Chapter 5

Singing Lieder, Hearing Race

Debating Blackness, Whiteness, and German Music in Interwar Central Europe

Issued decades after Roland Hayes’s death in 1977, the album The Art of Roland Hayes (1990), compiled by the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings, features a smattering of different songs from his recording output between 1939 (at age fifty-two) and 1967, when he sang Beethoven’s “Trocknet nicht” for his eightieth birthday at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. The album does not represent the African American tenor in his prime. The great irony of Hayes’s career as the first successful Black concert tenor is that he—unlike other successful Black concert singers such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson—did not issue any records until he was in his fifties. It shows. The voice we hear seeping through our speakers sometimes sounds unstable and raspy. It wavers too much. It has difficulties sometimes turning around the curves of a musical phrase.

But what this recording teaches us is how Hayes cultivated his vocal technique and developed his own art of expression. In his most well-known song, Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh,” he manages to sustain a soft and consistently fluid voice in his upper register. Singing “Du bist die Ruh/der Friede mild” all in one smooth phrase, he expertly rolls his r in the word Friede and fades away at the end of the word mild. When he sings, “Ich weihe dir/ voll Lust und Schmerz/ zur Wohnung hier/ mein Aug und Herz,” he articulates the h in weihe and carefully separates at the end of the stanza Aug from und using a glottal stop. Listening to Hayes sing Schubert is to partake in a lesson in musical decision-making. The choices he makes throughout the duration of the lied were thought out in advance and well executed live, even if his voice sounds to our ears more tired than we would wish. The voice itself still has the same feathery soft smoothness that audiences came to love, even though it was never a booming one.

How Hayes comes across on this recording, and how listeners in the 1920s understood him, is as a Schubert singer. Recognizing the musical conventions that singers have employed to perform Schubert for decades, Hayes tapped into them, using his education and musical training to sound like a Schubertian singer. His diction—how he articulates in his recording of “Du bist die Ruh” phrases such as zur Wohnung, his narrowed vowel e in the word Schmerz, his lack of diphthong in the word mein—as well as his dynamic control and musical sentence construction are markers of his excellent and famous musicianship.

Of course, Hayes wasn’t the only Black concert singer applauded for faithful and thoughtful interpretations of German lieder. Anderson’s 1946 recording of Schubert’s “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” also one of her most popular numbers, highlights her own musical tastes and ideas at work. Breathless, hurried, and anxious at the beginning, her singing encapsulates the terror and fear of the maiden meeting the eerie figure of Death.

But it is the musical choices she makes in taking on the role of Death that brought her acclaim as a lieder singer. Sung at half the speed of the Maiden’s text on the same note (D4) throughout, Anderson urges the Maiden, “Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebild.” The text does not get in the way of Anderson’s controlled singing, even as she articulates the consonances in the line. The last phrase, “Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen,” slows down even further as Anderson warms her sound while sinking to a low D3 on schlafen.

In this chapter, I offer close analyses of two Black musicians and their shape-shifting performances of German lieder in Vienna, Salzburg, and Berlin in the interwar era: Hayes (1887–1977) and Anderson (1897–1993). In these case studies, I examine the singers’ attempts to master the German lied, a process they undertook because of its influential position and multivalent function in German concert life. Lastly, I consider local reactions to their performances of German lieder and, relatedly, German culture. As we will see, audiences’ responses were varied and even contradictory. But, I argue, regardless of the range of their opinions, they all processed their musical experiences through a racial filter. Some German listeners applauded Black singers for “becoming white” on stage through their masterful interpretation of a Brahms lied and welcomed them as honorary Germans. Others insisted that they had heard Blackness in the music of Schubert simply because the performer was Black. None of the positions, ranging from glowing to skeptical to even downright hostile, eradicated notions of racial difference. On the contrary, they all upheld them. Even when in direct opposition to one another, white listeners relied on the category of race to form their aesthetic judgments. Audiences routinely resurrected racial barriers in response to Black performers’ musical attempts (intentional or otherwise) to undo them. White listeners’ struggles to come to terms with Black musicians’ performances are proof that musical reception was not a passive experience but rather an active process whereby racial categories were being worked out and renegotiated in interwar Central Europe.

Why the German lied? Why were musicians committed to spending so much time to learn this body of repertoire in particular? A composition usually written for voice and an accompanying instrument or group of instruments, the lied became a central focus of German music in the nineteenth century and a ritualized element of German concert life in the twentieth century.¹ If music is the most German of the arts, then the German lied is arguably the most German of genres in music history. “The fact is,” Richard Taruskin states, “that only two important musical genres were actually German in origin, and one of them was vocal.”² The German lied is so German, he argues, “that it has retained its German name in English writing.”³ Indeed, in one of Hayes’s unpublished writings praising the lied, he too reinforced German lieder’s musical hegemony. “The reason we have come to use the German word rather than the French (chanson) or the Italian (canzone) or any other,” he writes, “is because the Germans, in a very special way, were able to retain and improve a national quality in this form of musical expression.”⁴ Karl Christian Führer’s meticulous research on radio programming in Weimar Germany, for example, demonstrates that the Liederabend dominated classical music programs in Leipzig and nearby regions more than symphonies, chamber music concerts, operas, or oratorios.⁵

Yet its highly ritualized performance tradition, embodied by the Liederabend (or voice recital) gave the genre an internationalist bent by the 1920s. “The classical vocal recital,” Laura Tunbridge argues, “became a performative nexus for identifying as belonging to a certain race or nation while simultaneously demonstrating one’s command over a number of different languages and styles.”⁶ The Liederabend’s challenge in the interwar era was to see if the singer could become a musical shapeshifter, a mystical medium of different styles, affects, and manners of expression from across time and space.

