that rests on the premise of Asian women’s sexual innocence, operas such as Aida with Black female characters produced stagings built on German fantasies of Black female sexuality. Indeed, whereas relationships between Black men and white women were considered taboo, West German culture produced images and representations of Black women that were often voyeuristic and directed at white male desire. West German magazine articles, for example, portrayed Black women as “pretty exotic bird[s]” whose dark skin inspired male fantasies.⁴⁶

More specifically, Black women in Germany were often told that they were only desirable because they were deemed exotic. In the groundbreaking book Showing Our Colors, for example, an Afro-German woman named Laura Baum shared an encounter that reflected how her desirability could only be understood in these fetishized terms. After she was accosted by two drunk white German men, one of them said “Hey, she’s good looking!” to which the other replied, “But she’s not European.” Baum concluded from that experience, “As a colored woman you’re mostly viewed as exotic, it fits the usual stereotype found everywhere.”⁴⁷

Elfie Fiegert, the Afro-German child actress who starred in the film Toxi, also faced similar German attitudes toward Blackness, beauty, and exoticism in the early 1960s when she began trying to find jobs as a teen actress. Her agent told her that “dark types are harder to sell than blondes”—unless, of course, she could be cast in an exotic role. In the case of the Afro-German actress Marie Nejar, who had performed both in Nazi and postwar West Germany and Austria, her manager lied to the press and changed Nejar’s name without her consent to Leila Negra to make her appear foreign and exotic.⁴⁸ Black women existed in the German imagination as exotic sex objects. Nuns charged with the task of raising Afro-German girls in orphanages frequently castigated them for their supposed innate sexual deviance. In a memoir detailing her Black girlhood in postwar West Germany, for example, Ika Hügel-Marshall recalls a nun telling her that she “would need to choose between a future as a Christian missionary or a prostitute.”⁴⁹ The nuns believed that because Hügel-Marshall was a Black girl, it was in her nature to behave inappropriately and sexually with boys.⁵⁰

West German assumptions of Black sexuality informed opera productions as well. In the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s 1961 production of Aida, for example, Wieland Wagner set the opera deep in the heart of “primitive” Congo instead of ancient Egypt, calling Verdi’s Aida “an African mystery.” Wagner’s decision to “Africanize” Aida deserves more analysis. In his production, enslaved Ethiopians dragged totemic poles and African sculptures across the stage for heathen rituals and indigenous worship.⁵¹ Audiences, in turn, wielded an ethnographic and anthropological gaze at the spectacle, being drawn into what was not actually any real or meaningful African religious practice so much as a fictitious imagining of African peoples.⁵² Wagner sought to make Aida a primitivist story about earthly love between doomed lovers. Everything from the masks and costumes to animal worship and, according to one critic, a “dabbling in fetishisms” led one German music critic to observe, “There was definitely an Africa to see [tonight].”⁵³ Wagner’s production of Aida was also deeply erotic. Wagner thought of Aida as Verdi’s Tristan and Isolde (although critics jokingly called his production “Wieland Wagner’s L’Africaine”), a dramatic tale where the lovers could only be united in death. Wagner placed a large phallus in the bedroom of Amneris, the Egyptian princess, stating, “This gigantic phallus is Amneris’ constant dream.”⁵⁴

If staging Black women in exotic operas often reproduced racial hierarchies and desires, hiring Black singers for “white” roles posed its own set of problems. Above all opera directors worried that the singer might appear (to them) inauthentic or out of place on stage. One approach that some directors took was to cast Black singers in strange and aesthetically provocative productions, so as to not “distract” the listener with the singer’s Blackness. In that regard, the Salzburg Festival presented a bombed-out, post-apocalyptic Seville for their staging of Don Giovanni in 1961, rendering Price’s performance as Donna Anna uncontroversial. Instead, critics found Price to be well suited for the “weirdly baroque night scene.”⁵⁵ In these kinds of productions, the singer’s Blackness did not detract from the production, which was already considered strange.

