Conclusion

In the 1968 film Gottes zweite Garnitur (God’s second string), a white German family invites an American GI over for dinner—only to have the evening go terribly awry. Made for West German public television, the film functions as a German-speaking version of the 1967 classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which depicted a white upper-class family torn over their daughter’s romance with an African American doctor. Premiering only a year after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Gottes zweite Garnitur tells the story of a young white German woman who falls in love with an African American soldier to the great concern of her white fiancé and his family.

The film begins by depicting the Fehringer family and Claire Heggelbacher, their future daughter-in-law, waiting anxiously for an unknown American soldier to arrive at their front door. The family had invited the soldier over for Christmas dinner as part of a local initiative to take in American troops separated from their loved ones over the holidays. In preparation for the occasion, the father purchased a Beethoven recording to give to the American as a form of cultural exchange because it was “sophisticated” and “above all else, German!” But upon discovering that their guest was Black, the family bickers over whether to give the gift at all. In a heated conversation in the kitchen about what to do with their now-inappropriate present, someone exclaims, “What would a Negro do with Beethoven?!”¹ It had been perfectly acceptable for the family to give their gift of Beethoven to the American soldier when they had believed him to be white. Yet the soldier’s Blackness, to their eyes, rendered their gift useless. Blackness and Beethoven had nothing to do with each other.

Their assumption was not uncommon. Since at least the nineteenth century, white Germans have questioned Black people’s relationship to German music. The purpose of my book has been not only to showcase the number of Black performances of canonical German composers over time but also to uncover the hidden racial logics that then erased their presence on German stages. The story of Black classical musicians in Central Europe is a story of both Black musicians performing Beethoven and white Germans who forgot them. The white family in Gottes zweite Garnitur could claim ignorance about the history of Black classical musicians because West German racial thinking made it possible for them to do so—even after Rudolph Dunbar had conducted the Berliner Philharmonic in 1945, even after Grace Bumbry sang in Bayreuth in 1961, even after countless Black musicians had landed prominent contracts with opera houses or orchestras across Germany and Austria.

Yet in nearly every way imaginable the white German family’s neat bifurcation of Beethoven and Blackness was wrong. In fact, a Black classical musician was part of Beethoven’s musical circle during the composer’s lifetime: the Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower. Born in Biała, Poland, to a Polish mother and an Afro-Caribbean father who was personal page to Nikolaus I, Prince Esterházy (1714–90), at his estate in Eisenstadt (now in Austria), Bridgetower most likely spent his childhood in Eisenstadt taking lessons from the legendary composer Joseph Haydn.² As an adult, he began his musical career in the cities of Dresden and Vienna before settling in England in 1811. Beethoven dedicated his fiery and technically demanding Violin Sonata no. 9, op. 47, to Bridgetower after befriending him in 1803. Indeed, its name, “Sonata Mulattica,” leaves no question. After an altercation over a mutual love interest, the two stopped speaking and Beethoven chose to rename it “Kreutzer Sonata” for the violinist Rudolph Kreutzer instead—without Kreutzer’s knowledge. Beethoven’s notoriously difficult violin sonata, part of the Austro-German canon, symbolizes Austria and Germany’s lasting musical dominance in European history. But Beethoven’s initial dedication of the musical work to Bridgetower tells us that, contrary to the family’s skepticism in Gottes zweite Garnitur, Western art music was never divorced from Black people.³

It is important to note that the cultural token the family wished to share with the visiting soldier is a musical one. German music’s supposed universality, established in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lasted well through the twentieth, becoming part of both Germanies’ strategies of rehabilitation and renewal after 1945. For example, Friedrich Meinecke’s 1946 rumination on the disasters of Nazism and WWII, The German Catastrophe, turns to the power of German music as a restorative force in German society. Meinecke asks, “What is more individual and German than the great German music from Bach to Brahms?” To Meinecke, German music could rehabilitate German honor, for it alone could express the German spirit while also still possessing a “universal Occidental effect.”⁴ Unfortunately, by the time Meinecke penned his book, German public discourse had made anything deemed Black an exception from German music’s “universal Occidental effect,” whether that was African or African American. German music’s universality often rested on listeners’ assumptions of its whiteness.

