Chapter 3

The Sonic Color Line Belts the World

Constructing Race and Music in Central Europe

When José Julián Jiménez arrived at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music in 1854 to register for instruction, the administrators were so shocked by what they saw that they wrote down “colored” (farbiger) next to his registration form.¹ “Mister José Julián Jiménez, born on the island of Cuba,” they recorded, had recently traveled from New York to Leipzig to study the violin.² Who was this man who had crossed an ocean to visit them? Why was he here? Jiménez received support throughout his twenty-year-long relationship with the Leipzig Conservatory of Music from music veterans such as Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Reinecke. He spent many years studying violin and, as his school records indicate, learning music theory, organ, voice, and composition to complement his training. But his registration file indicates that in this moment, the administration was more interested in delineating him from the other students according to his perceived differences rather than acknowledging shared commonalities. His racial difference was noteworthy enough for the registrar to mark down.

Jiménez performed frequently throughout Germany with his two sons in the 1870s. Yet the registrar’s early act in 1853 of marking the musician according to racial difference foreshadows what followed over the next several decades. Considered extraordinary by some, derided as markedly unoriginal by others, African-descended musicians in Germany and Austria became a growing phenomenon that provoked comment, compelled documentation, and warranted extensive explanation and analysis. Musical demarcation along racial lines became an important leitmotif in Black musicians’ lives across the Atlantic.

This book begins its analysis of Black musical performances in German musical culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century for two reasons. First, the numbers of Black musicians traveling to Central Europe grew substantially by the 1870s and 1880s as they tapped into greater transatlantic markets of cultural exchange.³ Second, the mid-to-late nineteenth century, scholars argue, represents a shift or a departure from previous discourses on race and culture. While some Europeans had previously been engaged in humanitarian principles of egalitarianism or believed in Herderian evaluations of cultural difference, a generational shift in attitudes toward people of African descent between the 1830s and 1860s changed much of European thought. European rhetoric that had once promoted a universal brotherhood became displaced, Catherine Hall argues, “by a harsher racial vocabulary of fixed differences.”⁴

German nationalism and colonialism in particular played a significant role in defining racial ideologies within German culture.⁵ By the 1870s—the era of German unification—shared spaces for interracial solidarity had begun to erode as colonial interest in subjugating peoples in Africa grew. Indeed, the birth of German settler colonialism demanded that Germans publicly bind together Germanness and whiteness in relation to people of color and commit to promoting a fixed racial hierarchy.⁶ Intransigent notions of inherent racial inequality, presented as natural, came to inform ordinary Germans’ estimations of people of African descent.

Yet scholars have tended to divorce nineteenth-century German musical culture from these global developments. The worlds of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, we imagine, had little to do with the projects of globalization, let alone with Blackness. By incorporating narratives of globalization and diaspora into German music history, however, I challenge these claims. It turns out that Black musicians occupied a whole host of positions in German musical culture, from orchestral instrumentalists and military musicians to opera singers and bandleaders. They performed everywhere, from the royal palace to Richard Wagner’s surprise sixtieth birthday party.⁷ And even the most elite music journals of the nineteenth century, including Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, reported on the musical activities of Black people.⁸

In this chapter, I argue that transatlantic notions of race informed audiences’ listening experiences of Black classical musicians in Central Europe and, more specifically, gave them the tools to begin to articulate classical music as a white medium. In the late nineteenth century, the audience listening to Black classical performers linked racial (in)abilities to musical performance to reach astounding conclusions. Between 1870—the decade of German unification—and WWI, audiences began to find ways to hear Blackness in performers’ interpretations of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Central European listeners, then, constructed what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls a “sonic color line.” White Germans, as we will see, turned to the practice of racial listening to mark classical music as white and Black musicians as foreign.⁹ Central European audiences relied on ever-shifting and -evolving notions of Black musicality to process their own sensory experiences.

I also demonstrate that white German formulations of Blackness and classical music were informed by the practices of classical music itself. The gulf that divided German racialized listening experiences was an aesthetic one: ideological assumptions about vocal and instrumental music informed listener’s expectations of a Black musician’s performance. As the writings of German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann made clear, vocal singing sat in lower estimation than instrumental music. Intimately tied to the body and to notions of bodily production, vocal singing could be listened to contradictorily as both an artistic practice expressing interiority and a natural, even primal act. By the late nineteenth century, it became a racialized act as well, one in which Blackness could be sonically located in a singer’s biology. But white Germans not only heard Black voices in a racial key; they also racialized Black instrumentalists’ musical practice as well. Their concert criticisms illustrate that a Mendelssohn piano trio or a Chopin piano concerto could also be understood as a sonically Black or white performance.

What also anchored German listening practices was the belief in the supremacy of their music. The assumption that Germans were the best music-makers was so prevalent that many African American musicians took notice of it. An entry from the diary of the Fisk Jubilee Singer Ella Sheppard illustrates the degree to which Germans believed they were superior musicians: “One of the ladies present—a princess, I think—asked me who our teacher was and remarked that we must have studied many years to be able to sing as beautifully together. Such perfect intonation she had never heard before—and she seemed surprised to find our Mr. director was not a German but an American.”¹⁰ How else, this German response implies, could the choir have achieved such excellence in their musicianship if they had not received their training from a German?

Regardless of the kind of performance a Black musician delivered, however, their physical presence created a pretext for some Germans to test out and sometimes reaffirm their own belief in their superiority over the supposedly lesser races. Discussions of Black musicians, whether in local newspapers or in scholarly journals, used their musical performances to reaffirm the cultural and biological inferiority of Black people in both Africa and in the New World, to flesh out German ideologies about the seriousness of German music, and to locate “authentic” forms of musical expression in the bodies of the performers themselves. Regardless of one’s position within German society, Neil MacMaster writes, “underlying the colonial policies of left and right, of Social Democrats and Marxists, as well as Conservatives and Liberals, was an unquestioning assumption of Black inferiority.”¹¹ Black cultural inferiority was assumed to be an unalterable visual and sonic fact, a necessary condition of modern life, and, increasingly, part of everyday life.

Or was it? The problem with Black performances of classical music was that they so often exposed the shoddy construction of these sonic racial demarcations. Were Black classical musicians primitive people or could they be just as sophisticated as white people? To dare to answer that question meant addressing whether Black people were capable of creating and performing art music, which white Europeans had claimed as uniquely their own. Listeners had to reckon with a much wider scale of Black diasporic musical ability and talent than they were sometimes willing to acknowledge.

German music criticism, then, reveals the difficulties white Germans faced in coming to terms with the complexities of the Black diaspora. Germans’ shifting elision in terminology offers one illustration of this. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German employment of the term “Moor” dropped in favor of “Negro” to describe people of African descent, a change in vocabulary that represented a significant downgrade in position for Black people in German society. While “Moors” connoted “brave warriors, Christian saints, and the riches of Africa,” the term “Negro,” Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann argue, “alluded instead to a trading commodity; a childish, cheap, and unskilled hand.”¹² Black performers often received both labels in concert criticism and advertisements, irrespective of their own backgrounds. The words used even to categorize Black people, then, were also undergoing constant revision.

Yet even with the transition from “Moor” to “Negro” in German thought, there was an occasional flattening of Blackness that presented Black people as static and monolithic. Germans often conflated different Black identities together in their accounts of Black musicians. To read reviews, one would think that there were no differences between African Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and Afro-Europeans who had been born and raised in the Habsburg Empire or who had grown up as the children of Prussian servants.¹³ Sometimes white writers made little attempt to distinguish Africans in the Congo “in need” of civilizing from Afro-Cubans studying abroad. Occasionally, however, German concert criticism demarcated Black Americans as separate from other Black performers by virtue of their positions as formerly enslaved peoples. In these moments, the reactions of German listeners illustrated the potency of American notions of race from across the Atlantic Ocean.¹⁴ Mostly, though, Germans’ disavowal of diversity within Black cultures suggests the lengths to which German institutions and individuals were willing to go in order to sustain their fictions of Blackness.

German conversations about Black classical musicians, then, reveal the limits of musical universalism itself. In my first chapter, I illustrated how potent the siren song of German musical universalism had become to African American musicians and intellectuals. Hearing its call, they found ways to make the universality of classical music conform to Black cultural politics in white supremacist America. Singing its melody, they placed themselves on boats sailing across the Atlantic Ocean and imagined other musical worlds outside the confines of Jim Crow. Arriving in Central Europe, however, they found themselves participating (perhaps unwittingly) in a musical transfer of a different sort. But their presence in Central Europe meant that white listeners occasionally confronted the limitations of their own universalist musical aesthetic in an era of growing cultural and racial nationalism. By the early twentieth century, I argue, whiteness had become a necessary qualification for performing classical music.