Yet even an abstract or avant-garde staging could not stave off cries of outrage when Black women were cast in “white” roles, which the Bayreuth Festival Opera House discovered in 1961 when they cast Bumbry as Venus in Tannhäuser. Bumbry, a soprano from St. Louis, Missouri, had recently performed in Basel, and when she auditioned privately for Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor of the Bayreuth Festival, she had never sung any German opera in her life.⁵⁶ Nonetheless, the conductor recommended her to Wagner, who had been searching for a Venus, and he excitedly accepted her.

Why did Wagner hire Bumbry, especially if she was unfamiliar with the German operatic repertoire? “What I was looking for,” he said to the German press in July 1961, “was the best Venus in voice and appearance.”⁵⁷ In fact, that statement is misleading, because Bumbry’s appearance most likely mattered more than her voice, regardless of whether Wagner would admit this fact publicly. Bumbry was not the first Black woman to audition for the role of Venus. A letter dated October 1960 from Friedelind Wagner to Walter Felsenstein, the director of the Komische Oper in East Berlin, discussed the possibility of the African American soprano Ella Lee performing Venus for the Bayreuth Festival. In it, Friedelind tells Felsenstein in passing, “[Ella] arrived with me last night in Bayreuth, where she first wants to sleep, and then work on Venus for Wieland.”⁵⁸ Although it remains unclear why Bumbry debuted at Bayreuth in 1961 instead of Lee, Wieland’s documented interest in finding a Black singer to perform at Bayreuth goes against his misleading statements to the German public. He specifically looked for an “elemental erotic quality” in his new Venus that only a Black woman such as Lee or Bumbry was supposedly capable of possessing.

Like the Salzburg production of Don Giovanni, Bayreuth’s new Tannhäuser production in 1961 sought out a different interpretation of the opera and an entirely different concept of Venus, one that showcased a new erotic goddess. In Wagner’s production, Venus reigned on a throne from a dark cavern, where naked young men and women climbed down from the ceiling or lurked in the shadows miming sex acts.⁵⁹ Many opera critics applauded Wagner’s exploitation of the Black Venus to subvert portrayals of a Western goddess and instead present a “powerful goddess, a bronze, archaic idol, an Asiatic Astarte rather than the usual Hellenic Venus.”⁶⁰ Looking back on the 1961 production of Tannhäuser, the historian Geoffrey Skelton concluded, “The Black Venus did no more than show that, once one frees oneself from realism, such matters of outward appearance become almost irrelevant.”⁶¹ To Skelton and others, Wagner appropriately used Bumbry’s race to liberate the audience from realist and “authentic” depictions of medieval Germany.

By depicting Venus as an erotic, otherworldly beauty, however, Wagner—intentionally or not—reinforced modern German notions of the primeval Otherness of Black female sexuality. In the process of subverting the audience’s expectations of Venus away from a beautiful blonde toward a Black goddess, Wagner also instructed his crew to “present eroticism in a repulsive way.”⁶² The nature and the role of Venus shifted for the first time at Bayreuth to reflect a racial undercurrent, and because of Bumbry’s race, Venus became, in the words of Die Kölnische Rundschau, an “Ethiopian-heathenish Venus.”⁶³ Wagner acknowledged that his portrayal of Venus was different from any other production that had ever been staged, yet he never articulated how intimately race, gender, and sexuality were intertwined in his aesthetic vision. “Venus must convey eroticism without resorting to the clichés of the Hollywood sex bomb, yet she cannot personify the passive ideal,” he explained in an article for Opera News in 1961. “Venus must find the middle ground between two extremes, and no European singer I know has thus far succeeded.”⁶⁴ Only a non-white singer could embody Wagner’s vision for an exotic, primitive, powerful, and highly erotic Venus.