Indeed, in the same year that Meinecke wrote his book, German-speaking listeners were already weaponizing German music’s universality against any racial undesirables. A young housewife in postwar West Germany, for example, spoke out against a Duke Ellington film screened by the American military’s US Information Control Division in the most vicious and racist terms. “It fills me with disgust to look at these bestial faces and to listen to this horrible music,” she stated. “It is depressing for us white people to attend such a session. Give each race its own. Let the Negro listen to his own music; he might like it better. We Germans delight in the creations of the great German masters of German music.”⁵ Her demarcation of Black and white, bestial and civilized, un-German and German could not be drawn in sharper relief.

What is imperative to hear in this woman’s remarks is not her derision of jazz but rather her praise of German music. As we continue to have conversations in musicology and history about the creation of the canon and of German cultural works, it is important to consider that what we know about Western art music comes from this particularly German framework—one that considers Black people to be outside of it. Musicological scholarship on the whiteness of classical music is growing, but it has yet to consider how German musical culture itself might have contributed to the problem of musical gatekeeping that transatlantic racism created.⁶

Black performances of German music, however, have routinely exposed the music’s political, national, and racial affiliations, in spite of its universalist claims. Indeed, the reasons why Black musical performances have posed such significant threats to the racial and national order were precisely because they were performances of cultural citizenship. African American classical musicians in particular were powerful in this regard. Deemed outsiders to Germany, they nonetheless became cultural chameleons who could perform German cultural identity and linguistic fluency in such an effective manner that white listeners were forced to contend with the question of just what, exactly, Germanness was and to whom it belonged. If, for example, an African American concert singer could sound like a German on the concert stage then, in theory, anyone could. Black performances of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms suggested that German identity was not contingent upon whiteness but rather could be learned through study and musical mastery. For these reasons, intentionally or not, Black musicians constantly challenged the Black-white binary that shaped German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For these very same reasons, however, German-speaking listeners responded to Black classical musicians by reestablishing racial orders and listening regimes, even in new and radically different political circumstances. Listeners consistently drew upon older models and forms of recognition to make sense of the sounds that they heard, even reaching decades back to earlier modes of racial listening to explain their acceptance or rejection of a Black musician’s interpretation of the most canonical composer. Across decades, white listeners racially marked Black voices as different through language that described them as guttural or negroid. In 1972, for example, a critic for DIE ZEIT noted that the African American soprano Jessye Norman possessed a Mozart-like subtlety to her musicianship without the “corpulent, guttural timbre of her other colored female colleagues from [Leontyne] Price to Bumbry.”⁷ As we saw in chapter 5, this practice also existed in earlier decades. In the 1930s, Marian Anderson’s concert manager and accompanist also praised Anderson for lacking the guttural quality they believed that they heard in most Black voices. Such praise illuminates different kinds of racial logic. In each example—both before and after the Nazi racial state—the white listener rendered Black voices biologically different and even deviant. Simultaneously, praising Black women’s musicianship by distancing it from other Black artists meant rescuing those musicians from any associations with Blackness itself. Elevating Black musicians, in short, often meant whitening them.

In addition to racializing Black voices, white listeners often insisted on understanding Black musicianship only through a particular lens of Black authenticity—located outside of Germany—and in so doing reduced Black musicality to well-worn, reliable stereotypes of American Blackness, thus denying the full and rich spectrum of Black talent and creativity. Black classical musicians’ successes or failures in performing Schubert or Brahms could, at times, only be explained through well-established tropes of sorrowful plantation slavery or wild, primeval jazz. Oftentimes, Black classical musicians only made sense to white listeners when they sang African American spirituals, even if the Black performer was German born or, like Norman, simply uninterested in gospel. “Some people ask me why I don’t sing Jazz or spirituals,” she stated in an interview for the New York Times in 1973. “I can’t sing them, that’s why.”⁸ Unfortunately, the stereotype of the Black entertainer and the assumption that African American musicians were pious Christian worshippers or cultural degenerates had real effects on Black people living and working in West Germany and Austria. In 1964, the African American jazz musician Eric Dolphy, Jr. collapsed onstage during a performance in Berlin. Because doctors assumed that he had taken ill due to a drug overdose, they left him untreated, not realizing that he was actually suffering from diabetic shock. He died shortly thereafter.⁹

Black Germans have historically borne the brunt of this violent process of aural bifurcation between Blackness and whiteness in German history. Their performances of German identity have long been challenged, questioned, or rejected—rarely understood as German outright. Their biographies indicate that far too often, how German listeners determined the legitimacy or validity of a Black person’s performance—musical or otherwise—had little to do with questions of cultural immersion or fluency but rather what Rosina Lippi-Green calls “the social identity of the messenger.”¹⁰ In other words: public conversations on the accuracy, veracity, and validity of a performance by a person of color have historically functioned as barriers to cultural citizenship.