Ultimately, the lied offered the same paradox that lured other musicians to German art music of the modern era: it was universal in its appeal but also local and intimate as a form of musical expression. Audiences and performers also believed the lied—a genre of music accessible for singers at all levels to learn—to be imbued with the essence of Germanness because it captured sentiments of ardency, simplicity, and desire. It was understood that one must master the German language and spend years immersed in the culture of the lied’s musical homeland (German-speaking Europe) before one could expect to capture the feelings and sentiments that many cherished in these highly prized musical works. Many international musicians strove to execute the German way of singing and to create the German sound, but, according to the native ears of Austrians and Germans, most performers fell short.⁷

A cherished body of music, known for its intimacy and expressivity and beloved for its familiarity, the lied proved to be the most provocative as a form of national, racial, and gendered performance. Unlike opera, which relies on costumes, makeup, and set design (in addition to the music and libretto) to create characters, the German lied repertoire has many nameless and purportedly universal or raceless characters that African Americans could play. Arguing that they should be judged based on the purity of their performance alone, not on the particular character (Aida, Othello, Carmen) they had been assigned to perform, African American concert singers could assume different racial and national forms.

What white audiences in Central Europe had not expected, however, was that African Americans would take on these many kaleidescopic forms so well. Although African American musicians had traveled to Europe before the interwar era, the majority had performed Black popular music, like Josephine Baker, or sung African American spirituals, like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. As I discussed in chapter 3, Black singers who traveled to Germany and Austria before WWI, such as Sissieretta Jones, had not specialized in German music either, preferring instead to sing Italian arias or American parlor songs. In the interwar era, however, Black concert singers committed themselves to the study of German music in a manner that was simply unprecedented in the history of Black musicianship in Europe. In fact, it was precisely due to their rigorous study and meticulous execution of German lieder that African American concert singers rose to celebrity during the so-called transatlantic jazz age.

Ultimately, what German reception of Black concert singers teaches us is that race was the primary filter through which listeners interpreted Black performances of the Austro-German musical canon. On the basis of their listening practices, critics determined whether a singer’s performance met the standards not only of Austro-German musical culture but also of cultural citizenship. Black performances of lieder suggested that cultural identities had the power to supplant racial ones and that Germanness was something that could be mastered through performance and study, rather than biological inheritance through whiteness. Upon hearing Black musicians perform, white Central Europeans confronted the provocative reality that their identities were not stable categories passed down genetically but were transmutable through the very act of performance. Critics, audiences, and even Black performers’ closest friends and allies in Central Europe reconstructed the sonic color line anew in response to these racially transgressive performances. Their constructions remained remarkably constant, even after the Nazi seizure of power and Engelbert Dollfuss’s establishment of an Austrofascist state in Vienna in 1933, demonstrating a strong consistency in attitudes toward Black voices across a shifting geopolitical terrain. Black classical musicians could be loved or loathed for singing German lieder, but the notion that their voices sounded either “white” or “Black,” German or un-German, could not be uprooted.

A Black Steiner: Roland Hayes as a German Lieder Singer

The son of formerly enslaved parents from the Deep South, Roland Hayes was, Jeffrey Stewart writes, “the first African American vocalist to challenge the color line in modern concert singing.”⁸ He first fell in love with European art music as a student at Fisk, and along with Marian Anderson, he started a tradition of African Americans performing and excelling in their studies of German lieder that continues to this day. Hayes spent much of the 1920s in Europe learning lieder before making his career in the United States. In an essay for the Musical Courier, Hayes writes, “It is true that I had learned about vocal technique in America, but I had to travel to Europe to learn about music.”⁹

To make his dreams of becoming a lieder singer come true, he moved to Central Europe in the early 1920s. “I was determined to establish myself throughout Austria and Germany as a singer in the great lieder tradition,” Hayes shares in his memoir.¹⁰ Settling in Vienna in the fall of 1923 to study with the accomplished Polish baritone Theodor Lierhammer (for “coaching in the Viennese tradition”), Hayes sought to immerse himself in Vienna’s robust musical life.¹¹ He admired the “Musikstadt der Welt” and how much the city’s cultural life centered on music. He focused carefully on studying the works of “Vienna’s own musician,” Schubert, and built up a repertoire from that composer’s six hundred lieder in addition to learning songs by Brahms, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wolf.¹² In mid-April 1923, Hayes’s agent booked him his first engagement in the city of Vienna—a city he described as “jealous for the interpretation of his songs”—and he finally had his chance to prove to the Viennese that he was a worthy practitioner of German lieder.¹³ His concert program comprised seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pieces, followed by the music of Schubert, Wolf, and Brahms.

Figure 18. A photograph of African American tenor Roland Hayes aboard the German steamship the North German Lloyd, undated. A stamp on the back states, “Bordphotograph, R. Fleischhut, D. Bremen, Norddeutscher Lloyd, Bremen.” Courtesy of the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library.

The relationship Hayes developed with Lierhammer in Vienna played a critical role in his own musical development. Lierhammer, who spoke six languages fluently, preached the gospel of the German lied to all of his students. In a rare interview that appeared in a 1904 article for the Etude magazine, called “Dr. Lierhammer and the German Lied,” he articulated his pedagogical philosophy and musical commitments. “To me,” he confessed, “the lied is the highest level of the singer’s art.” And no composer was better at composing lieder than Schubert. “The most simple lieder are the most difficult ones; and those that we deem childish and unaffected are the hardest to interpret correctly … Schubert’s melody is always beautiful and simple, but most difficult to reproduce. What Mozart is to opera, that is Schubert to the lied.”¹⁴