Wieland Wagner’s concoction of a Black Venus for Bayreuth opened a Pandora’s box. The term “Black Venus” had earlier historical roots, explaining why Bumbry came to symbolize a savage femme fatale to German audiences. During the early nineteenth century, an African woman named Sara Baartman, nicknamed the Hottentot Venus or Black Venus, was exhibited throughout Europe and forced to display her body to onlookers in various exhibitions, museums, and venues. The term Black Venus signifies a historic fascination with Black female bodies, a history of white male voyeurism, and a history of colonial exhibitionism that became inextricably linked to sexual fantasies.⁶⁵

Europeans in the nineteenth century found Baartman’s body fascinating and believed that she represented a physical example of sexual and racial difference. Widespread in their discourse on the Black Venus was a belief that underneath Black female sexuality lurked something deviant and repulsive. Sander Gilman has argued that Germans believed that Black women had a primitive and “animal-like sexual appetite.” “Black females,” Gilman writes, “do not merely represent the sexualized female, they also represent the female as the source of corruption and disease.”⁶⁶ The Hottentot or Black Venus ultimately became the symbol of Black female sexuality during the nineteenth century, one that embodied sexual lasciviousness and primitive sexual desires. Its resuscitation in postwar West Germany was not some abstract aberration or departure from racist norms but rather a confirmation of them.

One incident in particular stands out in the swirling Bumbry debates of 1961 and illuminates Germans’ and the Bayreuth administration’s struggle to come to terms with her race. During a press conference, spokespeople for the Bayreuth Festival told the reporters that although they had hired an “exotic Black goddess,” they wanted to reassure German audiences that “the new production presents Venus as a symbolic figure, draped in gold cloth and wearing gold make-up. Her skin color will not be recognizable.”⁶⁷ This statement runs counter to Wagner’s demand for a Black goddess. Moreover, by minimizing Bumbry’s physical appearance to the press while simultaneously trying to disguise her skin color on the stage with gold paint, the Bayreuth staff eased the fears of those who found dark skin abhorrent. Both views of her—exotic Black goddess or racially altered singer—reflected an attitude of cultural superiority found in Germans’ intrinsic whiteness.⁶⁸

Bumbry was not the first or last Black singer whose skin would be covered up for the sake of making the audience more comfortable. The practice was so widespread that African American singers gossiped about it behind stage. When Jessye Norman debuted at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1969, Sylvia Lee remembers speaking to her about how she would present herself to the public. “Jessye Norman made a beautiful Elisabeth. They had been in the habit of chalking up the faces of Blacks when they were doing white parts. ‘Jessye,’ I said, ‘I hope they’re not putting that ugly clown makeup on you.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I got that straight. I make myself up.’ ”⁶⁹ Although Williams became known internationally as a singer of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, she confessed in a 1995 interview, “I would have loved to sing the Countess and Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro. Mozart was so right for my voice. But [opera companies] were afraid to put me in a white wig and whiter makeup.”⁷⁰ Rarely, it seems, were the practices of staging Black performers in white roles as simple or as color-blind as opera houses may have presented to the public.

Figure 27. Grace Bumbry as the “Black Venus” at the Bayreuth Festival, July 1961. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Whether staging exotic operas or canonical works by Mozart or Wagner, opera directors relied on Black female opera singers to provide a new direction for their aesthetic and political agendas. Their casting decisions, informed by the new postwar era in which they were producing musical works, frequently tried to upend audiences’ expectations and understandings of an opera and its meanings and ramifications after WWII. Yet opera directors’ assumptions of Black opera singers’ capabilities and their presentations of Black womanhood as sexually deviant or wild were often tied to longer histories of race and gender, even while they strove to move their institutions away from any associations with racism.

Seeing and Hearing Blackness in Opera

It was one thing for opera directors to stage Black women. How audiences responded to these stagings was another matter. Frequently, operatic stagings featuring Black performers that aspired to something akin to color-blindness provoked public outcry.⁷¹ By its very nature, opera cannot uphold mythologies of color-blindness because, André writes, “people do not not see race and gender.”⁷² German and Austrian listeners certainly connected Black singers’ race and gender to the operas they were attending. Above all, they expected Black opera singers to perform on stage in a way that recalled their Blackness. They assumed, in other words, that a singer’s supposedly inherent Blackness would somehow be funneled through her performance. While white singers were always free to dabble in performing other ethnicities, German-speaking listeners considered the most egregious acts of racial transgression to have occurred when Black singers took on white roles.