The experiences of the Afro-German singer and dancer Marie Nejar offer striking examples of everyday racism (Alltagsrassismus) and how white listeners rejected Black Germans’ daily performances of Germanness. Born and raised in Hamburg in the 1930s and 1940s, Nejar recalls in her memoir her experience trying to make a cash transfer at a local post office. Before she could even fully articulate her request, the white German clerk stopped her from speaking further: the woman claimed that she could not understand Nejar and stated that she refused to work with foreigners since they did not understand the German language.¹¹ Nejar’s native German language sounded inscrutable to the white German woman’s ears. Another example is equally illuminating. Once, while Nejar was purchasing items in a grocery store, a white German cashier asked her “how [she] could speak such perfect German.” Nejar replied that German was her mother tongue, to which the white German woman behind her in line replied, “But that can’t be. You’re not of our stock.”¹² Nejar’s Blackness prevented her from being understood as German to white ears. Black performances of German identities—whether an African American soprano or a Black German woman at the store—have been subject to “willful mishearings” because the performers’ appearances (Black) did not match how they sounded (European, ergo white).¹³

Similarly, in a contemporary context, the demand for Black authenticity has meant that Black Germans still find themselves being tasked with performing modes of Blackness that have nothing to do with their own biographies or family histories. Kevin John Edusei, a Black German musician and the conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra, notes that he occasionally receives requests to conduct orchestral works associated with African American music, such as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. “I mean those [musical pieces] are all well and nice but I’m not an American,” Edusei joked in a 2016 interview. “I actually have a stronger connection to Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.”¹⁴ Edusei’s story is part of a larger history of Black German music-making tied to white German expectations created by the transatlantic musical marketplace. His story is reminiscent of Black German musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, who had taken up performing jazz—not because they felt an affinity for the music but rather because it offered guaranteed work. It was irrelevant, Robbie Aitken observes, “whether Africans played African Americans or vice versa, what counted was the performer’s skin color and the authenticity or at least the illusion of authenticity of their supposed otherness that this brought.”¹⁵ Black authenticity, however artificially understood, drove white listeners’ demands for Black musicianship—sometimes over Black musicians’ own desires, interests, training, or capabilities.

But Black people claimed Germanness sonically and musically anyway, and in so doing constantly undermined what appeared to be both German and universal at the same time. From the moment Jessye Norman debuted as Elisabeth in Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1969—a year after the film Gottes zweite Garnitur appeared on West German televisions—she rejected white expectations of her.¹⁶ Even though Norman preferred to sing the music of Wagner and Strauss, she observed, “People look at me and say ‘Aida.’ ”¹⁷ Norman spent a lifetime rejecting roles in operas that Black women were hired to sing—Aida, Porgy and Bess, or Italian operas such as Verdi’s Don Carlos. Instead, she chose to make her mark in the opera world as a Wagnerian soprano. As a lieder singer, Norman became known for her renditions of works by Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Strauss and later gravitated toward Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and Mahler’s Rückert Lieder. Most remarkable, early in her career Norman also began to program music that even most opera singers hesitated to touch. She sang not only Wagner but also Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Leoš Janácˇek, and Olivier Messiaen. Moreover, she demonstrated her mastery over German music by offering her own German translations of the pieces she sang and by giving interviews in German on German radio.¹⁸ Comparing her to the white German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and the white German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, German critics declared her diction perfect and every note that she sang imbued with meaning.

