Chapter 4

Blackness and Classical Music in the Age of the Black Horror on the Rhine Campaign

Even before Roland Hayes stepped onto the stage in the Konzerthaus Berlin’s Ludwig van Beethoven Hall in May of 1924, Berlin residents had already begun to express their outrage. Prior to his arrival that night, some Germans had protested his appearance in front of the American Embassy and called for his concert’s cancellation. In fiery letters to German newspapers, they argued that his presence onstage would remind Germans of the “Black Horror on the Rhine,” a derogatory term referring to the stationing of French colonial troops from North and West Africa in the occupied Rhine region of Germany after WWI. Numbering approximately eighty-five thousand at their height between 1920 and 1921, the soldiers drew the ire of contemporary white German men and women, who spread racist, highly sexualized, propagandistic images depicting Black men raping white women to denounce what they deemed to be a Black invasion on German soil.¹

Because of German outrage, the American consul general warned the young Hayes, who was in Prague that summer studying German lieder, not to visit Germany until the Allied army occupation had withdrawn from the Rhine region. International newspapers picked up on the furor of Berlin locals and reported about the potential scandal his Liederabend posed. As a precaution, Hayes traveled to Berlin from Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, with a few Czech friends to make his arrival look less conspicuous. Once in the glittering capital, he discovered that he had not been banned from performing in the city and he arrived at the prestigious Beethovensaal the night of his performance with no difficulties.²

Nonetheless, when a visibly nervous Hayes arrived onstage to perform, he heard the sounds of booing and jeering from the audience. As parts of the crowd roared against the sight of him onstage, he began to softly sing the Schubert lullaby, “Du bist die Ruh.” His performance quietly won over the audience, and, according to multiple reports, the crowd’s roar quieted to a still silence. After the last notes of Schubert’s lied had floated through the concert hall, the audience burst into applause. By the end of the evening, the Konzerthaus boomed with boisterous praise for this African American tenor from rural Georgia.

Hayes’s story that May of 1924 encapsulates so many of the changes that shaped Black classical musicians’ performances in the interwar era and how audiences listened to them. Prior to WWI and the collapse of the Habsburg and German empires, Black classical musicians were an exotic sight in Central Europe but not necessarily a threatening one. If anything, their performances were sonic spectacles signifying a changing global terrain during the first era of mass entertainment. Not anymore. Following the destruction caused by WWI and the high rise of inflation that debilitated the economies of a greatly reduced postcolonial Germany and a newly formed postimperial Austria, audiences in German-speaking Europe began to treat Black classical musicians as a threat to Austro-German culture.

What is important to understand is that constructs of Blackness had not, in actuality, changed that drastically in the period after WWI. In fact, there was more overlap in cultural discourses of Blackness between the late nineteenth century and the interwar era than scholars have thus far assumed or discussed. From the 1880s through the 1920s, scientists, scholars, and artists consistently assumed that Black cultures were inherently more primitive than European high culture, and mass culture and visual culture depicted them as such. German and Austrian audiences frequently relied on the same racist notions of Black bodies, sounds, and cultures, steeped in colonialist and white supremacist ideologies, to interpret the Black performances they were witnessing. Black American popular culture, now in the form of jazz instead of the cakewalk, was still to German minds a tantalizing, exotic product made by outsiders and consumed by a white audience that cultural critics frequently denounced as wild and reckless. Moreover, listeners continued to assume that Blackness and Germanness were two separate and even incompatible markers of identity, even when performances muddled them together sonically. In the same vein, listeners continued to racialize classical music itself as white. Continuities abound, then, in how audiences understood Black bodies and Black cultures between the late nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries.

Although attitudes might not have changed that much, the consequences of listening to a Black performer had altered considerably. Against the backdrop of the stationing of French colonial troops and the Black Horror propaganda campaign that followed, Black classical musicians arriving in Germany found themselves in an economic climate of both unimaginable riches and extreme poverty. Their dynamic careers in Germany and Austria represented to a large array of listeners both the immense new opportunities and tragic pitfalls of their transatlantic age. Embodied in their performances was a variety of new experiences and realities with which audiences were forced to contend. Black classical musicians and their listeners were part of an ever-moving kaleidoscope of social, economic, and political changes that shaped Austro-German musical culture. They represented what Moritz Föllmer calls the “multiple modernities” that were able to coexist in the interwar era.³ Indeed, this multiplicity was part of what defined interwar Central Europe.