African American opera singers faced a set of expectations and stereotypes surrounding their sexuality that attracted operagoers while simultaneously limiting what roles they could play and how they could perform them. As I discussed in the previous chapter, white audiences conflated singers of color with the roles that they play in opera productions. After hearing a recording of Florence Cole Talbert in Aida from the 1920s, George Shirley concluded, “This was not an Aida voice. She had high notes, but certainly not the heft that Aida requires. Nevertheless, she was Black; her debut had to be as Aida.”⁷³ Expectations of a singer’s Blackness informed listeners’ reception of her musical performance.

This conflation between the singer and the role shaped opera reception in postwar German-speaking Europe, where audiences were unwilling to ignore or even forget the racial identity of the opera singer in order to suspend their disbelief.⁷⁴ Rather, the opposite usually occurred. Blackness informed their operatic experiences, either positively or negatively, depending on whether the audience believed the singer’s perceived Blackness was a convincing component of the opera.

In the postwar era, no opera demonstrated audiences’ dependencies on Black authenticity like Verdi’s Aida. In a 1961 newspaper article with the headline “An Ethiopian from America in the [Vienna] State Opera House,” for example, a music critic from Neues Österreich praised Martina Arroyo for bringing authenticity to Verdi’s Italian opera. “The audience didn’t feel ‘among equals,’ when watching all those people in brown and black makeup,” he stated.⁷⁵ Arroyo, the critic believed, was simultaneously saving (white) German singers from having to suffer the indignity of using blackface and rescuing the audience from participating in an unrealistic and ethnologically inaccurate experience. No one, however, embodied the role of Aida quite like famous soprano and diva Leontyne Price. Praised as the “optically ideal interpreter” of this Ethiopian princess who sang “with the warm musicality of the colored people,” Price was admired for her “naturalness” and lauded for her “noble primitiveness.”⁷⁶ To many Germans, Price’s Blackness granted her an authenticity that few other singers possessed. Newspapers also praised Gloria Davy’s performance in Wieland Wagner’s erotically charged production of Aida at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in a way that highlights her race and gender. Der Kurier believed that Davy “brought with her everything from nature” to become a convincing Ethiopian princess.⁷⁷ Her “animalistic” and “naturalistic” performance enhanced what was already a dark, Africanized, and highly sexualized production of Aida.

Surprisingly, performances of Madame Butterfly by Camilla Williams and Price also encouraged critics to link the opera to Black authenticity. One Viennese critic praised Williams for bringing to the performance “the grace of a race that is eloquent down to the fingertips of her long, slender hands.”⁷⁸ Moreover, Price chose to play Butterfly, they declared, less as a girl and more as a soulful woman.⁷⁹ Indeed, one critic explained that Price’s African American heritage was precisely what had made her performance so convincing. “This story reminds one of so many Black women who bore children by white men during slavery,” he writes. “These men had no intention of loving that woman or caring for that woman. So Miss Price not only brings her magnificent voice to the role of Butterfly, but she also brings her history, the history of her people, and the African musical practices of coloring, intonation, and a deep, deep level of understanding to the role of Madame Butterfly.”⁸⁰ Through the historical traumas endured by African Americans, Price, the critic claimed, could understand and sympathize with Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly.