Throughout her career in Germany and in the United States, Norman was absolutely unapologetic about being Black and a singer of German repertoire. When asked about being Black in the world of Western art music, Norman was quick to shut down any needling questions about her success. “I don’t feel guilty about making it in a largely white or European world—not at all,” she stated.¹⁹ “She gave me this look,” the African American dancer Bill T. Jones once recalled, following a rehearsal on a collaborative performance project on civil rights history and the anti-apartheid struggle. “I think, that as African American artists working in very Eurocentric environments, it was her way of saying, ‘I am in touch with who I am.’ ”²⁰

Moreover, Norman attributed the successes of her Germanic career to her time as a student at Howard, an HBCU, as well as to other Black musicians—not to European teachers. Repeatedly in her career, she stated in interviews that Black women such as Anderson, Price, Dorothy Maynor, and Mattiwilda Dobbs “made it possible for me to say, ‘I will sing French opera’ or ‘I will sing German opera,’ instead of being told, ‘You will sing ‘Porgy and Bess.’ ”²¹ She acknowledged, in other words, that her career as a singer of Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg had been able to flourish because of Black classical musicians who had come before her in Europe and in the United States. Norman’s insistence on crediting other Black musicians and institutions for her education also suggests that learning German music was no longer dependent on white German teachers. Musical Germanness did not belong to the purview of white Germans alone. Norman’s experience suggests that constructing Germanness is, indeed, a global project, formed by contributors both in- and outside of German-speaking Europe.²²

In a contemporary context, people of African descent continue to push back against white definitions of German national identity through musical performance. The Berlin-based Nigerian sound and installation artist Emeka Ogboh’s 2015 piece The Song of the Germans effectively demonstrates what it means for Black artists to join and thus to change a conversation to which they have, historically, not been invited. First appearing at the 2015 Venice Art Biennale, the sound installation features a choir of African refugees singing the German national anthem in unison in ten different African languages (Igbo, Yoruba, Bamoun, More, Twi, Ewondo, Sango, Douala, Kikongo, and Lingala). The sound installation thus dismantles long-standing ideas of just what the German national anthem sounds like and for whom it resonates.

Ogboh’s choice to have different African refugees sing the German national anthem works on multiple levels because of the melody’s complex history. The tune for the anthem itself has historically been vulnerable to different national interpretations. Taken from the second movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, op. 76, the melody is part of the Austro-German canon and its shared tradition in both countries reflects the importance of classical music to national identity formation in German-speaking Europe. Most important, the words assigned to the melody have changed repeatedly over time. Perhaps for these reasons the melody has been the basis for two Austrian national anthems in addition to the German national anthem. First assigned to Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor in 1797 (“Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser”), the tune later functioned as the anthem for the newly-created Austrian republic in the 1920s. In the case of modern German history, the poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben first set the melody to words (“Das Lied der Deutschen”) in 1841, and it became the national anthem of Germany under the Weimar Republic in 1922.

In other words: the “nationality” of Germany’s national anthem has always been contested. In Vienna in 1938, for example, shortly before Hitler’s annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, rowdy crowds in the capital city attending the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg’s defiant speech sang three completely different political anthems at the same time, all of them using the same “German” melody by Haydn: one group sang the old Habsburg anthem, another the new Austrian national anthem created in 1929 that represented the Austrian republic, and the last group sang the German nationalist one. All three versions relied on Haydn’s tune as the basis for their visions of an Austrian, German, or Austro-German future. Since 1945 and the collapse of the Third Reich, it has been hard to shake the German national anthem’s Nazi connotations. In postwar West Germany, the state commissioned a new anthem in 1950, only for it to fail in popularity and for the government to return to Haydn’s melody. To eradicate any further ties to Nazism, however, West Germany declared that only the third verse of the song—and not its more contentious first verse (“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”)—could be sung.

Ogboh’s sound installation reclaims the “Song of the Germans.” For the version at the 2015 Venice Art Biennale, the chorus of African voices sings in E-flat major, the key most commonly performed today. Yet the unrecognizability (to most German speakers) of the words the African refugees are using to sing the anthem unsettles its textual meaning. To further complicate matters, each singer’s voice projects through an individual stereo speaker, and the only information telling visitors about the language employed is a label underneath the stereo. No textual translation is provided, forcing visitors to trust the African translation of the German anthem. Yet the melody still sounds German, even if the words are not. Linguistic fluency in German is not, in this case, a requirement in order for the German national anthem to be sung—or recognized as such. Even if Ogboh’s anthem sounds unrecognizable to German speakers, it is recognizable to the African refugees singing it. Their knowledge, in this case, matters more than that of German speakers. Ogboh’s installation thus blows up the question of whether fluency is necessary for Black people to perform Germanness. Rather than waste his time trying to answer it, Ogboh’s work chooses to ignore the question altogether.