Lierhammer’s unorthodox approaches to singing might explain why Hayes and his teacher bonded so closely. First, Lierhammer was insistent that “foreigners” could sing the German lied. He highlighted singers outside of German-speaking Europe who he believed had mastered the German lied, like the Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich, whom he called a paragon of legato singing. Second, Lierhammer and Hayes might have worked well together because Lierhammer already harbored a deep suspicion of singers who tried to sing repertoire that was bigger than their voices. The best voices for lieder singing, Lierhammer argued, were not even that loud or commanding: “The greatest liedersingers [sic] of our time were not vocal giants.” It was more important to learn how to sing piano and legato (“And legato must be finely distinguished from slurring, which is a most reprehensible habit,” Lierhammer countered) than to try to develop a voice that was bigger than it actually was.¹⁵

Hayes had a small voice. He was an expert in singing softly, creating vocal coloring, and shaping vocal lines with minute detail. Like Lierhammer, Hayes also remained adamant throughout his career that the best way to learn German lieder was through the music of Schubert. “I like the Schubert music for the quality which suggests improvisation and spontaneity, and for its highly colored, imaginative feeling,” he explained in his memoir. “It lends itself to emotional re-creation and can be made to sound endlessly fresh and inspired.”¹⁶ Hayes’s training in 1920s Vienna with Lierhammer fit perfectly with his own vocal abilities and perceptions of German lieder.

Perhaps for those reasons, when Hayes premiered on the European continent, he stunned Viennese critics. Although he was to their minds unmistakably foreign—one critic described him in primitivist terms as “a small, agile Negro with crisp hair, thick lips, and shining white teeth”—to some, his expert execution of German lieder suggested a cultivation far removed from what they imagined to be his primeval Blackness.¹⁷ Hayes’s diction, pronunciation, and lyricism were apparently evidence of that great Austro-German musical tradition that many believed created a unique German sound. A critic for the popular newspaper Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, “No German could sing Schubert with more serious or unselfish surrender. Do not imagine that it is sufficient to be white to become an artist. Try first to sing as well as this Black man did.”¹⁸ His observation is a remarkable example of what critical race theorists call marking/unmarking in historical discourse. This author critiqued the popular assumption that one had to be white in order to be an authentic singer of German lieder. The critic admitted that he too had assumed that classical music and German national identity were anchored in whiteness—until he heard Hayes sing. Thus, the critic’s comments revealed “the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position,” as Richard Dyer describes it, for only after Hayes had performed the German lied did the music and its performers become marked in racial terms.¹⁹ But much to the critic’s surprise, he discovered that German musical identity was not irrevocably bound to whiteness after all. The relationship between appearance and sound, between race and culture, could be severed.

Hayes’s performance in the spring of 1923 was the first of many that challenged audiences’ notions of what constituted authentic performance practice. Following his successful debut in Vienna, Hayes embarked on a tour through Central Europe that took him to Graz, Budapest, Karlsbad, and Prague. Hayes credited Countess Colloredo-Mansfeld with helping him learn how to sing lieder with authority. Together in Prague they read definitive biographies of historical German figures including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Otto von Bismarck, and played through the music of Bach, Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wolf.²⁰ The countess suggested numerous changes to Hayes’s performance style that also transformed his singing. From her he learned to elongate or double the consonants on specific words (such as the l in liebe), thus giving him a more authoritative grasp of lieder performance practice.²¹

Following his time in Prague, Hayes headed to Berlin in May 1924 where, as I discussed in the previous chapter, he subdued an angry crowd with his performances of lieder. Much of Hayes’s success in Berlin has to do with his choice of repertoire. His decision to begin his Liederabend with Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh” turned out to be the best possible choice for that moment for several reasons. First, singing softly forced the crowd to stop shouting at him in order to hear him. Second, the lied’s sweetness, warmth, and quiet (the primary dynamic markings are pianissimo) were disarming; its performative qualities did not present Hayes as a threatening stranger. Rather, the piece gave the opposite impression: the performer of “Du bist die Ruh” sounds gentle and patient. Third, “Du bist die Ruh” was one of Schubert’s more well-known lieder, and its comforting familiarity may have also helped subdue Hayes’s audience.

What Hayes offered the crowd on that evening in 1924 was ultimately something intimate, familiar, and beloved. Expecting scandal, exotic curiosity, minstrelsy, and indecency (which they associated with Blackness), the audience encountered a soothing, simple, and beloved Schubert lied. Instead of sounding like other African American singers of spirituals and popular music, Hayes resembled musically the native German-speaking performers the audience was accustomed to hearing.

After their initial resistance, most Berliners were impressed by how expertly Hayes had mastered the German lied. Several newspapers called him a “true artist” who had captured the feeling and sentiment of German lieder with breathtaking accuracy and warmth. In the right-leaning nationalist newspaper Deutsche Tageszeitung, the musicologist Hermann Springer called Hayes a “Negro who shows dedication in singing Schubert and Brahms for us in the German language.”²² The seriousness of Hayes’s musical purpose found approval in Berlin. In fact, it was “specifically in these songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf that one noticed that Roland Hayes is a real artist, not just a singer but rather a musician,” wrote a critic for the conservative German People’s Party (DVP)-backed Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.²³ Like the critic for the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, the writer claimed that real artistry was located in the purity and universality of German music. In their eyes, Hayes had transitioned from being a Black entertainer to a more “universally” appealing artist of classical music.

Hayes’s extensive classical vocal technique and training especially earned the admiration of several critics. “Without any exposed effects, [Hayes] builds his voice from the inside out,” praised the Deutsche Tageszeitung.²⁴ “His voice isn’t big,” observed Der Tag, “but has a rather pleasant sound and is very well cultivated, so that all of the [voice’s] shading was effortlessly at his disposal.”²⁵ Nearly every review of Hayes’s performance used words such as “cultivated” and “smooth” to describe Hayes’s voice. “Mr. Hayes,” wrote the critic for the more liberal Berliner Tageblatt, “possesses … a magnificent mezza voce; he masters the whole falsetto, the head voice, which he [sings] in piano as if [from the belly], with great skill … It remains admirable what his teacher was able to make out of him.”²⁶ The critic’s implication that Hayes’s successes as a vocalist came almost entirely from his German teacher perhaps made his performances more palatable to readers. The writer located genius elsewhere, outside of Hayes himself.