Other Black women received similar praise for bringing their African American heritage to the operatic stage. After hearing Bumbry sing as the “Black Venus,” one critic noted, “Most Black singers are blessed with an apparently innate performing temperament that enables them to enact their roles with far more ease [than their white counterparts].”⁸¹ Bumbry’s supposed inborn musicality as a Black performer—a racial logic at work since the nineteenth century—meant that she could perform better in Wagner’s opera. In a promotional interview with Vera Little before her debut in Bizet’s Carmen, the Berliner Morgenpost interviewer depicted Little as a singer with “big black eyes,” a passionate gaze, and a look of childish joy on her face as she described singing in church as a child in her hometown, Memphis.⁸² Many articles spoke, as the Tagesspiegel did, about “the American Vera Little, who brought with her to the role of the gypsy child the naturalness of her dark race.”⁸³ Such comments would not have been out of place in 1920s Weimar criticism.

Similarly, critics racialized Black singers’ voices in a manner similar to music criticism in the 1920s and 1930s. Critics continued to describe singers’ voices in visual terms, calling them smoky, dark, or colorful, regardless of vocal range. Much like descriptions of Marian Anderson’s voice from the 1930s, which critics called “dark” like her skin color and “brownish-black,” a description of Gloria Davy’s voice in Aida attributed to it a “dark undertone” that matched her skin color.⁸⁴ Die Welt praised Little for being a proper Carmen because of her exotic background. “She is a real mezzo with an opalescent bronze toning,” the critic praised.⁸⁵ It is unclear if the critic was describing Little’s voice or skin tone. Der Kurier also praised Vera Little for bringing color to the role of Carmen and called her the “ideal representative of the title role. Her soprano has that Gypsy-brown Carmen timbre. It’s not big but feline in its sleekness … and in the Habanera and the Seguidilla, it endears itself to our ears with beguiling tenderness.”⁸⁶ The voice, the body, and the role of the singer all blended into one.

When Black singers performed in white roles, however, the tables turned viciously. Two particular criticisms stood out when Black singers performed in so-called white roles. The first was that their Blackness destroyed the illusion of race in the opera. This common refrain affected Leontyne Price’s debut as Pamina in Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Vienna State Opera House in 1959, when she stepped in to perform at the last minute. Critics cried foul. What was a Black singer doing in what was obviously a white role? Price’s performance was upsetting to them because that particular staging of The Magic Flute was traditional, relying on costumes and set designs that depicted an eighteenth-century magical kingdom. This production first premiered on the Vienna opera stage in 1958 under the direction of Günther Rennert and Georges Wakhévitch and had been performed multiple times with various singers.⁸⁷ The only aspect of the opera that was different in 1959 was the addition of Price. Audiences certainly had their own expectations of what The Magic Flute meant, and some had perhaps even seen this production before Price joined the cast.

In one article titled “Well-Sung but Makes No Sense,” the local music critic explained why Price should not sing in a white role, and his argument reveals how he and others viewed Black women and their place on the German stage. Price, the critic began, “has a wonderful voice, and behind the tenderness [in her voice] is a dramatic timbre that finely glimmers.” However, he continued, “Intensity of feeling (a typical womanly characteristic of Negroes!) is a contradiction for this Mozart opera.”⁸⁸ Here, the critic relied on established tropes of Black performance and Black womanhood to argue against Price’s debut. The dark passion that critics perceived and desired from Price in Aida and Porgy and Bess was now thought to be out of place in this allegorical opera. The critic for the Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung shared similar sentiments. Although he admired the “dark timbre and exotic beauty” in Price’s voice, and he freely admitted that she had a good grasp of the German text—“often more so than what her white sisters can claim”—he still argued that having a “dark-skinned Pamina” went against Mozart’s wishes.⁸⁹