Because the visitor encounters the African singer only through a stereo speaker, Ogboh’s artwork rejects the (usually white) audience’s desire to see Black people sing. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, white German audiences had become conditioned to see a Black man or woman and anticipate a kind of sonic authentic Blackness. For example, in the 1920s, the Jewish-German critic Rudolf Arnheim said upon hearing a choir of African American singers perform spirituals, “One must see these Negroes when they sing.” They sing, he writes, “exactly like they look, and they each look a little forbidden, if one takes our cosmetic ideal of beauty as a basis.”²³ The relationship between sight and sound was intertwined in German culture, as German listeners became accustomed to both seeing and hearing Blackness as part of the same synesthetic experience. Yet Ogboh’s sound art challenges the viewer to sever the ties between sight and sound that transatlantic racism had bound. Moreover, Ogboh’s work calls into question the relationship of the racialized body to German national identity. Who could sing the German national anthem? By divorcing the body of the performer from the music itself, Ogboh’s installation lays bare the long-standing assumptions of just whose music this was and to whom it belonged.

Part of Ogboh’s motivation to create this sonic piece was his frustration with German assimilationist narratives. As a Nigerian artist living in Berlin, Ogboh is well aware of white German demands of him in relation to his perceived African identity and he has repeatedly questioned contemporary rhetoric encouraging integration and assimilation. In June 2018, for example, the art curator Okwui Enwezor, another Nigerian involved in Germany’s contemporary art scene, stepped down from his position as director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst. Among Enwezor’s complaints at his former position was white German treatment of him as an African in the Bavarian capital. “Some people do not even bother to pronounce my name correctly,” he told Der Spiegel, “but they demand that I speak German.”²⁴ Ogboh, who had worked with Enwezor at the Venice Art Biennale, understood his colleague’s complaint. “This is what migration is all about, it’s not one-sided,” he said. “You give and you take. If someone has to speak German, good—but also make an attempt to understand where they’re from.”²⁵ The politics of German language and German identity, in Ogboh’s case, might have little to do with who speaks it. Singing the German anthem in any language could, perhaps, free the singer and the listener to imagine German national identity as a global, mutually-shared process.

In both Norman and Ogboh’s cases, German music takes on different, deeper meanings because of the musicians performing it. If white German audiences demanded that Black musicians shed their Blackness in order to perform “universal” German art music, Norman and Ogboh’s artistic practices—based on their own African or African American histories—argue just the opposite. Rather, Black musicianship opens up the potential for developing and pushing the concept of musical Germanness to richer and more riveting places and provides a better and more meaningful representation of Western art music in all its diversity and multiplicity.

The story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe reveals the Austro-German canon’s globality all along, even while audiences in Austria and Germany constantly found ways to undermine or erase any traces of Blackness from their histories. Austro-German musical life was a revolving door, accepting Black musicians onto German and Austrian stages in greater number than the United States and elsewhere while also rejecting the very premise that Black musicianship could exist outside of an exotic racial frame. But Black musicians from the Americas, the Caribbean, and from within Europe studied and performed anyway. Their stories are ones of resilience, true, but also of musical mastery.

In 1952, years before Gottes zweite Garnitur made its premiere, the African American music critic Nora Holt expressed the same sentiment: “It is becoming a bit out-of-date, and we might add, discriminative, to label American Negro singers of professional stature as unqualified to interpret the works of such masters as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, German lieder, or operatic roles in which they have proved their capabilities.”²⁶ Indeed, as we have seen, Black performances of the Austro-German canon have been subject to scrutiny since at least the nineteenth century. But instead of marginalizing their musicianship by framing it within the language of exceptionalism and exoticism, this book places Black music-making—and Black lives—at the center of our musical and historical narratives. In doing so, a richer and more resonant story has emerged, one of a global musical past and Black diasporic present in Germany and Austria. Black people have been part of German-speaking Europe’s musical history all along. We simply had to listen.