All of these factors—Blackness, whiteness, Germanness; sight, sound, race, and culture—come together in the concert hall and in the opera house in nineteenth-century Central Europe. Scholars have seen these threads as separate for far too long, in part because German musical discourse, having erased Blackness from itself, presented them as such. But German musical culture was more global, messy, and entangled than its idealized self-presentation. Instead, it was part of the very projects of globalization, transnationalism, colonialism, and racism from which many of its listeners believed it was divorced.

Coming to Terms with the Black Diaspora: The Fisk Jubilee Singers as Musical Albatross

The Fisk Jubilee Singers did not perform classical music in Germany. Nor were they the first Black musical ensemble to travel there to perform. But they require our attention because their powerful status and prominent position as the first serious musical ensemble meant that they touched nearly all aspects of German society during and after their visit.¹⁵ It is in their personal accounts and other documents that we see most clearly the contrast between Black understandings of themselves and German expectations of Blackness, and that we witness some of the most dominant tropes Germans used to describe Black musicianship coming to light.

Arriving in Germany in 1877 to raise money for Fisk University, the choir sang songs such as “Steal Away to Jesus” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for ten months across the nation, performing in small Lutheran towns like Eisenach and Jena and in major cities such as Berlin, Cologne, and Stuttgart. At their concerts, royalty wept and audiences were left speechless. Their concerts in the Berlin Cathedral were filled to such capacity that two hundred people were forced to stand in the back to listen to them.

How German audiences discussed the Fisk Jubilee Singers became the pattern for German music criticism of Black musicians for decades. First, notions of primitivism colored much of their praise. The “primitive,” Sieglinde Lemke writes, “was the antonym of discipline, order, rationality—the antithesis of ‘civilized.’ ”¹⁶ What made Black people primitive was not only their supposed lack of rational intelligence, but also their lack of a sophisticated culture from which to draw artistic inspiration and intellectual curiosity.¹⁷ Culture—including music—fell along a racial fault line; high culture was by nature European, and Black diasporic cultures primitive.

By the late nineteenth century, the discourse of Black primitivism had become two-pronged, embodied in the primitive “natural peoples” (Naturvölker) on the one hand and in the Black popular entertainer on the other. The myth of natural peoples has its roots in nineteenth-century anthropology, when academics divorced non-European peoples from narratives of Western civilization and progress. “Cultured peoples” (Kulturvölker) were white and European, deemed civilized by their history and civilization. Natural peoples were usually non-European, often racialized as Black and Brown, whose supposed lack of history and culture made them suitable objects of anthropological study.¹⁸ Constantly under a colonial gaze, natural peoples were the embodiment of the primitive in white European formulations because they failed to adhere to European hegemonic norms.

The caricature of the popular Black entertainer also functioned to reinforce white beliefs of Black primitivism. By 1896 the digest Der Artist reported that there were over one hundred Black entertainers living in Germany. Black minstrel shows and dances such as the Cakewalk “brought to the surface uncomfortable elements of the radical changes in Germany associated with colonialism, transnational capitalism, and the emergence of mass culture,” Jonathan Wipplinger argues.¹⁹ Mass culture made caricatures of Blackness more easily transmissible, and new markets, recognizing Black entertainment’s increasing popularity, offered it as a modern, sometimes colonial, consumer good. A popular repertoire for Black ensembles in the 1870s and 1880s included spirituals and sacred songs from church, as well as “coon” songs, plantation numbers, and other “humorous” acts for German audiences.²⁰ Mixing together dance, comedy, and song, Black vaudeville shows presented African Americans as jovial tricksters whose appeal lay in part in their physicality as performers and dancers.

White German interest in seeing both “natural peoples” and Black popular entertainers perform for them had everything to do with their desire for a perceived Black authenticity. The impresarios of human zoos (Völkerschauen, literally “people shows”) constructed environments that were meant to resemble the “natural habitats” of Africans so that white observers could take part in a fully immersive experience.²¹ Black popular entertainers in Germany also emphasized their authenticity as “real” Black performers. The comedian Edgar Jones, for example, was a featured performer in numerous German playbills in the 1890s. German advertisements touted “the best Negro comic in the world,” with print ads and posters that appeared on lampposts or billboards stating that Jones was a “wirklicher Schwarzer,” or “real Black,” unlike other imposter performers circulating in Germany at that time.²² German audiences need not fear being tricked by a white performer in blackface, in other words, because they could see a Black performer for themselves.

The desire to see “real Blacks” may have been responsible for the high ticket sales for the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ tour in Germany. Yet the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ visual and musical presentation caused Germans to calibrate their expectations against what they experienced after leaving the venue. Straddling the line between the anthropological and the popular, the Fisk Jubilee Singers moved German audiences with the gravitas and religiosity of their musical performances. Their presentation of African American identity—which was genteel, Protestant, and imbued with African American respectability—confounded listeners, who had associated Blackness with an African primitivism. It was surprising for white German listeners to learn that there was more than one way to be Black.

One major difference between the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other Black performers was the location of their concerts: throughout their stay, the ensemble sang their sold-out shows in some of the most sacrosanct spaces in the nation, including the Berlin Cathedral and the Berlin Sing-Akademie. Where the Fisk Jubilee Singers performed mattered just as much as what they were performing. Unlike Black minstrels, who entertained listeners in cheap, popular venues or African “villagers” performing music in a human zoo, the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang their music in spaces usually reserved for European high art musicians or for church choirs. These sacred locales elevated their artistry above other Black musical performances and demanded that listeners situate their songs on a higher musical plane. By the nature of the recital space in which the Jubilee Singers sang, German listeners unquestioningly accepted that their music was the most sophisticated, cultivated, and respected genre of Black diasporic music, even if it remained inferior to European art music.

German reviewers and audiences were also often surprised by their fashionable, Western-style dress. Sheppard’s diary records an encounter at a reception in Berlin:

Clothing was a strong visual symbol of the civilizing mission and its ability to convert “savages” into Christianized subjects. For example, white European missionaries encouraged Africans to change their dress and conform to Western notions of beauty, culture, and behavior as outward expressions of their civilizational processes.²⁴ But the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ dress may have also implicitly violated the supposed natural order of racial hierarchy by visually denying white audiences the opportunity to conceive of themselves as superior in dress and culture than people of African descent.

Not only did their style of dress surprise Germans, but the variety of skin tones among the singers was another source of astonishment. Nearly all of the concert reviews, stories, and biographical sketches on the Jubilee Singers mention at some point how varied in skin color the Jubilee Singers appeared. For example, a Berlin critic complained that the appearance of the Jubilee Singers did not meet his expectations. “One had imagined that these North American slaves would have a clearly Black appearance,” the author explained, “[but] of the ten members represented from the society, only two appeared truly Black to the eye; the rest were more or less mixed, some so much so that their African heritage would not even be suspected on this side of the ocean.”²⁵ Die Post also emphasized the diversity in appearance among these African American musicians: “We encountered there eight full-blooded negresses, one mulatto, and a light-colored mestizo, of whom only her hard, kinky hair betrayed her heritage.”²⁶ Much like their racial mixture (perceived or real), Germans would attribute their musical mixture to European influence as well.

Even if the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ appearances and mannerisms betrayed German expectations of Black people, audiences nonetheless turned to a variety of racist stereotypes to make sense of the ensemble’s Blackness. Tellingly, three aspects of German music criticism illustrate how Germans determined the musical merits of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The ways in which they listened for Blackness appeared in concert criticism for decades thereafter. First, German critics focused heavily on the perceived melancholia in African American music and musicians, a long-standing belief dating to at least the 1860s. German writers assumed that African Americans had adapted melancholia as a form of cultural and musical expression as a result of their history of enslavement. Music criticism often described the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ music and performers as melancholic or “elegiac.”²⁷ In so doing, they perpetuated a transatlantic belief that nature had turned African Americans into an inherently long-suffering people and thus made them better able to withstand oppression.