The constantly changing statuses of Black musicians as symbols of success and opportunity on the one hand and racial degeneracy and anxiety on the other fit neatly into Central Europe’s constantly changing cultural topography after WWI. “The Weimar Republic,” Peter Fritzsche argues, “remains compelling not because of the glimpses of social democracy and social welfare it offers, but because its public life was formed so forcefully by the sense that nothing was certain and everything was possible.”⁴ With the instability of Weimar Germany, in other words, also came opportunity.⁵

Building on the scholarship of cultural historians of interwar Central Europe, I argue in this chapter that out of the economic, social, cultural, and political instability of interwar Central Europe emerged two distinct historical realities: first, that African American classical performers had never had so many opportunities to perform in German-speaking Europe. While many white German and Austrian musicians could only attract half-filled halls, African American concert singers routinely offered sold-out performances.⁶ Because of the relatively low cost of living in Central Europe, the newly emergent social networks of Black performers, their heightened new cultural status as Americans, and the benefaction of a powerful white patronage network comprised of wealthy aristocrats who advocated for their careers, Black musicians became international superstars in a manner that was frankly impossible before WWI. But Central Europe’s instability also meant that Black classical performers had never before experienced so much vitriol or so many threats of violence. The new reality of Black bodies in some of the most elite musical spaces now represented to some everything that was wrong with the new postimperial states of Germany and Austria.

Hayes’s Liederabend in Berlin demonstrates how both historical realities functioned at the same time and in the same space. He had arrived on the stage in Berlin in part because of the support of white Central European teachers, patrons, and friends, some of whom quite literally drove him across the border to ensure his safe arrival in Germany. He had spent the previous twelve months studying the German lied in Vienna and Prague because of both a Black network of singers and a white patronage system that had connected him to the proper teachers for his voice type and repertoire. Hayes then used his connections and financial advantages to perform in an elite German musical space previously unavailable to Black musicians. Yet his debut was mired in the violent politics of anti-Blackness that increasingly dominated German musical culture. For the first time—and not the last—German-speaking audiences interpreted a Black musician’s performances of German music as a threat to the German nation.

The fact that such provocative racial performances occurred in the world of classical music contradicts popular perceptions of interwar jazz-age Europe and its associations with the avant-garde.⁷ Yet, Karl Christian Führer warns, “Our understanding of Weimar culture is incomplete without a grasp of broader patterns of cultural production and consumption, and skewed if it does not take into account the conservative tastes and the forces of tradition which also characterized it.”⁸ In his book The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross makes a similar point, arguing that “the automatic equation of radical [musical] style with liberal politics and of conservative style with reactionary politics is a historical myth that does little justice to an agonizingly ambiguous historical reality.”⁹ Historians have frequently relied on the same narrative device to analyze the history of the Weimar Republic: the notion on the one hand that the political sphere was always reactionary, antidemocratic, and lurching from crisis to crisis, and the belief on the other that Weimar culture was a vibrant site of experimentation and liberalism. In so doing, Jochen Hung writes, their scholarship reinforces “the narrative of cultural experimentalism against the backdrop of democratic breakdown.”¹⁰

Such is the case of Black performances of supposedly bourgeois, static, and—perhaps to some—boring classical music from the Austro-German canon in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of finding reactionary and culturally stuffy politics in the world of classical music and liberalism and progressivism solely in jazz or avant-garde music, we see a wide variety of responses to Black classical musicians across many different political perspectives and social positions. Black classical musicians garnered support from well-known leftist activists, including high-ranking members of international communist parties, but they also drew praise and unending support from aristocrats, conservative newspaper columnists, and bourgeois listeners. And Black classical musicians could also face hostility from these different audiences as well.

If anything, Black performances of Schubert and other composers illustrate that the Austro-German canon was an especially potent powder keg in the transatlantic twenties, precisely because of its institutional history, claims to national identity, and performative promises of transformation. German and Austrian state funding of musical affairs frequently reinforced the notion that they were “nations of culture” (Kulturnationen) whose responsibility was to provide for the cultural needs of their citizens.¹¹ One would not expect an economically destitute German state, in the aftermath of a destructive, years-long war, to immediately start providing financial support to over thirty opera houses.¹² Yet the fact that state regimes financed orchestras, opera houses, and concert halls in the name of national unity is an illustration of how much classical music reigned over cultural life in the interwar years. Black musicians’ entry into the world of classical music in Germany and Austria made the relationships between politics and culture, race and national identity, and music and locus even more potentially explosive.