It was obvious to many listeners that Hayes was a foreigner, but they marveled at how he had been able to mask that foreignness. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung’s critic remarked that the range of feeling (Gefühlskreis) that made German Romantic music unique had to be a foreign sensation to Hayes, yet “one was astonished to hear with what depth of expression and understanding for the specific voice he sang lieder such as Schumann’s ‘Nussbaum’ or ‘Ich hab im Traum geweinet’ and Schubert’s ‘Nacht und Träume’ or ‘Die Forelle.’ ”²⁷ The well-loved, conservative cultural feuilleton Berliner Börsen-Zeitung agreed: the critic Siegmund Pisling praised Hayes’s performance in the sold-out hall warmed by “an African heat.”²⁸ Pisling wrote:

Pisling’s use of the word Moor is especially striking because it harkens back to earlier histories and mythologies of Black migration. While the moniker “is an ambiguous, multivalent term whose meaning could differ significantly according to time period, language, location, and other contexts of use,” Arne Spohr argues that it nonetheless carried “colonial and racist connotations.”³⁰ Here, however, Pisling used it to distance Hayes from his middle passage diasporic Blackness and conjured up instead a much older image, giving Hayes’s supposedly foreign allure an exotic, otherworldly time and locale.

Regardless of the nature, degree, or location of Hayes’s foreignness, many Berliners believed that he had accomplished something almost unimaginable: he had somehow learned to “penetrate the spirit of the German lied” and possessed the ability to perform with “so much ardency [Innigkeit]” required to interpret German music.³¹ Hayes’s lieder performances “were in a gentle, flawless German with so much ardency, sung with such deep and true sentiment” that many listeners left the Konzerthaus’s Ludwig van Beethoven Hall convinced of Hayes’s musical genius.³² But, as one critic surmised, “The listeners, who perhaps had expected vaudeville, soon became aware that here, real and very serious art was speaking to them.”³³ Real art, the previous quotation implies, was German art, and few singers of any nationality could truly master it. Yet Hayes, as an African American, had been able to. Following this concert, an American studying music in Berlin greeted Hayes backstage and said, according to Hayes, “Goddamn it … put it there! This is the first time I have seen the Germans admit that good art can come out of America.”³⁴ Both diasporically Black and quintessentially American, Hayes’s twoness, as Du Bois called it, played an important role in his acceptance in Central European society.

Hayes performed in Vienna one last time before returning to the United States, and the “Musikstadt der Welt” welcomed him back. An admirer and patron wrote to him afterward, gushing, “I very rarely saw our public so enthusiastic and you really deserved it!”³⁵ Following his recital on October 8, 1925, a review in the Neue Freie Presse, a popular liberal newspaper, demonstrated how critics depicted Blackness and German lieder as antagonistic opposites:

To the reviewer, Hayes is a musical contradiction. As with other Black singers, Hayes received nicknames that made him a Black variation of a white performer, including the “Black Raval,” in reference to the Vienna Court Opera lyric tenor Franz Raval; the “Black Steiner,” in reference to the popular Austrian concert singer Franz Steiner; and the “Black Caruso,” in reference to Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. He is foreign, yet musically expressive in a natively German way. He comes from a primitive or primeval culture, but he sings Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms in their original (German) musical language. Descriptions of his Black body imply that Hayes should have been more comfortable in the world of dance and Black popular music, yet he had proven himself capable of the kind of “spiritual and intellectual expression” that normally only native singers of the lied could articulate. Many became convinced that Hayes was a musical chameleon, a cultural chimera who had firmly established his credentials as a twentieth-century lied singer through his mastery of the appropriate performance practice tradition.

Marian Anderson and the German Lied

One of the most famous singers of the twentieth century, Anderson launched her career in German-speaking Europe studying and performing German lieder. Regarded as “most decidedly a Handel-Schubert singer,” Anderson possessed a cultivated voice that many believed emoted best when singing religious works, especially Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Handel’s “Begrüßung,” and Bach’s “Komm, süßer Tod.”³⁷ She resided in Central Europe intermittently throughout the 1930s and became an overnight international sensation after her debut at the Salzburg Festival in 1935, where Toscanini said she had a voice heard “once in a hundred years.”³⁸

Anderson’s primary motivation for studying in Europe had little to do with cultivating her vocal technique; rather, she sought out German teachers in the United States, England, Berlin, and Vienna who could coach her in the lieder repertoire.³⁹ Like Hayes, Anderson began seriously studying German lieder in England before journeying to Germany. In 1927, Anderson asked Hayes’s accompanist Lawrence Brown to find her a reputable teacher in London, and Brown convinced the German concert singer Raimund von Zur Mühlen, a celebrated lieder singer and former student of Clara Schumann, to teach her.⁴⁰

Anderson’s time with the aging yet highly respected tenor and vocal pedagogue was brief but productive. Anderson recalls singing Schubert’s lied “Im Abendrot” for Zur Mühlen in one of her early lessons, and he was not impressed.

Following this encounter, Zur Mühlen gave Anderson a book of Schubert lieder in German and suggested that she learn “Nähe des Geliebten” for the following lesson. According to Anderson, he intentionally gave her a copy of Schubert lieder that did not provide any English translations, thus forcing her to translate and study the text carefully. For her next lesson, she was expected to provide a line-by-line analysis of the text, an aspect of her musical training she carried with her for the remainder of her career.⁴² Anderson’s training in Europe shaped her approach to the repertoire of German lieder and the art of singing itself. Her accompanist Kosti Vehanen recalled, “When Miss Anderson arrived in Europe, her programs were conceived in typical American form. A number of composers, some quite unimportant, were on them. Miss Anderson’s first coach in Berlin suggested many other songs in an effort to acquaint the newcomer with different types.”⁴³ She began to focus on understanding the cultural and intellectual significance of the body of lieder that European audiences sought out.