Second, reviews of the Fisk Jubilee Singers located Blackness in the ensemble’s voices. Many listeners frequently described the singers’ voices as “natural,” implying that the singers were closer to nature than white Europeans. One reviewer stated, “They have beautiful … voices of a pure, healthy sounding timbre entirely free from those tricks ([and] artificialities) which we so often censure in European singers.”²⁸ The critic’s act of hearing their voices as pure, natural, and unspoiled by civilization perpetuated ideologies of primitivism, which praised the supposed advantage Black diasporic people possessed as a racial group somehow untouched by cultural development over more “developed” Europeans.

Music criticism also used animalistic language to describe the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ voices in a manner that predates much historical scholarship. In an 1878 review of the choir, one critic states their singing sounds like “the scream of the persecuted and enslaved ones, and sometimes it is a wild shriek, corresponding to the hot blood of the Negro race.”²⁹ The critic’s description of their style of singing as “screams” and “shrieks” connotes instinctive and apelike noises. In so doing, the critic associated Black musicianship with unintelligible noise. Moreover, the phrase “hot blood of the Negro race” marked Black people as intemperate and uncivilized—long before German critics in the jazz age used similar phrases.

Figure 8. “The Jubilee Singers at the Sing-Akademie in Berlin. Drawn to life.” Taken from the magazine, Daheim 14, no. 30, April 27, 1878, supplement: “Of the times—for the times.” Courtesy of bpk Bildagentur/Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany, Newspaper Division/Art Resource, NY.

Third, German reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers also illustrates that German music critics had already begun to espouse the notion that Black music could rejuvenate a failing Europe long before writers such as Ivan Goll (“The Negroes Are Conquering Europe”) or Alice Gerstel (“Jazz Band”) issued such declarations in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic. Reviews of the Jubilee Singers that appeared in even the most elite music journals suggested how Black music could be called upon to aid German art music in its improvement of itself. To the German critics, the “natural” sounds and supposedly simplistic musical abilities of the Fisk Jubilee Singers made the choir a perfect foil for critiquing German musical culture.

For example, one reviewer argued that Black music was exactly what a decaying European musical culture needed to revive itself. “We have much to learn from them,” the critic said. “We with our old culture, with our classical achievements piled one above the other like some palatial structure, do not see that the foundation upon which the superstructure is raised is beginning to decay … in other words, we are losing sight of the primeval simplicity so excellently delineated by these Negroes.”³⁰ The music of American slaves, in other words, could help German composers of art music rebuild their own foundation.

The most daring articulation of the belief that African American spirituals could contribute to Western art music came from the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung. Decades before Antonín Dvorˇák shocked classical musicians by telling composers of Western art music that African American folk music could serve as the basis for musical composition, the music critic of the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung made the same claim in his concluding remarks on the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ concert:

Here, the reviewer directly ties African American music to Western art music in the most explicit and provocative terms. In the nineteenth century, Hungarian music, closely tied to Sinti and Roma music, represented a particularly romantic sensibility in Austro-German musical culture. Considered wild, rhythmic, modally adventurous, and inferior to German art music, it became a source of inspiration for German composers.³² Hungarian music’s beautiful primitiveness was something to be improved upon, teased out, and reconfigured. It was up to Austro-German composers to take on the challenge of writing in a Hungarian style without it overpowering their own music’s classical roots. It is in this spirit that the critic of the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung offers the same backhanded praise of African American music. In spite of its exotic differences, and in spite of (or perhaps because of) its simplicity, the music of the Jubilee Singers could be appropriated into a larger German tradition.

What unifies much of the German discourse surrounding the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s is the belief that music was a legitimate category for racial analysis. The Singers’ music offered a point of entry for scholars investigating folk music’s ethnic, national, and regional musical boundaries, and it could inspire a new generation of German composers to approach music with fresh ears because of its primitive, childlike qualities. Listeners’ praise of the ensemble as a potential source of inspiration to German musicians reveals a “primitivist modernist” aesthetic at work well before the 1920s, the era that scholars have traditionally assumed this discourse first came into existence. Never held up as equal to or even similar to Germany’s strong choral musical tradition in the nineteenth century, the choral music of the Fisk Jubilee Singers resonated the most with listeners when heard ethnomusicologically and in dissonant, contradictory keys: modern yet primitive, childlike, simple, and natural yet strange and unfamiliar, the music of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was heard by Germans as an amalgam of sounds that could only have been produced by Black people in the New World.

As we will see below, reviews of Black classical musicians shared many of these tropes. Indeed, many of the same formulations of Black musicians—that they sounded different than white Europeans, that their appearances were confusing because they were not African—appeared in concert music criticism. However, instead of locating Blackness in supposedly Black sounds, listeners heard it in compositions by white European composers. Listeners used their writings to articulate evolving positions on the relationship between sight and sound, between race and culture, and between ability and authenticity. Classical music became a site where Blackness also had to be defined and made sense of, even if listeners used elaborate logistics to do it.

Will the Real Black Patti Please Stand Up?

Unlike most instrumentalists who came to Germany for formal training, Black singers who traveled to Germany came to advance their already established professional careers. The majority of Black singers who traveled to Germany were women. Part of a gendered phenomenon known as the “Black Prima Donna,” they toured around the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The women who traveled to Germany included Marie Selika (Williams), Rachel Walker, Jenny Bishop, Sissieretta Jones, Annis Hackley, and Abbie Mitchell, and smaller unknown female groups such as a “Negress Quartet” who performed in Germany and Austria in 1885.³³ Although it is unclear where and when Rachel Walker might have traveled to Germany and Austria, evidence suggests that, at the very least, she sang for the princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and a countess of Baroda.³⁴

Many of these women traveled under monikers such as “the Black Swan” or “the Black Jenny Lind,” presenting themselves as a racial variant of a prominent white singer. One of the most popular titles was “Black Patti,” a reference to the famed Italian singer Adelina Patti. A contemporary of the “Swedish Nightingale” Lind, Patti had a light, fluttering voice well-suited for operatic roles such as Zerlina or Lucia. In the 1880s and 1890s, Black women in the United States began to use the title “Black Patti” to gain followers. Flora Bergen, for example, called herself the “real Patti” in response to Jones’s use of the title.

In the 1890s, two Black prima donnas traveled to Germany to much fanfare: Marie Selika and Sissieretta Jones, both of whom called themselves the “Black Patti” during their tours.³⁵ Both singers had trained with well-established classical musicians, performed difficult and technically demanding musical works, and used established entertainment managers to land contracts in Germany. Selika toured as part of a troupe called the African American Concert Company, sponsored by the popular entertainment manager William Foote.³⁶ Rudolph Voeckel, a German American, became the manager for Jones’s German tour and for the rest of her career. Together they created the Black Patti Concert Company in 1894, featuring Jones and a variety of white and Black musicians, including the German-born pianist Felix Heinck.³⁷

Marie Selika, dubbed “the Queen of Staccato,” was born in Natchez, Mississippi, raised in Ohio, and moved to San Francisco in her early twenties to study music.³⁸ Selika toured intermittently throughout Europe beginning in the 1880s and continuing well into the 1920s.³⁹ After Selika wound through Europe during her second tour in 1891, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported in 1894, “It remained for the critics of Germany to complete her triumph. Everywhere in that country she was received with great enthusiasm.”⁴⁰ She received numerous encores in Berlin and had to stop her program to perform her first aria again for the audience. The Berliner Tageblatt raved about the sweetness of her voice, its extraordinary range, “pure tones, her wonderful trills and roulades, her correct rending of the most difficult intervals” that won over amateurs and professional musicians alike that evening. “It is almost impossible to describe the effect of her voice,” the reviewer gushed; “one must hear it to appreciate its thrilling beauty.”⁴¹

Figure 9. An 1899 poster of African American soprano Sissieretta Jones, also called “The Black Patti.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Collections: Posters: Performing Arts Posters.