This chapter examines the arrival and treatment of Black classical musicians in Central Europe from the mid-1920s until the mid-1930s, focusing on how Black musicians created opportunities for themselves in spite of constantly shifting political terrain. They faced some of the most hateful tropes and rhetoric in Central European history, which I discuss below. Yet they also formed some of the most powerful networks and allies to launch their careers, even after Hitler came to power in 1933. Instead of performing in Germany, Black musicians increasingly used their networks to live and perform in Austria, slowly migrating southward by 1932. The social and cultural consequences of anti-Black racism, however, continued to mire Black musicians’ live performances and careers. Their profound economic successes and their volatile audiences, both hostile and adoring, were two sides of the same coin in interwar Central Europe.

Black Horrors, Jonnys, and Josephines: Tropes of Anti-Blackness in Central Europe

The title of Ivan Goll’s 1926 article—“The Negroes Are Conquering Europe”—says it all: during the interwar era, Black musicians had begun to pour into Central Europe from the Caribbean, North America, and Africa in unprecedented numbers.¹³ In comparison to the Kaiserreich, Weimar Berlin and Red Vienna had become hotbeds, some denounced, of Black popular entertainment. Popular shows such as the Chocolate Kiddies, La revue negre, and Black People Revue sold out quickly in both capitals, and Black entertainers brought to German audiences new dance crazes such as the Charleston, the Shimmy, and the Foxtrot.¹⁴ Reflecting on his experience in Berlin in the 1920s, the African American journalist Roi Ottley guessed that there might have been approximately three thousand Black people in Germany in the 1920s.¹⁵ That does not, of course, include groups or performers who only passed through Central Europe to tour, such as the Hampton Singers or the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who traveled to Germany in the 1920s. Yet Goll’s headline also reflected growing anxiety over what Germans and Austrians perceived to be an ever greater presence of people of African descent on Central European soil.

What Black classical musicians faced in the interwar era that had not been part of Black experiences before WWI was a new and even violent antagonism toward their performances. With the so-called boom in Black bodies and cultures in German-speaking Europe after WWI caused by the stationing of Black troops on German soil and by the “jazz invasion” of Black diasporic musicians, many German-speaking nationalists became alarmed that there were more Black people in Europe than ever before. They argued that Black people, whether they were entertainers such as Josephine Baker or African migrants working in the docks, were invading and destroying German culture. Jonathan Wipplinger argues, “It is important to think through how discussions of the Black presence in the occupation zone functioned in the context of Berlin’s modernist interest in Blackness and American popular culture.”¹⁶ The fact that Black performers began to travel through Central Europe during the same time span as the Black Horror propaganda campaign and its aftermath is worth noting. Central European discourses of anti-Blackness took on an air of anxiety as politicians and citizens alike decreed that Black people threatened to destroy white Europe, whether through acts of sexual violence, racial mixture, or cultural hybridity.

In newspapers, private correspondence, and public speeches, German and Austrian citizens and politicians repeatedly invoked three symbols of the imagined racial and sexual threat posed by Black people to explain why they were protesting against or advocating for Black classical musicians in the interwar era: the Black Horror on the Rhine, the “Jonny” figure from Ernst Krenek’s 1927 opera, Jonny spielt auf, and Josephine Baker. There were, of course, other Black tropes and figures in Germany and Austria during the transatlantic twenties. The Chocolate Kiddies, the first Black troupe to tour Central Europe after WWI, drew impressive crowds to their shows, and Black entertainers such as Ruth Bayton earned almost $200,000 a year in Berlin, according to gossip in newspapers. But nonetheless, stereotypes of the Black Horror, Jonny, and Josephine took on lives of their own that lasted beyond their initial appearance. Audiences uttered these three particular tropes like curses in their denunciations of Black cultural labor—including Black classical musicians—and its supposedly harmful effects in German-speaking Europe.

The first striking example of how this supposed Black threat to German culture loomed over society in the interwar era was the Black Horror propaganda in the early 1920s. The Black Horror threat—and, more important, the cries of hysteria from white Germans about it—placed Blackness in a negative and threatening light. Coming from several countries and regions in Africa, including Algeria, Morocco, and Senegal, and stationed in the Rhineland area of Germany from 1919 to 1924, these French colonial troops originally went unnoticed in the German media during the first year of their occupation.¹⁷ But by the early 1920s, the scandal of the “Black shame” (“Schwarze Schmach”) had reached every corner of German society. Germans created organizations dedicated to protesting the presence of African troops. There was, above all, a sexualized nature to the Black Horror campaign, as propagandistic posters warned that Black male soldiers would take white German women against their will.¹⁸ Sexually graphic images circulated in print and on coins depicting grotesque Black men on the verge of raping innocent white women. Often caricatured as anthropoids, Black troops appear animalistic in these images and unable to control their own desires.