Anderson gave three recitals in Berlin in 1930. First, she performed lieder and African American spirituals in the Bach Hall at the Konzerthaus.⁴⁴ Following her success there, she performed for a private gathering hosted by her patron and teacher, Sara Cahier. Finally, she gave a recital at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University (today’s Humboldt-Universität) for prospective managers interested in signing a contract with her.

In her memoir, Anderson recalls that she walked onto the stage in the Bach Hall that October feeling intimidated by the native German speakers who comprised her audience. “I was about to sing before a German public,” she writes, “a group that would be alert to every subtlety of its own language and would probably know most of the lieder by heart. It gave me a strange feeling.” Her accompanist Michael Raucheisen appeared frightfully nervous, and rightly so: in the audience were some of the most elite members of Berlin’s musical community, including the pianist Artur Schnabel. But when the reviews began to appear in German newspapers a few days later, Anderson was pleased to discover that the majority of them were glowing.⁴⁵

As in the reviews of Hayes’s performances, critics could not seem to describe Anderson’s sound without discussing her physical appearance. In Anderson’s case, her skin color was interpreted in a gendered manner. While critics often reported that Hayes was “dark-skinned,” Anderson just as often became a light-skinned biracial woman under their gaze.⁴⁶ At her Salzburg debut in 1935, one critic even described her as a “mulatto.” “Wearing a white, long, low-cut silk dress, with a huge flower in pale red at her cleavage,” he writes, “she looks as if she had sunbathed too long in Africa.” This Salzburg critic denied Blackness in Anderson’s appearance. “As far as a white person is entitled to a judgment of taste,” he continues, he found her pretty and lively, “with inky black hair, beautiful bright eyes, and moving facial expressions.”⁴⁷

Anderson’s supposedly exotic looks earned the attention of most reviewers, but her deft skill and handling of German lieder were what impressed the majority of them. Taken aback by the conviction with which she sang lieder, Rudolf Kastner, music editor at the liberal Berliner Morgenpost, wrote, “This remarkable woman sang German lieder at that, with a nonchalant command of style, a language so meaningfully accentuated, [and] with convincing musicality.”⁴⁸ Indeed, Anderson’s mastery of German was so complete that critics in Germany and Austria asked her repeatedly in public interviews how she came to speak German so well. By the end of her residency in Vienna in 1937, listeners joked that her accent was so local that she occasionally lapsed into Viennese dialect; she admitted that she occasionally had to remind herself to speak high German.⁴⁹

Figure 19. Marian Anderson studies a musical score with pianist Kurt Johnen. Marian Anderson Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, 198: volume 1, page 36, items 1–2.

Figure 20. The program for Marian Anderson’s Berlin recital, October 1930. Marian Anderson Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, MS Coll 200, box 178, 08532. Used by permission.

Her linguistic mastery over the poetry and her musical mastery over the score made her a phenomenon. The critic at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung marveled at Anderson’s feat in the Bach Hall:

Anderson continued to earn praise for her authoritative performances of lieder in Central Europe during the 1930s. In Salzburg in 1935, critics admired the “genuine German maiden-like feeling” with which she sang Mahler’s “Die Urlicht [sic].”⁵¹ “What a lovely rebuttal to [these] false racial theories!” cried a critic for Das Echo after her performance in Vienna in November of the same year. “Have you ever heard Schubert [sung] more joyfully, more ‘Schubertly’ than from this Negress, who thoroughly enchants us with this almost northern breath …?”⁵² The most affirming praise of Anderson’s abilities came by the end of her residency in Central Europe. After her concert with the Vienna Philharmonic in June 1936, a critic for the daily apolitical Neues Wiener Journal wrote, “It might surprise you that Marian Anderson comes to us as primarily as an interpreter of German classical music; but whoever has heard her sing Schubert, Schumann, or Brahms once knows that she is on utterly convincing terms with German musical art.”⁵³

The Germanness of Anderson’s musical interpretations was especially impressive, a few critics surmised, because her Blackness could have so easily thwarted her Liederabend’s success. Many reviews applauded Anderson for having cleverly walked this racial tightrope and for overcoming the limitations that her race must have surely imposed on her talent. Indeed, a critic for the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna reported, “When one chats with the famous Marian Anderson, one can, in spite of her dark brown tint, occasionally forget her exotic heritage.”⁵⁴ In admiring Anderson’s elegant, sophisticated, and spiritual renditions of Bach, Handel, and Schubert, some critics claimed that they were looking past her Blackness, even though her race had most likely drawn some of them to her performances in the first place. Attempts to ignore or forget her Blackness illustrate Patricia Williams’s observation that “performance becomes a vehicle through which the Other is seen and not seen.”⁵⁵ Initially drawn to her because she was exotic and foreign, audiences in Germany and Austria came to adore Anderson because they believed that she embodied the characteristics of German music when she sang. A New York Times reporter in the audience marveled that the Viennese had “reached the point of accepting practically without challenge her sovereign interpretations of Schubert, of Wolf, of Mahler—in short, of masters whom they usually concede to foreigners only with all manner of hair-splitting and reservations.”⁵⁶ Anderson was no longer a foreigner; on the stage, in concert dress and singing German lieder, she became one of them.