The writer’s effusive praise was not out of the ordinary. Throughout her stay in Germany, Selika appeared to earn adoration from even the most difficult critics. The Bavarian Schweinfurter Anzeiger’s reviewer reported in 1884, somewhat in a state of disbelief, “The audience was literally carried away by enthusiasm for the singing of this wonderful woman. Only once before has the city of Schweinfur [sic] been favored with so rare an opportunity of listening to so bewitching a voice as that possessed by this American lady, and that was on the occasion of the concert of the celebrated contest of Totto Luger, the opera singer of the Royal Court of Prussia.”⁴²

Most reviews did not comment on Selika’s Blackness, aside from describing her as a woman with “coal-black hair.”⁴³ Only later in the 1920s when Selika sang again in Germany did reviews mention her race. Her concert featured some art songs and a piece entitled, “Je suis Titania la blonde” from Ambroise Thomas’s opera Mignon. In a press release for the upcoming concert, a German critic wrote, “Imagine, a Negro singer of such dark visage, in the role of the blond Mignon and attempting to sing the airy vocal polonaise.”⁴⁴

Jones, on the other hand, became a much more pronounced symbol of Blackness and of the Black prima donna to German audiences during her short stay in 1895. Born in Virginia to a carpenter and a washerwoman in 1869 and raised in Rhode Island, Matilda Joyner moved to Boston to study music, where she changed her name to Sissieretta Jones. Her voice quickly made an impression on managers and directors in the entertainment industry, and by 1888 she had already toured several major American cities.⁴⁵ The repertoire that Jones performed indicates that she was a well-trained lyric coloratura soprano. A clever marketer, she also sang many of the exact same songs in Patti’s standard repertoire. Between 1888 and 1916, her standard pieces included excerpts from Verdi’s Rigoletto and La Traviata, and she sang numerous art songs by French and German composers as well. Like Selika, Jones sang a rendition of the Swiss echo song—a piece of music designed to display a singer’s vocal techniques—to great acclaim.⁴⁶ By 1895 Jones was secure enough financially and had a strong enough reputation in the United States to tour Europe. Like Selika, she used a German agent (in this case, a man named William Gottschalk) to set up her bookings in Berlin.

Biographies and other works about Jones that have sought to detail her time in Germany have relied on her scrapbook, located in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, and on translated reviews that appeared in the Indianapolis Freeman newspaper to investigate German reception of her. By not reading German print sources directly, they have missed a bigger story, for in actuality, Jones’s title of Black Patti was contested during her entire stay.

It turns out that Berlin was embroiled in a war of divas in February of 1895. Two Black Pattis were competing against each other in the musical city at the same time: Sissieretta Jones and an unknown singer named Jenny Bishop. Little documentation exists on Bishop, the singer who usurped Jones’s debut in Berlin that cold winter. One report from the Detroit Plaindealer in 1892 states that Bishop was a daughter of an enslaved woman who “picked cotton in Virginia,” and that she was a specialist in “old plantation songs.”⁴⁷ At Bishop’s Berlin debut in mid-February as the “Black Patti,” a few days before Jones performed, she sang mostly “Negro songs” to positive acclaim.⁴⁸ Other newspapers, such as the Berliner Börsen-Courier also described Bishop’s musical performance as deeply empathetic, quietly moving, and melancholic.⁴⁹ In so doing, their criticisms tapped into the practice of associating African American musicianship with melancholia. Like countless other reviews of Black performers, one report concluded, “Thus Miss Bishop is not only a curiosity for the eyes, but also a welcome [sound] for the ears.”⁵⁰ Bishop’s appeal to white audiences was, like all Black performers, dualistic—both sonic and visual, always racially marked.

Nonetheless, the problem remained for German audiences that two self-fashioned Black Pattis were singing Italian arias and Swiss echo songs in Berlin at the same time. The city could only support one. “Both parties fight for the honor of holding the title, the real Black Nightingale,” a writer at the Berliner Intelligenzblatt gossiped. West of the city at the Apollo-Theater one Black Patti (Bishop) sang, and in the north at the Wintergarten Varieté was another (Jones), who swore that she alone was the real one. “They both appear to be right,” the author wrote in frustration, “because the one is as Black as the other, and the one sings so beautifully as the other.”⁵¹ What was the city of Berlin to do?

Jones’s management agency went on the attack. The barrage of advertisements announcing her arrival in many daily newspapers and other promotional materials sought to undo the level playing field Bishop had created. One such promotional article on Jones appeared on February 17, 1895, in the popular daily Berliner Börsen-Courier, two days before her premiere. Called “How Sissieretta Jones was discovered,” the story—a wildly fabricated and sensational tale—told of Jones’s rise from a “simple Negro maiden” in Kentucky to a superstar. Years prior, at a festive celebration that the scientist Thomas Edison was hosting for President Grover Cleveland, the article begins, the partygoers heard a voice singing “whose smoothness and interiority immediately arrested everyone’s hearts.” At the sound of her voice, the crowd demanded to know who the singer was. Edison came forth boasting of Jones, holding a wax phonographic cylinder with her name on it. After hearing her perform, President Cleveland’s wife took the young singer under her wing and found her a proper music teacher. She wanted to see “if [the teacher] thought it was possible for a Negress to learn how to completely overcome the unpleasant, strange, and unmelodic guttural sound [kehllaute] of her speech and become a perfect singer.”⁵² The teacher graciously agreed to this supposedly difficult challenge and discovered that “the Negroes have the finest musical ear.” Two months after working intensely with the teacher, Jones debuted at the White House to great applause. She was a sensation, a “Black Patti in the White House!” the article advertised. She had come to Berlin only to discover that an imposter had been imitating her. “She looks sharp against [such] a worthless competitor, an obscure singer who has also taken the name of Black Patti,” the writer sneered.⁵³

The story is fascinating for all of the details it incorrectly shares as facts—and for its racial depiction of Jones’s musicking body. No evidence exists that suggests Jones worked on a farm in Kentucky, as the article states, or that she knew Edison. Most striking, the German print source describes her voice as guttural. In so doing, the German source (even if it had been placed there by an American or by Jones herself) asserted that Black voices were sonically different from white ones. The article’s claim of racial difference confirms Nina Sun Eidsheim’s finding that listeners located a “fundamental physiological difference” in Black voices dating back as far as 1891.⁵⁴ By concluding that Black people have “the finest musical ear,” the article also reinforced the popular transatlantic idea that Black people were inherently more musical than others. Lastly, the article’s appearance in print journalism indicates just how seriously Jones took Bishop’s claim to be the real Black Patti. Jones’s success (financially and musically) depended upon eradicating the threat of another Black female singer’s popularity.

When Jones stepped onto the stage at the Wintergarten Varieté on February 19, 1895, people were ready to finally hear the “real” Black Patti, as headlines indicate.⁵⁵ Her concert program was typical for a white soprano prima donna in the nineteenth century: Charles Gounod’s “Valse Arietta,” two American art songs, most likely an Italian aria by Giuseppe Verdi such as “Sempre Libra” from La Traviata (a standard in her repertoire), and “The Last Rose of Summer.”⁵⁶ Unlike Bishop, she did not sing any African American spirituals or other “Negro music.” In fact, the only African American composer to ever appear in Jones’s standard repertoire over the course of her career was Will Marion Cook, and she only performed his music after she had returned to the United States and began performing vaudeville. Jones’s concert tour is a reminder that only in the early-to-mid-twentieth century did it become customary for African American classical singers to perform African American art songs (usually spirituals) as part of their concert repertoire. Singers such as Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson popularized arrangements by classically trained composers Harry Burleigh and Nathaniel Dett in the 1920s and 1930s.⁵⁷

In numerous articles on Jones’s performance, reviewers praised her bel canto, an Italian vocal style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that emphasizes a singer’s light tone and flexibility. They also applauded her musical ability and excellent delivery. “It is not only the dusky complexion that is real about her,” a reporter for the Das Kleine Journal marveled, adding, “The clear, full-toned voice, a soprano with range of two octaves, has the true ring.”⁵⁸ Jones demonstrated a strong technique and vocal prowess on the stage that proved why she was a well-regarded singer of operatic arias.

Yet in order to praise Jones, critics felt compelled to minimize her Blackness in their reviews, even while they claimed (in the language of color-blindness) that her talent was “quite independent of color or nationality.”⁵⁹ For example, many reviews stated that Jones’s name was a misnomer, for she was not actually Black. The critic for the Post declared Jones’s stage name inaccurate: “only half the name fits, but fortunately the better half. ‘Patti,’ we may rightly call her, although we protest against the adjective ‘Black.’ … The only thing ‘Black’ about her is the beautiful shining hair.”⁶⁰ He was grateful that the Black Patti he had encountered was more (white) Patti than Black. Many reviewers squirmed over the use of the word Black to describe Jones, calling it an offensive and rude term. A critic for the Berliner Börsen-Courier stated, “[The] adjective ‘Black’ seems to us unnecessarily impolite.”⁶¹ All of these reviews imply that the characteristics and qualities of Blackness were somehow offensive in themselves. Their statements, and countless others, suggested that Jones’s visual Blackness was better when minimized. Nana Badenberg writes, “The notion that white is to be understood as positive and Black as negative can be assumed to have come only from the perspective of a European, a light-skinned culture, even if it is not explicitly stated.”⁶² Blackness was deemed neither beautiful nor worthy of celebration to these critics; rather, it was something to be ignored if it could not be excised.