At the heart of this campaign was a commitment to affirm a racially exclusive definition of the German nation as white. This nationalist and racist self-understanding can be traced back to the nineteenth century.¹⁹ For decades, the historian Tina Campt argues, “Germanness [was] equated with purity and superiority, while racial mixture represented dangerous forms of impurity, pollution, and inferiority.”²⁰ Under colonialism, scholars argue, the German body came to represent something pure, biological, and white that needed protecting from foreign (Black) elements. White German racial and sexual anxieties, located in their depiction of Black and white bodies, was part of a larger discourse that reached back to before WWI.

But the global nature of the war and its outcome on German society greatly changed the political nature of this conversation on racial miscegenation and cultural impurity. Prior to WWI, German debates about racial mixing occurred mostly in their African colonial territories or were focused on what was occurring in those territories. The question of whether children born of white German men and African women in the German colonies could claim German citizenship had become a subject of debate and eventually legislation. After WWI, however, German fears of Black people mixing with white Europeans had reached home. The German body was now under threat by the presence of Black soldiers on German soil and, just as important, by the offspring these soldiers produced. Campt writes, “Unlike the stereotypes that preceded it, the Rhineland Bastard is the first representation of a domestic, German-born Black ‘native.’ ”²¹ Because of the presence of African colonial soldiers in the Rhineland (which reminded white Germans of the economic, social, and political consequences of the war) and because of the growing fears stoked by racist German nationalists, the Black Horror campaign symbolized white Germans’ first confrontation with Black claims to German soil and citizenship.

Ultimately, the Black Horror trope worked to foster an “us vs. them” dichotomy that depicted the civilized and cultured German at the mercy of the savage and primitive Black man. Letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and propagandistic pamphlets and speeches repeatedly expressed the sentiment that French colonial soldiers were a threat to Germans because they were unable to comingle with enlightened white Europeans. Their savagery and primitivism threatened to ruin, dilute, or degrade European civilization. Writing for the Grenzland Korrespondent, for example, one journalist argued, “The ‘Black Horror’ is not only a disgrace for Germany. It is much more. It represents the desecration of white culture in general.”²² The journalist thus linked Germanness to whiteness. “The reputation of the European culture is in danger,” in other words, because “savages” were overseeing a cultured people.

Ironically, most of the Black troops had left the Rhine region by 1921. The only troops still stationed in Germany after 1921 were not Senegalese or from other regions of sub-Saharan Africa, but rather from the North African countries of Algeria and Morocco. And although the number of supporters in the propaganda campaign declined, Iris Wigger argues that “the stereotype of the ‘Black shame’ remained popular and present in German society.”²³ But their real identities did not matter to perpetrators of the Black Horror propaganda, nor could they compete against the myth of the pitch-black African soldier.²⁴ The frightening image of a lurking Black man circulated widely, and the perceived threat of Black savagery infiltrating white European culture remained at large throughout the interwar period. The image of Black troops on the German Rhine became the symbol of dark savagery at its worst in post-WWI Germany. Propagandists optimized the troops’ Blackness to create fear and panic among the populace in an attempt to mobilize citizens against this invasion of foreigners.²⁵

What also posed a potential racial threat to German culture was the arrival of jazz to Germany and Austria. Audiences heard and saw performers of jazz in sexual and racial terms. Like the African troops stationed along the Rhine, jazz musicians served as a locus for German anxiety over racial mixing. Their rhythmic gyrations and the physicality of their dancing tempted listeners to move their bodies in ways deemed sexually daring. Naked, wild, and dancing “with their senses” instead of their minds, Black entertainers, in Ivan Goll’s estimation, offered Central Europeans sexual liberation.²⁶

One figment of the Central European imagination in particular embodies Central European anxieties about jazz, race, and sex in the interwar era: the character Jonny from Krenek’s 1927 opera, Jonny spielt auf. By the late 1920s, the figure of Jonny personified in crude form Central Europeans’ imaginings of Black jazz musicians. Jonny, an African American musician living and performing in Europe, was, in the words of Wipplinger, “an amalgam of competing ideas about African Americans and their music.”²⁷ With his banjo (an obvious musical signifier of American folk and lowbrow music), his colloquialisms, and his jovial and capricious manner, Jonny represents an impish womanizer with ebony-dark skin and bright white teeth. He is constantly trying to win a “new white girl” while hopping around on his numerous adventures and escapades, and he seems to dance through life shirking any responsibility and ignoring any hardship that might befall him.²⁸