Not only was Price’s voice and personality out of place in the opera, critics claimed, but her skin color destroyed a much beloved scene by altering its plot. In act 2, scene 7 of the opera, the Black slave of Sarastro named Monostatos (usually played by a white man in blackface) discovers Pamina sleeping on a bed of flowers and sings about how ugly he is in contrast to her. To many audiences, the scene was highly comedic because it played on the racial contrast between the characters. However, Price’s skin color destroyed this moment of surprise and discovery, and critics called foul on this production of The Magic Flute, arguing that a white Pamina was necessary to display this sense of racial difference, since “the opposite of a white Pamina is a Black Monostatos.”⁹⁰ How strange it was, the Österreichische Neue Tageszeitung commented, that Price should be the “dark daughter of the Sun King,” and that “Monostatos should meet a fellow member of his race on [Pamina’s] bed.”⁹¹ Das Kleine Volksblatt also thought Price as Pamina ruined what was intended to be a funny scene: “The text expressly states that Monostatos requires a white Pamina.” The punch line of the joke had fallen flat, and the moment of contrast between Monostatos’s Black ugliness and Pamina’s white beauty was gone. Postwar Viennese audiences, it seems, enjoyed racial difference, but only when it supported their preconceived notions of race and place on the German stage. “A dark-skinned Aida,” the critic for Das Kleine Volksblatt concluded, “would actually be the ideal occupation [for a woman of color].”⁹²

Funnily enough, critics had hurled the same critique decades earlier against Roland Hayes when he sang Tamino’s “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön” from The Magic Flute in Vienna in 1923. Heinrich Kralik at the Neues Wiener Tagblatt writes, “It is a perverse world, and miracles and wonders happen: Tamino a Black man! There will be nothing left but for the white race to be represented by Monostatos.”⁹³ The constant concern about role reversal suggested that listeners thought of Black and white performers as diametric opposites from each other, as opposed to the equals some listeners frequently proclaimed them to be.

Similarly, Bumbry received the same complaints that her race was a distraction at best or had destroyed the illusion of opera at worst. The Stuttgarter Zeitung critic Hans Habe called Bumbry’s presence at Bayreuth an enormous distraction because of her race. And a critic for Die Tat agreed: “Hans Habe said it right,” the critic writes. “Wagner would have protested against a Black Venus, not because she was of another race, but rather because she would have destroyed the illusion, without which no theater—and also opera—can exist.”⁹⁴ Black performers—not white ones, who for centuries could apparently perform in exotic operas with aplomb—were capable of destroying the illusion of theater.

Ultimately, Deutscher Anzeiger’s music critic suggested, Black women should sing only Black parts. In an article called “The Black Venus of Bayreuth: Tannhäuser is not Porgy and Bess,” he condemned Wagner for hiring Bumbry on these grounds. “Of course Venus should have the right to represent the arts of temptation that nature has given her,” he writes, “but when she is embodied by a Black woman, then her color holds an accent, [one] that is simply not ‘in’ the work.” He states, “A beautiful voice is not enough to be Madame Venus.” Most tellingly, he suggests that Bumbry should continue instead to play exotic characters in exotic operas, namely Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba, Aida, or Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, roles in which “one is—without reservation—entitled to have a brown to coffee-brown skin color.” He continues, “But this Black Venus is a contradiction, one diametrically opposite to what the idea of the work stands for. That is, unless one casts the entire opera with Negroes, as was done in Gershwin’s ‘Porgy and Bess.’ ”⁹⁵

The second criticism that Black opera singers faced for singing white roles was that they were taking away jobs from white German singers. Boos and whistles accompanied the debut of Vera Little in Bizet’s Carmen at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1958 for this reason.⁹⁶ Although Carmen became over time a role associated with Black singers, in 1958 German listeners apparently did not see the role as something within Black performers’ repertoire. The upper balcony of the opera house became so rowdy at Little’s debut that the incident made international news. Local Berliners wrote numerous letters to newspapers stating that the problem they had with Little’s performance was that she had taken a German singer’s job. Hildegard Kuhn, a resident of Wilmersdorf, wrote a letter to Der Tagesspiegel, arguing, “The rejection of Vera Little did not mean racial resentment, but rather that people were annoyed that especially in the premiere, a singer like Sieglinde Wagner was not used, who both vocally and theatrically was an ideal embodiment of Carmen in the earlier years.”⁹⁷ Brigitte Werr, a resident of Tempelhof, was more overt in her protest. She protested because she was upset that “more and more good German singers are being laid off. Instead, foreigners are engaged who are not better, but at best just as good. I would be interested to hear how the intendant of the City Opera justifies this fact.”⁹⁸ Tellingly, in Werr’s remarks, she defines Blackness and Germanness in opposing terms. The sight of Little as Carmen could only remind Werr of the growing presence of foreigners in opera.