One way that music critics worked around Jones’s Blackness was by making her biracial, stating that “only her full lips and the delicate brown tint of her complexion betray her mulatto blood.”⁶³ A critic for the Berliner Börsen-Courier stated, “Miss Jones is evidently of Negro blood, but not alone of Negro blood. She is a mulatto of bronzed complexion and pleasant expressive features, with full lips and high forehead and the bearing of a lady, even to the choice of her costume.”⁶⁴ Skull shapes and sizes were critical forms of data collection within the emerging field of racial theory and anthropology.⁶⁵ Europeans and North Americans often assumed that Black people’s lower foreheads (a myth) were physical evidence of their supposedly lower intellectual aptitude and ability. Describing Jones’s “high forehead”—and coupling it with praise for her posture and dress—provided evidence to support the theory that she was mulatto, thus denying her the full extent of her Blackness in an effort to appease German audiences. As Kristin Moriah has observed, “In [Jones’s] German reviews, an insistence on her lightness, or a denial of her darkness, seems analogous with praising her musical talent.”⁶⁶ Her perceived white features therefore trumped any positive attributes her African forebears might have given her.

Critics also used chocolate to describe Jones and Bishop with high frequency. The Berliner Morgen-Zeitung, for example, called Jones an “imposing figure with a chocolate-colored tint.”⁶⁷ Bishop, the “exotic singer” wasn’t Black so much as “chocolate brown,” according to the Nationalzeitung.⁶⁸ The Berliner Börsen-Courier’s critic mentioned Bishop’s appearance to dismiss her moniker: “A twist: Miss Jenny Bishop actually has a chocolate-brown coloring,” the critic writes, “and the epithet ‘Black Patti’ is therefore out of place.”⁶⁹ Yet the association of chocolate with Blackness, Silke Hackenesch argues, “is not based on a vague similarity of some people’s skin color to the color of an edible product. Instead, it is based on the imagination of ‘dark people,’ tropical places, and practices that produce chocolate.” Advertisements and other products created a romanticized view of plantations in the New World and linked tropical fantasies of colonialism to the exploited racialized bodies that companies relied on for their colonial goods. “There is nothing ‘natural’ about the connection of certain brown and black products with the pigmentation of human beings,” Hackenesch concludes.⁷⁰ Rather, the repetitive association of white Germans over time linked people of African descent to colonial commodities, steeped in discourses of exoticism and primitivism.

Many German music critics explained Jones’s success by emphasizing the “naturalness” of her musicianship. These comments are a damning form of praise, for they imply that the singer’s mastery was without thought or effortless, requiring no training or dedication. Reviewers from the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Kreuz-Zeitung noted that the singer possessed “great natural gifts,” which were revealed “in the easy, natural manner of her singing; there is no seeking for effect, only the endeavor to render music and text their true effect.”⁷¹ The critic in Das Kleine Journal also remarked that “the colored singer’s voice has been well endowed by nature.”⁷² Their remarks on the “naturalness” of Jones’s voice could have equally appeared in comments on the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s.

Jones returned to the United States armed with glowing reviews of her performance. With European accolades in tow, Jones garnered even greater audiences in the United States than she attracted prior to her trip. When asked upon her return to Berlin in 1895 by an American journalist if there was a difference in her reception by audiences in Europe and America, Jones responded: “Yes, a marked difference. In Europe there is no prejudice against my race. It matters not to them in what garb an artist come, so he be an artist … It is the artist[’s] soul they look at there, not the color of his skin.”⁷³ Jones’s comment, like many other African Americans’ statements about racism in Central Europe in the Kaiserreich, was more of an indictment against white American racism than it was a critical illustration of European racial terrain. Even if she never publicly stated it, German constructs of race nonetheless shaped their reception of her musical performances.

Debating Black Merit and Intelligence: Black Instrumentalists and German Music Criticism

Black instrumentalists posed a conundrum to German listeners. German-speaking Europe promoted the common misconception that instrumentalists were more serious, better trained, more intellectual, and more dedicated to high art than singers.⁷⁴ First espoused by German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, this peculiarly German perspective insisted that instrumental music—symphonies, chamber music, piano sonatas, and the like—were more noble or pure musical genres than opera. German music critics also elevated instrumental music as a national treasure that showcased German intellectual and artistic superiority.

Central European musical discourse frequently denigrated Italian opera, and critics’ assessments of singers denied these musicians recognition of their musical intelligence and rigorous classical training. Whereas instrumentalists could convey through their hard-won efforts a highly cultivated technique and musical intelligence, singers could only instinctively grasp the primitive and easily accomplished nature of singing and therefore could not necessarily commit themselves as thoroughly to a higher understanding of music.

This musical reasoning came to the foreground in discourses on music and virtuosity and it also took on racial meaning in reviews of Black musicians. Black singers such as Jones and the Fisk Jubilee Singers received praise for the “naturalness” of their abilities and for qualities in their manner of performing that German audiences assumed they inherently possessed. But rarely did Black singers earn applause for their musical acuity.

Black instrumentalists, however, posed a different set of questions and challenges, since their decision to pursue instrumental music rather than vocal music supposedly revealed the seriousness of their purposes and their musical intelligence. Reviews of the Jiménez Trio, the Afro-Cuban violinist Claudio Brindis de Salas, and the African American pianist Hazel Harrison highlight how some German listeners used race as a category of analysis in their concert criticism. In different ways than with Black singers, German music critics confronted classical music’s whiteness by virtue of assessing the technical abilities of Black instrumentalists.

The Jiménez Trio offer us the first example of how Black instrumentalists could be listened to on racial terms. Jiménez came to the Leipzig Conservatory of Music to study in 1853.⁷⁵ Thirteen years later, in 1869, Jiménez’s two sons joined him in Leipzig to attend the same school. Nicasio studied the cello and his brother José Manuel “Lico” studied piano. Their jury exam recital programs and registration records in Leipzig illustrate the rigor of their training. Taking lessons with some of the most prominent teachers working in Germany at the time, including Moscheles, Reinecke, and Ferdinand David, they performed with Leipzig’s Gewandhausorchester and joined small chamber groups.⁷⁶ The music that the Jiménez brothers chose to play, and the music that the Jiménez Trio as an ensemble later performed, was almost entirely German.

The Musikalisches Wochenblatt and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik both reported regularly on students’ recitals (they were open to the public), and thus offered comments on the two brothers’ student recitals in 1870 and 1871. Lico, the pianist, was pretty good. He had “good musical sense” and supportive technique. But Lico’s cello-playing brother, Nicasio? He was stunning. The very first review of him, in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, states that he played the Georg Goltermann cello concerto “with a mastery that created general astonishment.” The critic could not believe Nicasio’s “beautiful, captivating tone, paired with his lyrical execution,” nor could he offer enough vociferous praise for how Nicasio was able to “playfully overcome the most difficult double stops and the fastest passages” with a “purity and conviction in intonation.” He had, in short, “all of the qualities of a splendid cello virtuoso.”⁷⁷ Other reviews in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt confirmed the critic’s account: keep an eye on this student, the reviews said, for his intonation, warm tone, and brilliant technique were the stuff of musical legend.⁷⁸

Figure 10. A studio recital concert program for students at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music, dated June 1, 1870. Featured are the Afro-Cuban musicians Manuel [Lico] Jiménez (piano) and Nicasio Jiménez (cello), who performed Felix Mendelssohn’s Cello Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 45. Courtesy of Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig, Hochschulbibliothek/Archiv.