Black Bodies, White Souls

The problem remains, however, that both Anderson’s and Hayes’s Blackness—demure, subdued, and minimal in the case of Anderson or wildly primeval in the case of Hayes—posed a stumbling block to many listeners enjoying these performances of German lieder. However entranced some critics were by their stunning renditions of Schubert lieder, they nonetheless could not imagine Anderson or Hayes as both Black and capable of expressing the German spirit. Instead, these critics encouraged listeners to erase the singers’ Blackness and make them white. At the end of an interview with Hayes in 1925, for example, a reporter for the Neues Wiener Journal suggested that Hayes “appears to have a white soul.”⁵⁷ A separate headline on Anderson articulated the same kind of race-crossing: “The Negro Singer with the White Soul.”⁵⁸

Both Hayes and Anderson had to stop being Black in the listener’s imagination in order for them to accept the performers’ remarkably compelling renditions of German lieder. Many critics felt compelled to expunge anything foreign or alien about the performers before they could accept the validity of their musical interpretations. For example, a Hamburg newspaper insisted that Hayes’s race had disappeared during his Liederabend: “Color bleaches under the rays of art, and what remains is man.”⁵⁹ Only after Hayes’s color had been (metaphorically) bleached could the critic see Hayes for the true artist that he was. In fact, one journalist proposed that future listeners close their eyes when they heard him sing: “[To] avoid being disturbed by the Negro’s gaze, a wise fellow shuts his eyes during the singing, which then focuses one’s concentration.”⁶⁰ Hayes’s Blackness was a distraction that demanded a solution for white listeners to hear properly: severing the relationship between sight and sound. The popular Wiener Zeitung also erased Anderson’s Blackness in order to make her Viennese. “In the city of Vienna,” the critic writes, “Marian Anderson is a foreigner no longer.” She had become “not a Black but rather an artistic sensation” capable of convincingly rendering some of Austro-German music’s greatest works.⁶¹ A top critic from the Viennese Mittags-Zeitung offered similar praise of Hayes: “Not as a Negro, but as a great artist, he captured and moved the audience.”⁶² Such statements, made in earnest, offer yet another example of how the practice of un/marking in music criticism functioned. In both cases, music critics assumed that whatever was Black could not also be universal and that what was universal could not be tainted by ethnic particularism, leaving whiteness untouched and unspoken. Until Anderson’s departure in 1937, listeners attending her sold-out Liederabende insisted that they were not frequenting her concerts simply because of her exotic background. “The artistry of Anderson,” one critic assured his readers, would have existed “if the singer were white.”⁶³ Her mastery of the German lied made Anderson any white singer’s equal. She was worthy of attention not because of her race but in spite of it.

What is going on here? Why did listeners insist on seeing Anderson and Hayes as white? Dubbing Black classical musicians “Negroes with white souls” went beyond erasing, dismissing, or downplaying their Blackness. In a musical context, that phrase tacitly affirmed the whiteness of classical music. Behind musicians’ claims to German art song’s universality and pure artistry lies a racialized view of the music itself. By insisting that Hayes’s and Anderson’s souls were white, listeners were then able to adopt them into the world of cultivated German music and make them honorary members of German culture. The term “Negro with a white soul” granted listeners the ability to recognize Black concert singers’ artistry while simultaneously reinforcing the popular assumption that other forms of Black expression had none. Thus, when a newspaper described Anderson as “The Negro Singer with the White Soul,” they reassured listeners and readers that her interpretations were trustworthy and culturally valid.⁶⁴ In this moment, one can see how listeners aligned Black musicians’ appearance with their musicianship. Because they heard Anderson and Hayes as German and therefore as white, listeners felt compelled to see them as white as well.

Critics often painted Black concert singers in stark contrast to Black jazz musicians in order to elevate them to the status of a white European concert singer. For example, after Hayes’s last performance in Vienna in October 1925, the critic at the Neue Freie Presse wrote, “What [could be] a greater contrast to such brutal, ‘Black’ music [than] songs of astonishing European trimness like those of Roland Hayes!!” ⁶⁵ The Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung also set up a contrast between Black minstrel entertainers and Hayes:

When African American baritone Aubrey Pankey sang in Vienna in November 1931, he received similar praise: “A Black man,” Robert Konta of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung writes, “who sings Schubert and Richard Strauss with overwhelming intensity of feeling and forms them into great unforgettable experiences. He is a boon for our period where one is very easily inclined to see in all Negro musicians mere jazz band clowns. There are evidently Black men who are messengers of culture at its greatest.”⁶⁷

These reviews exploit racist stereotypes of the Black entertainer. Clownlike, insipid, brutish, and smirking, the aggressively masculine Black musician functions as a straw man against which critics can praise the Black concert singer. But in doing so these critics did not elevate Black performers. Rather, pitting clownish jazz musicians against Black concert singers devalued both kinds of performers and performances. There were no celebrations of Black musical talent or accomplishment on the musicians’ own terms. Instead, the Black musician either fulfilled the Central European stereotype of Black musicality or was rescued from it by virtue of art music’s near-magical properties of uplift and transcendence.

Hayes knew the public consistently tried to erase his Blackness and he was quite frustrated by it. While traveling through Paris in 1924, Hayes confessed in a diary entry that he knew his Blackness was a catalyst of some kind, sparking listeners to work through their ideas of race and music. “Although I know my face to be Black,” he wrote,

Wishing neither to be absorbed into the world of whiteness nor relegated solely to the world of Black music-making (high or low), Hayes sought acceptance as both a Black man and an interpreter of German lieder. Classical music was universal, many claimed, but as Hayes’s and Anderson’s stories tell us, audiences tacitly understood it to be a white medium.

White Music, Black Sounds

Many critics applauded Black concert singers for becoming white on stage, but others heard their performances as fundamentally Black anyway, despite the lack of any racial music signifiers. Sometimes critics relied on theories of cultural and biological racism to explain what they understood to be a faulty musical interpretation, attributing a performer’s supposed inadequacies to an insurmountable cultural and intellectual gulf that no amount of effort or training could bridge. For example, the influential Viennese music critic and editor Julius Korngold remarked of Hayes “that from each phrase, though technically perfectly rendered, a primitive sort of feeling wells up.”⁶⁹ After hearing Hayes sing, the critic Elsa Bienenfeld complained, “He sings over the expression of the words. As if African intelligence could not follow the German line of thought. But he has the expression of the melody. That may be his instinct.”⁷⁰ Unlike the journalist at Hayes’s Berlin recital who credited his teacher for Hayes’s convincing performance—and not Hayes’s own efforts—Bienenfeld perpetuated the longstanding myth of Black musical talent as “natural” or “inherent” and therefore untrainable, being incapable of intellectual adaptation or evolution. Both refused to recognize the musician’s agency in and capacity for the proper study and interpretation of lieder.