In a letter to Der Kurier, an operagoer from Charlottenburg also argued that too many foreign singers were dominating German stages:

The names she mentioned, of course, are all foreign. For Berlin audiences, Little was emblematic of a growing problem in Berlin’s opera scene: the hiring of non-German artists. Sure enough, a year later when Price performed as Pamina, the same comments emerged. Although Price was talented, many wrote, she was no better or worse than Vienna and Berlin’s “homegrown” singers. So why hire her at all? In fact, after witnessing Price sing as Pamina in Vienna in 1959, one critic issued an omen: “The inclusion of colored singers in the ensemble will definitely become polemicized [in the future].”¹⁰⁰

And it did. Three years later, Bumbry’s performance as Venus brought up the same complaints. “If [Wagner] should come to us with the excuse that he did not find one equally capable performer of the role of Venus among female German singers, then he will hardly be able to convince us of his argument,” the critic for Die Tat complained. “We could count singers for him on both hands with no hesitation. Why this sad theater that does nothing other than symbolize the betrayal of Bayreuth?!”¹⁰¹ Over and over again, listeners decried the presence of Black singers on German opera stages in nationalistic terms, lamenting their perceived loss of German talent.

What is so striking about the majority of white German criticisms against Black singers is the same rhetorical gesture that they all make: all of the critics make sure to mention in their comments that they are not racists. Indeed, the remarks usually began by insisting that race had nothing to do with the critic’s discontent. This statement of disassociation reveals both how necessary it had become to illustrate that white Germans no longer had any associations with Nazism and also how little the Nazi past had actually been worked out in spite of protestations otherwise. Letters to the editor protesting Little’s performance as Carmen in 1958 began by distancing themselves from any potential accusation of racism. For example, Werr’s letter to the editor of Der Tagesspiegel begins by stating, “In reference to your Carmen critique, I would like to say that the booing did not refer to the singer Vera Little herself, to her achievements, or to her being a Negress.”¹⁰² It had become unacceptable to protest on racial grounds, but nonetheless the purpose of the letter was to question why a white German singer had not been given a role as the lead in an exotic opera. Similarly, the Deutscher Anzeiger’s critic insisted that “this has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the race question. Due to the fate of our people we have survived such intolerance.”¹⁰³ Declaring that West Germans had survived—and overcome—racial atrocities reveals that the critic understood that to speak of Bumbry’s performance within the context of race meant acknowledging West Germany’s most recent past.

In the case of Bumbry’s debut, there was a political dimension to her reception caused by the nature of the institution in which she sang and its previous ties to Nazism. Because her performance was supposed to illustrate that even Bayreuth could break away from its Nazi past, anyone who stood in Bayreuth’s way represented the last remaining vestiges of Nazism in West German society. Those who defended Wagner’s decision to cast Bumbry as Venus dismissed any aesthetic objections and instead launched attacks that painted anti-Bumbry critics as racist Nazi sympathizers who longed for a return to the “thousand-year Reich.”¹⁰⁴ In one letter to the editor, a local Hamburg resident asked if Germans had really forgotten what Bayreuth had stood for prior to 1945 and the ugly and indelible stamp it bore because of its relationship to the Nazi party.¹⁰⁵ Several articles and letters to the editor snidely referred to anti-Bumbry protesters as the “not-so-anonymous defenders of our white ‘noble race,’ ” and an op-ed in the Kölnische Rundschau stated that one could hardly believe such racist ideas and ugly debates were still possible in Germany.¹⁰⁶