Between 1872 and 1875, the Jiménez family toured across Europe as the Jiménez Negertrio, performing in at least fifty-six different cities.⁷⁹ Outside of the confines of their familiar home of Leipzig, away from friends, teachers, and critics who knew them well, they faced a greater variety of responses to their musicianship. One vein of reviews applauded the players for performing works from the Austro-German canon (especially Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Louis Spohr) with “noblesse” and artistry. Their training at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music was on full display for audiences to hear, and many applauded their musical choices and execution. The trio astounded audiences in Aachen in October 1875, for example, and the local critic’s praise, reprinted in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, indicates just how moving the ensemble could be. Lico demonstrated his “technical mastery, musical intelligence, and sensible handling” of the music, and he knew how to restrain his passion in a measured manner to perfectly execute his musical phrases on the piano. Nicasio possessed “impeccable technique, a pithy tone, and tasteful execution of his phrases,” and José gallantly led the trio through Mendelssohn with great understanding.⁸⁰ What the ensemble seemed to be especially known for was its intonation, even in different spaces and weather climates. They were comprised of a solidly good pianist with a better cellist (even negative reviews the ensemble received over the years stressed that the cellist was excellent), led by a violinist father who very much knew what he was doing and was in control of the ensemble.

Yet race nonetheless featured into the reviews of the trio. Critics found the appearance of the Jiménez Trio distracting at best or abhorrent at worst. One critic, for example, found the pianist Lico’s “black fingers, hopping up and down [on the piano keys] … sufficiently grotesque.”⁸¹ In an 1873 review of the Jiménez Trio’s performance of Schubert and Schumann lieder arrangements, music by Chopin, and Liszt’s fantasy on Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the reviewer noted, “At first glance, it may appear peculiar, almost comic, to hear the interpretation of works (besides Chopin) of German masters skillfully performed by Negroes.”⁸² Grotesque, strange, or bizarre, the Jiménez Trio did not look like classical musicians to these critics because they were Afro-Cuban.

One striking feature of concert reviews of the Jiménez Trio is their refusal to locate the trio’s national identity in Cuba, the Caribbean, or even simply in the New World. Written in a style that smacked of the colonial civilizing mission, a short report in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt on the Jiménez brothers’ student recitals simply called them “natives [Eingeborene] who have come to Leipzig to receive their artistic civilization.”⁸³ Much like how converts were baptized or converted to Christianity, the Jiménez Trio, too, had come to Central Europe to receive the blessings of musical civilization.

Many reviews did not conceive of the ensemble as Afro-Cuban but rather as African. One critic for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik stated that it had been “interesting” to watch “three sons of a wholly southern race of people render [music] in the spirit of Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin.”⁸⁴ A critic for the Musikalisches Wochenblatt misidentified the group as Ethiopian, stating that “From a cultural-historical standpoint, it is certainly impressive for us to think that the Ethiopian race has already conquered German music.”⁸⁵ Life in Germany would be turned on its head if, in the future, one could hear “Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 performed by court musicians of the Sultan of Wadai.”⁸⁶ Although the passage drips with sardonic language, it nonetheless speculates about a world in which Africans had conquered German music. At first a fantasy, Fatima El-Tayeb argues, white German fears of Black people conquering Germany became a growing concern.⁸⁷

What became implicit in reviews of the Jiménez Trio was that music critics tacitly understood classical music as a white genre of music—until the ensemble performed it. At one of Nicasio’s student recitals in Leipzig, a critic commented that Nicasio’s virtuosic cello-playing, beautiful intonation, and excellent bowing technique were so good that even “many of his white colleagues” were permitted to be jealous of him.⁸⁸ Nicasio played as well as—if not better than—a white student, thus demonstrating that classical music did not belong to white people.

While critics might have disagreed over some interpretive or technical aspects of the Jiménez Trio’s performances, they nonetheless heard the performances as legitimate concerts of classical music. The flashy sonic acts of the violin virtuoso Brindis de Salas, on the other hand, were anything but. From the beginning of his career in Central Europe, Claudio José Domingo Brindis de Salas Garrido (or, simply, Brindis de Salas) caused waves of excitement with his outrageous playing style and bombastic personality. Settling in Germany in 1880 and residing there until 1900 when he moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Brindis de Salas became a mirror reflecting German conversations about Black masculine musicality in the Kaiserreich. Like the Jiménez Trio and others, he traveled with other Spanish-speaking musicians, with white Americans, with women, and with Central European Jews when he toured Germany.⁸⁹ He performed many difficult pieces, including Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Beethoven’s Romance in F Major, Henryk Wieniawski’s Polonaise, and a Niccolò Paganini violin concerto.

The manner in which dozens of newspapers in Germany reported on Brindis de Salas gives us a whiff of the sensational. He was, according to different reports, an African violinist, the son of a Negro colonial officer stationed in Madrid, a native-born Martiniquais, and the grandson of an African Negro chieftain who had been sold into slavery and sent to Cuba. In the most patronizing version of the latter story, an African warrior chief died while en route to Havana, Cuba, and his son (Brindis de Salas’s father) was placed in the house of a Cuban gentleman who loved him so much that he eventually granted him his freedom and provided him with an education. This particular biography perpetuates a violent myth of the “good slave owner” because it praises the supposed Cuban gentleman for his magnanimity instead of recognizing the horrors of slavery to which Europeans subjected Africans. What seems to be clear from these different reports, however, is that from a young age, Brindis de Salas exhibited “the makings of such an excellent musician that his father had to send him to the Paris Conservatory.”⁹⁰ He trained with the violinists Charles Dancla and Hubert Léonard in Paris, he was supposedly the last student of Ferdinand David, and he earned accolades from the kings of Spain, Portugal, France, and Germany.⁹¹

It is still unclear what about his legacy is verifiable. Sometimes called the “Black Paganini,” Brindis de Salas was, according to different reports, given the French Legion of Honour, made a baron by Kaiser Wilhelm II, and married to a German noblewoman. “He was covered with orders,” the violinist Ovide Musin gossiped later in his 1920s memoir, “and when the old Emperor William of Germany gave a dinner at the palace to which de Salas was invited, and on his being presented to the Emperor, the latter exclaimed: ‘He is more decorated than I am.’ ”⁹² It is true that different newspapers called him a “Chevalier” by 1882, which implies that he had most likely received some honors or awards.

One example of Brindis de Salas’s musical activity that illustrates his unique musicianship is his frequent performance of the Austrian violinist and composer Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s showstopping Othello Fantasy as the concluding piece on his concert program. The fantasy is a medley that takes musical excerpts from acts 1 and 3 of Gioachino Rossini’s opera Othello. Full of tricky double, triple, and quadruple stops, harmonics, and difficult bowing, it is not a work for the faint of heart.⁹³ Playing the piece in tune is an Olympian feat, especially since some passages require the violinist to move quickly back and forth from a triple stop on the bottom register of the violin to the absolute top of the register. Ernst had earned a reputation as the heir to the infamous violinist Paganini, whose musical compositions stunned (and enraged) audiences in Europe for their extreme technical difficulties.

In playing this musical work, Brindis de Salas demonstrated that he also followed in the same tradition as other virtuosic violinists. Yet picking a work on the theme of Shakespeare’s Othello might also suggest an awareness of his own Black masculinity. He might have chosen it to capitalize on how audiences perceived him. Or it might have been a defiant gesture, a wink, or a nod. The figure of Othello, after all, was well known in European cultural productions in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century through performances of the character by Ira Aldridge, the African American Shakespearean actor. It might have been one of the most recognizable and potentially uplifting symbols of Black masculinity during Brindis de Salas’s European career.

But were Brindis de Salas’s musical performances any good? “Claptrap,” the Musical Times called his playing in Darmstadt in April 1885. Pure “claptrap.” The reviewer uttered one of the most damning statements one could proffer of a musician in the nineteenth century: “He is a virtuoso rather than an artist.” The reviewer complained, “The tone he produces from his instrument is devoid of power, yet his technical abilities are truly marvelous.”⁹⁴ Brindis de Salas seemed to represent everything reprehensible about the world of virtuosic performance in the nineteenth century.⁹⁵ A critic for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung registered his complaints in the opposite direction. Brindis’s technique was atrocious. “Not only notes but whole bars” were razed by Brindis de Salas’s haggard playing during his performance of Paganini’s Violin Concerto, and the audience had been forced to endure his plodding the whole night. “Mr. Brindis should keep his fingers away from Beethoven,” the reviewer condemned. “He doesn’t understand him.”⁹⁶

The most dismissive critics brought race to the center of their analysis: the only reason why audiences had been enthralled with Brindis de Salas was because he was Black. Right after declaring Brindis de Salas unfit to perform the music of Beethoven, the reviewer homed in on why there had been such an overwhelming commotion for him at the recital. “Understandably the applause was monstrous,” the reviewer dismissed, “because it’s not every day that one sees a Moor play the violin.”⁹⁷ It is remarkable, a reviewer for the Musikalisches Wochenblatt wrote, that Brindis de Salas had drummed up such a furor in the city of Berlin unlike anything the reviewer had seen in some time, because he was not very good. “The great excitement for Brindis de Salas,” the author concludes, had more to do with “appearance than with accomplishments.”⁹⁸ In Vienna, a similar remark: it was only because of his “interesting dark skin color” that the “Negro violinist” had won over his audiences. “Today,” the writer scorns, “there are dozens of violin virtuosos at the same midlevel position in their technique and intonation.”⁹⁹