But concert criticism went beyond musical interpretation or linguistic fluency and extended to the nature of sound production itself. The music, they argued, sounded Black, despite the fact that it was a Schubert lied. This approach routinely functioned to refute the singer’s claims to be a professional musician trained in Western art music. To these critics, Black performers had no place in Central Europe, no matter what they sang or performed. Their Blackness was immutable and ever present, manifesting in the ways in which their bodies produced sound. Trapped by their own biology, by their own racial and cultural limitations, and unable to transcend their bodies’ limitations, they were forever doomed to imitate but never actually produce Germanness.

Black concert singers were, of course, capable of producing Black sonic effects akin to those that exist in popular music. “In popular genres,” Eidsheim writes, “vernacular languages and pronunciation styles are used to tag performers with social distinctions.”⁷¹ A singer’s unique wail or hum can purposely function as a marker of their identity and refer to a particular historical tradition in singing. But classical singers largely eschew individual style in favor of adherence to strict musical conventions of diction, timbre, and tone.⁷² After all, all European-trained singers deliberately followed the stylistic conventions dictated by Western art music. If listeners claimed to have heard Blackness in the voices of African American singers, we are left to draw one of two conclusions: either there were indeed fundamental biological differences in Black singers’ vocal production, or the distinction between Black and white singers in interwar Europe lay, as Eidsheim writes, “beyond the sound itself.”⁷³ Some listeners in the 1920s insisted that they heard a fundamental difference in sound. Listening with a racial ear, music critics relied on the long-established transatlantic belief that Black vocal difference was located in the timbre of the singer’s sound. The notion that Black American voices sounded different from white voices had existed in the United States since at least the 1890s, when the American trade paper the Phonogram wrote that “Negroes [record] better than white singers, because their voices have a certain sharpness or harshness about them that a white man has not.”⁷⁴ But interwar era concert music criticism provides evidence that such views had traveled across the ocean.

Often German and Austrian critics compared Black concert singers’ voices to their skin color, creating a racialized form of sensory alignment in which the sound of the singer’s voice matched their visual appearance. Listeners described their voices as sounding like the colors black, purple, or blue—all dark hues. In 1930 the Vossische Zeitung wrote that “[Anderson’s] complexion is not altogether Black, but she has a dark, blue-black voice which she handles with artistic accompaniment and taste… . Sonically her voice sounds somewhat unusual to our ears, exotic: but we readily take a fancy to its appeal.”⁷⁵ The critic for the daily Berliner Morgenpost admired her “purple sonority” which the critic found fitting for a contralto.⁷⁶ In Vienna in the mid-1930s, critics compared the darkness of Anderson’s tone to the darkness of her skin color. For example, one Viennese critic wrote, “The dark, soft tone of her voice works so well with [her] African skin color.”⁷⁷ In Salzburg, another stated that Anderson possessed “a dark voice, brown like her skin.”⁷⁸ Others praised her “soft, dark, alto voice” and gushed about “the marvel of this dark woman, this dark voice!”⁷⁹ In 1935, a critic for the Salzburger Volksblatt complained that her deep and dark voice’s “negroid coloring” made it difficult to hear any resonating overtones. “The voice goes down deeply as a very dark contralto, and [then] up surprisingly high[, reaching the range of a] soprano. Where does this little chest find such power?”⁸⁰ Like those of other Black singers in interwar Austria and Germany, Anderson’s voice became black like her race, an audible marker of her racial difference.

White American and white European singers who were Anderson’s contemporaries, however, faced no such criticism. Indeed, in examining their reception it becomes clear how the practice of racial un/marking shaped critics’ listening practices. At first glance, all contralto voices described in print media appear to share similar features: their low range meant that critics frequently used adjectives such as “dark” to describe them, regardless of the singer’s race. But that is where the similarities stop. German and Austrian reviews of white contraltos such as Gertrude Pitzinger, Sigrid Onegin, and Margarete Matzenauer emphasized color and tone with less specificity than they did with Anderson. Their voices were “big,” “warm,” or “glorious” (herrlich), they could have wide ranges, they could sound masculine, and they could sound like a church organ or a cello obligato. But rarely did critics assign a particular color or hue to a singer’s voice, and they never related vocal color to the singer’s appearance (hair color, eye color, skin color, size, shape, etc.).

Rather, what made these white contraltos’ performances praiseworthy was their ability to control their voices, not necessarily the timbre of the voice itself. Pitzinger, one critic lauded, possessed “a secure, functioning feeling of style, that she used to meet each lied composer’s characteristic tone, a natural and convincing style of artistic expression, and a fresh, musical joyfulness.”⁸¹ About a decade before Anderson arrived, her mentor Cahier received praise from Austrian critics for being “in full command of all the rules of singing.” After hearing her “bring forth a captivating pianissimo and then in the next blink of an eye yield a shocking fortissimo,” the audience knew that she was a true connoisseur of the lied.⁸² The Jewish American contralto Sophie Braslau was one of the most well-known American performers in the 1920s. After her performance in Berlin in 1925, the critic Otto Steinhagen stated that Braslau’s “phenomenal” voice was “an alto of astonishing resonance, a seldomly heard depth and power therein that at times reminds one of a manly register. But then come the highs of a mezzo-soprano, likewise the full power and expression-rich elasticity.”⁸³ Power, control, technique, and the conviction of one’s artistic expression were the markers of a white contralto singer’s success to the ears of Austrian and German music critics.