An editorial in Die Welt was the most explicit about tying Bumbry’s debut to the most recent Nazi past. Placing Bumbry’s debut within the context of the ongoing Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel, the author implores West Germans to be more vigorous in recognizing and fighting against racism. The author writes, “They are going to have to learn, whether they want to or not, that in the practice of art other colors exist aside from white ones, among which is also black.”¹⁰⁷

Operatic performances featuring Black women symbolized something greater than the music itself—even if or when listeners pretended otherwise. Audience reactions to Black women on West German and Austrian stages confirmed the pessimistic assumptions of opera directors and conductors that German-speaking Europe was not as racially accepting as its citizens claimed it to be. Music critics, rowdy fans, and bourgeois listeners alike reacted strongly to the presence of Black opera singers in both exotic and non-exotic operas, judging their performances along racial and nationalistic lines. A singer’s Blackness could only be embraced or understood if it fit into the audience’s preconceived notion of just what, exactly, Blackness was. Much of the audience’s formulations of Black authenticity still relied on notions that predated WWII, ones that depicted Black musicians as somehow more naturally gifted to emote suffering than white Europeans on the one hand, or possessing an intoxicating and exotic sexuality on the other. Their judgments, often masked in aesthetic criticisms, informed how they listened to the music of Mozart, Verdi, or Wagner.

Singing Against the Grain: Black Opera Singers Speak Out

In 1959, Shirley Verrett was living in Cologne and performing with some regularity in local opera houses. Although she was enjoying her stay in West Germany, she soon became aware that the topic of race remained complex and often hidden. She writes in her memoir:

Verrett’s conversation with her fellow musicians illustrates how Black musicians occasionally found themselves at the heart of a discussion on race in a place that was still coming to terms with its own recent racist history.

Black opera singers’ place within this shifting German-speaking landscape is contradictory. In cities such as Vienna and Berlin, African American opera singers had more opportunities to perform in major opera houses than they did in the United States. Yet the problems of racial typecasting stymied the careers of Black opera singers in West Germany and Austria. Reflecting on his long career in German-speaking Europe, George Shirley indicates how vexing this problem was for Black musicians. “Given the fact that I had gained cachet as a desirable racial token due to the groundswell of social change that was beginning to erupt across the Continent when I set out upon my career path,” he writes, “it was subsequently impossible to discern the role my artistic virtues played upon my successes and failures.” Where, in other words, did his successes or failures stem from? “Were critics being especially kind in writing good reviews of my performances?” he asks. “Were they incapable of subduing their racial biases when their reviews were harsh?”¹⁰⁹ The nature of Shirley’s popularity, cast against the light of West Germany and Austria’s recent Nazi past, made it difficult for him to parse out when he was being evaluated on musical terms and not political ones.

The reality for Black opera singers was that they were always evaluated on both terms, whether they wished to be or not. By taking on any role—exotic or otherwise—they immediately partook in a greater conversation on race in opera. They either fulfilled the requirements placed upon them as a Black singer or they drew ire for singing outside their exotic frame. The problems of racial typecasting on German-speaking opera stages never went away. When asked in 1996 about her experience with race and typecasting in Europe, the retired opera coach Sylvia Lee observed, “If [an opera company] put on Aida and they have a blue-eyed blonde in the title role they’ll darken the complexion [and] the eyes. But then nobody cares because the singer is one of them. But with Blacks [they say], ‘Oh, you’re not Nordic!’ ”¹¹⁰ In 1990, George Shirley made similar observations:

The roles of Blonde or Ännchen, Shirley observed, “for Germans were considered to be, how can I say, the paragon of whiteness.”¹¹²

But what, ultimately, were Black opera singers to do when faced with the choice of having a career in Europe or the United States? Annabelle Bernard’s response sums up the position for many Black singers. In 1962, Bernard became the first Black woman to win a contract to become part of an ensemble cast in Germany, and in 1970 she earned the German honorific Kammersängerin. In an interview with the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes, she reflected, “I would eventually like to return to the States, but there’s so little opportunity there if you want to sing opera. And if it means staying in Europe to sing—I stay.”¹¹³