Above all, critics enjoyed describing Brindis’s Blackness. Daniel Jütte argues, “Brindis virtually dropped—to use an image from Heinrich Hoffmann’s children’s book Der Struwwelpeter—into an inkpot of the journal and came out blacker than he’d ever been.”¹⁰⁰ The Heidelberger Zeitung called him “a real full-blooded Negro” and several other concert reviews contrasted his dark skin color against the whiteness of his fellow performers (one critic called him the direct “antipode” to his fellow performer, the noted Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate).¹⁰¹

Others instead saw Brindis de Salas as mixed race, but with dominant African features. A critic for the Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt came to the conclusion that Brindis “is not solely of Negro blood, for his mother belonged to a mixed race, while his retreating forehead, wooly hair, bulging lips are a wholly unmistakable Negro-type inherited from his father.”¹⁰² The reviewer’s 1882 article indicates how much stereotypes of Black bodies—wooly hair, big lips—had entered German musical culture and had been influenced by scientific racism. Jones was able to escape her Blackness by virtue of her supposedly high forehead; Brindis appeared in music criticism as a caricature of a grotesque Black man.

Not everyone, of course, spoke of Brindis de Salas in such dismissive and scathing tones. Some defended him. They admired his “exceptionally gifted artistic nature,” his “clean and beautiful” tone, elegant bowing, and solid technique.¹⁰³ Yet even those who sought to defend Brindis de Salas did so on racial grounds. His style and manner of playing, they argued, “are proof that the highest musical talent can be found also in the Black race and that the bounds of cultivation are not so narrowly drawn as people commonly accept.”¹⁰⁴

How much Brindis de Salas’s musicianship could be attributed to his race became another point of contention. Some critics painted his and other Black instrumentalists’ playing style as somehow ineluctably Black. A German music critic described Joseph White, for example, as “an entirely Black violinist … in whose playing lives the entire fervor of a still untapped natural peoples.”¹⁰⁵ Decades later, the Black German oboist and conductor Gustav Sabac el Cher received similar criticism when a writer for the Deutsche Zeitung complained that “in his conducting he cannot escape the distinctively nigger style of dance movement.”¹⁰⁶ In his memoir, Ovide Musin remembers discussing Brindis de Salas’s style of playing with his music teacher, Léonard. When Musin asked Léonard why he allowed Brindis de Salas to play differently, Léonard supposedly replied, “He plays like a Negro—the difference in nature; if he were to play as you do, it would not make any impression.”¹⁰⁷ Musin and possibly Léonard believed that Brindis de Salas’s playing style was a natural, instinctive, and inherent expression of his Blackness.

Yet other critics heard nothing Black in Brindis de Salas’s performances. For example, the same Stuttgart critic who loved Joseph White for “sounding Black” on the violin was disappointed to discover that Brindis de Salas offered nothing inherently Black in his musical style. His playing was good, the critic wrote, but “remarkably, we discovered straight away [that there was] very little in his playing that we understood to be of his race.”¹⁰⁸ The question of whether Blackness could be located in instrumental music is strikingly similar to German debates about the supposedly different nature of Black singers’ voices. Both discourses turned to biological racism to delineate sonic racial difference in Black musicality of whatever kind, vocal or instrumental.

German racial constructions of Black instrumentalists reached an apex in concert critics’ responses to Hazel Harrison in 1904, the first Black woman (and most likely first Black musician) to perform as a solo instrumentalist with the Berlin Philharmonic. Their reviews of her performance indicate how much listeners had come to rely on race to understand Black performances of classical music. A student of Ferruccio Busoni and Egon Petri, Harrison offered much of the usual fanfare required of a professional pianist at the time. Her May 1904 concert program, for example, reveals that she played six Chopin etudes, Schumann’s Piano Sonata in G Minor, and a Bach Prelude and Fugue before concluding the evening with two pieces: Moritz Moszkowski’s fiery Caprice Espagnol and an arrangement of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s, waltz Tales from the Vienna Woods.¹⁰⁹

Harrison’s accomplishments won her an opportunity to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic on October 22, 1904, making her the first Black woman to perform with the ensemble. She played Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E Minor and Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. Only a few reviews of Harrison exist. Many newspapers simply chose to ignore her performance. The reviews of Harrison that do exist focus on both her race and her gender as significant musical problems that she had to overcome in order to perform the music of white male composers.

Gendered language runs through music criticism of Harrison. Since at least the early nineteenth century, European music critics gendered instrumental music’s repertoire, arguing that “stereotypically masculine qualities of athletic bravura, interpretative and physical power, and showmanship” were requirements to perform much of it.¹¹⁰ In the estimation of many (male) critics, very few female pianists could rise above their gender to properly execute and interpret classical music. For example, in the case of the pianist Clara Schumann, Alexander Stefaniak writes, critics argued that she was able to perform her husband’s music so well because she could “make her own subjectivity recede, projecting only the male composer’s work.”¹¹¹ It was necessary to male critics, in other words, for women pianists to overcome their gender in order to give convincing musical performances.

Harrison apparently failed this challenge. Some critics praised her technique, calling it “smooth and fluid.”¹¹² “She plays with clean, accurate technique and a delightful touch,” a Berlin reviewer writes, “and her reading revealed a true musical nature.”¹¹³ However, most listeners seemed to think she lacked the rigor to see the whole concerto through, and one critic suggested that her “careless use of pedal” destroyed the piece’s clarity.¹¹⁴ Walther Pauli complained that “her performance was flat and expressionless” because she lacked physical power.¹¹⁵ Although it is impossible to gauge the veracity of these comments, they nonetheless suggest a gendered viewing of Harrison’s musicianship by implying that Harrison lacked (masculine) robust properties to properly execute a rigorous concert program.

Not only did critics discuss Harrison in a gendered manner but they also picked apart her racial appearance. As with reviews of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Brindis de Salas, and the Black Pattis in Berlin, German critics debated the use of the term Black to describe Harrison. Most reviews did not call her Black or a Negro at all, but concluded that Harrison was biracial. “This is the first time a colored girl has ever played in Berlin,” observed one critic, “and the first time I’ve ever heard a mulatto in a serious composition in public.”¹¹⁶ As a supposedly mixed-race woman, these reviews state, Harrison offered listeners something exciting and new in classical music, overturning their assumption that most Black musicians belonged to the realm of minstrelsy or vaudeville.

Her race was also used to explain the qualities of her performance. For example, one critic concluded that Harrison was able to convey the “beautiful melancholy of Chopin,” because “melancholy is a characteristic of the young woman’s race.”¹¹⁷ In so doing, the critic attributed her performance not to her talent, hard work, or musical intellect, but to a quality perceived to be inherent in African Americans. Harrison had nothing to do with her own musical accomplishments.

This same reviewer’s praise of Harrison also relied on white supremacist ideas of Black primitivism to assess its merits. The critic states that her performance was remarkable because “the colored race has thus far done nothing worth mentioning in music.”¹¹⁸ His comments thus reinforced the Hegelian notion that Black people stood outside histories of intellectual, cultural, and technological progress. Michelle Wright rightly points out that these formulations were always paradoxes: “[Black people’s existence] is constantly denied any role of importance, and yet its implied inferiority is the crux of Europeans’ arguments for their ostensibly self-evident superiority.”¹¹⁹ In other words, upholding assumptions of Black primitivism was necessary for European critics such as Harrison’s to maintain the white supremacist ideology that German musical culture was superior.

Figure 11. A portrait photo of the African American pianist Hazel Harrison, undated. Atlanta University Photographs, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library.

The critic also attributed any Black success to white help. “Our best Negro songs are not the product of the Black race, but of that white genius, Stephen C. Foster, and a freak like Blind Tom [Thomas Wiggins] does not count, because he is not a musical nature, but simply a marvelous imitator,” the critic continued. White intelligence and white cultivation were behind any Black accomplishments. Black people could not create, only imitate. Yet Harrison’s performance indicated to this critic that perhaps Black people were almost ready to enter the realm of high art. Like reviews of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Harrison’s performance represented the potential Black people possessed to overcome their supposed cultural backwardness and enter into Western civilization. Rarely, however, did Black musicians ever seem to meet that goal. Yet for those who understood Black musicianship as this critic did, Harrison symbolized the potential successes of racial uplift, achieved only through white intervention and musical schooling that allowed her to rise above her race’s musical inadequacies.