In addition to describing the voices of Anderson and other Black singers as dark, listeners also frequently called them guttural, as if they were more primal than white voices. For example, the Wiener Zeitung wrote, “The gutturalness of [Anderson’s] expression lends her organ the timbre of an Italian viola.”⁸⁴ “Sometimes,” wrote another Viennese critic, “the sound rounds further in the back of her throat—is that due to her English mother tongue or is it actually because of her foreign blood?”⁸⁵ Even Hayes’s high tenor could not prevent the Viennese music critic Balduin Bricht from gendering and racializing it, describing it as a “somewhat guttural expression of a tenor voice with a feminine resonance.”⁸⁶ When Pankey, a baritone, performed in Salzburg in 1932, he was also criticized for sounding Black. His style of singing was said to be too different and exotic to offer German listeners anything of value. His voice, which the critic described as lacking in color, was “different natured from that of Europeans. It sits very far back and is very guttural. Obviously, this has to do with the Negroid formation of the mouth.”⁸⁷ When Pankey performed in Berlin in 1924, a critic at the Berliner Tageblatt articulated what he believed was so special about the Black voice:

In contrast, some listeners championed other Black singers’ voices precisely because they thought their voices lacked the guttural quality Black musicians were supposed to naturally possess. For example, when Kosti Vehanen first heard Anderson perform at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University with the concert manager Rulle Rasmussen, they discussed her voice using language similar to that of critics. Vehanen recalled that Rasmussen observed,

These debates about singers’ voices—purple or brilliantly light, guttural or more cultivated—reveal that audiences often relied on biological notions of racial difference to understand a performance of classical music. Their criticisms of singers’ voices and behaviors assumed that there were essential qualities to their performances—biological and cultural—that were not only fundamental to their musicianship but could not be overcome through musical practice, cultural immersion, or linguistic training. To these listeners, their Blackness was irredeemable, permeating everything it touched—including classical music itself, which supposedly had little to do with race.

Dropping the Act

German and Austrian audiences were willing to grant Black singers unequivocal authenticity in one repertoire: African American spirituals. In spite of their different and even oppositional stances on Black concert singers, most music critics concluded their reviews by praising the performers for their heartfelt and homegrown rendition of songs such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” or “Go Down, Moses.” Here, finally, after a long evening of performing Germanness, Black singers supposedly dropped the act to reveal their “true selves.” Their true selves were apparently not German or European at all. Neither did critics locate Black authenticity in a contemporary, vibrant, bustling, transnational, and transatlantic Black diasporic society; instead, they firmly planted Black singers in nineteenth-century antebellum America. African American spirituals were, in many listeners’ minds, authentic musical expressions of life in the antebellum Deep South, and audiences praised them accordingly with repeated calls for encores. Die Stunde’s reporter wrote that although Pankey sang German lieder well, the “best that he gave us, however, was definitely in the native spirituals.”⁹⁰ The critic for the Berliner Tageblatt stated that Hayes closed out the evening with songs that were “sung as on the plantation.”⁹¹ At one of Anderson’s last concerts in Vienna in November 1937, the audience loved her performance of spirituals so much they demanded that she perform several of them twice.⁹² Although Central European audiences might have thought that they were listening to local and humble expressions of formerly enslaved Black peoples, musicological scholarship suggests otherwise. African American concert performers frequently arranged spirituals for white American and European audiences.⁹³ Hayes’s performance of African American spirituals in Central Europe sounded very much like European art songs; for one recital in Berlin in 1925, for example, Hayes orchestrated his arrangement of spirituals for harp and strings instead of using the piano.⁹⁴

A few critics warned against emphasizing African American spirituals over German lieder in evaluating the performances of Black concert singers. Although the music critic for Das Echo loved Anderson’s performance of spirituals such as “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” he nonetheless pushed back against the popular opinion that African American spirituals were her best work. “It would be an injustice, however, to only emphasize these songs,” he stated. “Seldom has Schubert been sung with such a sense of style and relatability.”⁹⁵ The critic for Die Stunde agreed: “When she sings, her Schubert is the most authentic and best Schubert, and the spirituals move us as if they originated from the Danube and not the Mississippi.”⁹⁶ Unlike performances by Robeson or Hayes, which critics praised for transporting the audience to a southern plantation or the Mississippi River, Anderson’s Liederabend was fully Viennese, in this critic’s estimation, for even her spirituals reminded audiences of themselves.

African American Liederabende functioned as sonic experiments in Central Europe where audiences tested out the relationship between race and sound in classical music during an era of increased transatlantic Black migration and travel. Audience constructions of whiteness and Blackness tell us that race was not only a visual experience but also a sonic phenomenon in German musical culture. Using their “listening ear,” audiences sought to determine what they were seeing and hearing in the Austro-German canon along racial lines. They revisited their definitions of Blackness and whiteness in response to Black performers’ musical erasures of the Black-white binary that dominated transatlantic discourses of race, nation, and culture in the twentieth century.

But African Americans’ masterful musical game of mimicry vs. authenticity, which allowed them to be at once Black and German on stage, always relied upon the audience to play along with them. The shared, liminal space of the concert hall was, ultimately, a temporary one. Audiences left in the wake of the Liederabend relied on two particular modes of racial listening. Some chose to call Black singers white, which by proxy associated Germanness with whiteness. Others insisted that something foreign or alien, located in the Black body, had impinged on a Black musician’s ability to produce German sounds, thus sonically marking their performances as irredeemably un-German. Race was ultimately the filter people used to understand performances of repertoire from the Austro-German canon. A fixed, false dichotomy guided their complex listening processes: Blackness or Germanness. Both categories remained, in sobering daylight, two separate spheres on opposite poles.