The critic concludes his review by reformulating the question of whether nature or culture was responsible for Harrison’s musical performance. Is Harrison “a musical prophet arisen among the colored race, like Booker T. Washington, to show by her example what others can do if they will try,” he asked, “or is it the Caucasian blood in her veins that is doing the work, for she is not a full blooded Negress?”¹²⁰ In other words: was Harrison successful in the concert hall because of her cultural upbringing or because of some inherently perceived whiteness?

Both theories are deeply flawed. First, the writer’s supposition that Black musical success was (potentially) attainable through hard work negates the fact that Black musicians had been performing serious concert music in Germany since at least the 1870s—and it ignores the history of earlier generations of Black musicians such as George Bridgetower, a Black violinist and composer who was one of Beethoven’s contemporaries and friends in the early nineteenth century. It also dismisses any African American musical achievement in the United States and Europe prior to Harrison’s performance as meaningless or a byproduct of Black laziness.

Second, the reviewer’s alternate theory that Harrison’s performance succeeded because of the “Caucasian blood in her veins that is doing the work” reinforces white supremacy and biological racism. In this formulation, Harrison simply had to have been born mixed race in order to successfully perform this music. The critic’s comment extols a different kind of “one drop rule” than the one that plagued American racism. If “one drop” of African ancestry made a man or woman ineluctably Black in the United States, the critic in this case suggests that Harrison’s theoretical “one drop” of whiteness rescues her from Blackness’ lamentable musical inferiority. Moreover, the critic revises the transatlantic trope that Black people have a “natural” musical ability by instead insisting that, for classical music, Blackness was not enough to interpret the sophisticated works of the “great masters.” Whiteness was, in this estimation, a necessary qualification to perform classical music.

What is especially striking about these comments is that they appeared during an era in which growing fears of miscegenation became more pronounced in German society. In German colonial South West Africa, for example, the administration enforced a strict one drop rule that relegated all children born of white German men and African women to the status of African “natives.”¹²¹ Unlike Harrison, they were not protected by their white blood. Indeed, El-Tayeb writes, “ ‘mixing’ between the Black and white race was condemned as ‘unnatural’ and disastrous not only for the offspring itself, but for all mankind.”¹²² Yet reviews of Harrison, Jones, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers suggest that white ancestry was responsible for “rescuing” these Black musicians from themselves.

While scholarship has focused heavily on constructs of race in discourses of the voice, instrumentalists have often escaped our historical analyses. Yet reviews of Black instrumentalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also illustrate how listeners perceived of racial difference in instrumental concerts. Many of the same racial practices found in white German music criticism of Black singers such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers or Jones also worked their way into a performance of something as supposedly benign as a cello sonata or a Grieg piano concerto. In no genre or repertoire of music were Black musicians able to escape white music critics’ evaluations of them in ways that did not reinforce anti-Black assumptions of racial difference. Their perceived Blackness—or invisible whiteness—could always be attributable to their musical performances, for good or for ill.

Black Belonging, White Silence, and Racial Synesthesia

In 1909, five years after Harrison’s debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, a stormy colonial debate reached parliament about a Black musician named Gustav Sabac el Cher—the son of an African man and a German woman who had joined the Prussian military and served as bandleader. Eduard von Liebert, a member of parliament and the former governor of German East Africa, brought to parliament’s attention a shocking fact: Black musicians were currently serving in the German military.¹²³ “It has come to my attention—and I wish it weren’t so,” von Liebert lamented, “that a Prussian cavalier regiment has a Negro for a drummer and a Prussian infantry regiment has a Negro for—I don’t know, for a Kapellmeister or a drumming major.” If Black musicians were indeed part of the German military, then their presence would be an egregious transgression because the commanders would then have “absolutely no racial feeling and absolutely no racial pride.”¹²⁴ Von Liebert charged, “I would like to see a Briton or an American subordinated to a colored man—this is unthinkable! It would end in rebellion and mutiny.”¹²⁵ He concluded, “We know too well the good and the bad sides of the Ethiopian race and they should not be permitted to be placed above or near our own soldiers.”¹²⁶

Gustav Sabac el Cher, born and raised in Berlin and a former student at the Royal Academy of Musical Performing Arts in Berlin, had actually sued and won against a newspaper the year before for proliferating such slander.¹²⁷ But Von Liebert’s comments only a year later demonstrate the terrible growing power of white German definitions of Blackness, whiteness, and Germanness in music. Von Liebert denies any possibility that Black musicians such as Sabac el Cher—who had German citizenship—could ever be considered German. Much like concert reviews of Black performers, many of which dismissed any lurking assumption that Blackness and Germanness could combine, von Liebert’s remarks make it clear that a Black person had no business in German settings.¹²⁸

German reception of Black classical musicians, appearing intermittently from the 1870s through the 1910s, illustrates that constructs of Blackness, whiteness, Germanness, and music were not peripheral to German musical culture in the nineteenth century but rather very much at its center. Listeners heard the music of the great masters in a racial key and dictated their interpretations of Black performers accordingly. Racially unmarked for so long, classical music became an audible signifier of a white, European culture (against a supposedly primitive, non-European one) only when listeners were forced to think about classical music’s racial alternatives.

The legacies of German concert criticism in this regard have been profound. First, the presentation of Black classical musicians as a strange but temporary phenomenon, outside the bounds of the world of German music, ensured that their performances would not survive in established narratives of German music history. The German press’s refusal to comment on Harrison is an especially informative case study. Their silence implies that they considered Harrison’s performance to be nothing more than a fleeting moment, unworthy of commemoration. In refusing to create a written record of her performance, newspaper editors and writers ensured that such performances would be forgotten in Germany once they left living memory. Figures such as the Jiménez Trio and Harrison have become ghosts to us, even though they had strong relationships to institutional figures (Wagner) and musical institutions (Berlin Philharmonic). Art music’s Black musical past was never public because it was never meant to be public. Always marginalized or treated as anomalies, Black classical musicians’ experiences in Central Europe are a historical lesson in the conjoined forces of racism and nationalism in Central European music.

Second, German concert criticism suggests in general the power of synesthesia. The aesthetic pleasure that a listener derived from a sonic encounter had to be explained in visual terms. The defined or well-articulated relationship between sight and sound was of course something that already existed in German musical culture. As Nicholas Cook argues, in their quest for “pure music” listeners tried to divorce sight from sound by the mid-nineteenth century, darkening concert halls in order to supposedly hear sounds better. Such activity, he warns, “is always an indicator that ideology is at work.”¹²⁹ The notion that what listeners saw could determine what they heard, I argue, took on a racial dimension in the nineteenth century as audiences made sense of perceived visual differences embodied by Black performers. This relationship between sight and sound, so often relegated to the realm of “Black music,” greatly affected classical music as well.

Relatedly, wittingly or unwittingly, Central European audiences practiced a form of colorism in their reception of Black performers. Sometimes they attended a performance because they wanted to see a performer who was “fully Black.” Other times, they praised a Black musician such as Jones or Harrison for their bronze or “chocolate brown” appearance. In reality, what audiences saw in front of them was more varied or mixed than they had anticipated. Yet frequently German music criticism indicates a hierarchy of Blackness that worked in close proximity to the performer’s perceived whiteness (or lack thereof). Hence, a concert critic could believe that because Harrison appeared biracial, she was able to perform classical music. Sight and sound worked in tandem in nefarious ways.

Third, the rhetoric of the civilizing mission ideology, of saving Black people from themselves through classical music, meant that audiences found it difficult to acknowledge Black merit independent of white magnanimity. Brindis de Salas’s family was “saved” by white Spanish plantation owners, Jones was plucked from obscurity by Edison, and even Harrison’s redeeming virtues as a performer could be explained by her perceived white ancestry.

In sum, Black musicians’ performances of classical music in the nineteenth century were not free from the politics of race. German musical culture did not abstain from the transatlantic project of anti-Black racism. Classical musicians and critics in Central Europe formed their own definitions of Blackness in relation to music, even as they applauded Black performers for appearing on their stages.