The Jonny character represents a highly sexualized Black man who carelessly engages in affairs with white women. Like the Black Horror figure, Jonny is also ultimately proof that Black men are sexually deviant, perhaps diseased, and that they ultimately cannot be trusted.²⁹ In propagandistic posters, music, and literature from the 1920s and 1930s, white women who associated with these potently sexualized Black men were often depicted as either whores or victims, depending on whether the women were perceived to be active or passive participants. In many ways, the trope of the sexually active Black man turned whiteness into something that needed protection and defending.

Although Krenek’s jazz opera first premiered in Leipzig and had a long and successful run throughout Germany, it became associated with scandal and degeneracy after its premiere in Vienna in February 1928. Viennese nationalists and pan-Germanists, for example, demonstrated against what they called the desecration of Viennese high culture. Similar to the degenerate art exhibit that appeared a decade later, they condemned both Black people and Jews for desecrating Central European high culture. “To the Viennese! Our opera house, the first site of art and culture in the world and the pride of all Viennese, has succumbed to Jewish-negroid perversities… . Christian Viennese men and women, artists, musicians, singers, and antisemites appear in measure and protest with us against this unprecedented cultural shame in Austria.”³⁰ Both the Jonny figure and the Black Horror were egregious scandals to some, for they threatened to impurify the German body racially and culturally.

If Black men were reduced to threatening soldiers lurking in the shadows or to roguish Jonny figures sleeping with white women, then Black women in popular entertainment, embodied in the figure of Josephine Baker, offered Austrian and German audiences a different type of fantasy: a chance for white heterosexual men to finally unleash or liberate their sexual desires.³¹ Black women entertainers in interwar Austria and Germany gave audiences permission to fantasize about exotic and erotic sexual encounters with people of African descent without the threat of violence that they associated with Black masculinity. As the historian Nancy Nenno argues, women like Baker “successfully mitigated the German popular fear of primitive sexuality associated with the ‘Black Horror.’ ”³² Entertainers such as Baker, Bayton, and dancing girls in ensembles such as the Chocolate Kiddies and the Black People Revue offered viewers a different type of Black exoticism, one linked to primitivism and deviance in a similar manner to Black male sexuality, but one that listeners instead found unthreatening.³³

The complicated character of Baker, who toured Central Europe in 1927 and 1928, powerfully illustrates the gendered division in white German and Austrian responses to Black sexuality. Described as “childlike,” “wild,” “primitive,” “lascivious,” “savage,” and “beautiful” in the European press, Baker embodied many of the contradictions embedded in the fantasized image of Black women. No other figure has come to represent Black female sexuality in twentieth-century Europe quite like her. Her provocatively nude public performances, combined with her scandalous and numerous love affairs offstage “served as a notorious advertisement for the unbridled, voracious sexuality attributed to, and expected of, the Black woman since the Hottentot Venus,” Nenno writes.³⁴ Intentionally playing with colonial tropes dating back to the nineteenth century, Baker mixed the “primitive” with the “modern” and in so doing danced on the line between Black agency and white sexual desire.³⁵ Similar to Goll’s racialized and sexualized description of Black dancers in “The Negroes are Conquering Europe,” white German and Austrian critics fixated heavily on her body. After attending her revue in Berlin, produced by the African American entertainer Louis Douglas, the artist and journalist Ottomar Starke stated, “Her bottom, with all due respect, is a chocolate semolina flummery of agility, and she is rightly proud of this gift of nature.”³⁶ The use of chocolate imagery to describe the bodies of Black women thus continued to prevail in Weimar German discourse.

Both desired and abhorred, Baker seemed to create furor wherever she went. Her stay in Vienna in 1928 is especially illustrative of how her mythology as a highly sexualized Black woman provoked a debate about race, sex, and German culture. Baker arrived in Vienna in February 1928 to stage her revue “Black on White” (“Schwarz auf Weiß”) only shortly after the opera Jonny spielt auf had closed, causing the second scandal tied to Black sexuality in a short manner of months.³⁷ Upon her arrival in Vienna, opposition to Baker became fierce and swift. Led by Anton Jerzabek, a popular Christian Socialist and founder and chairman of the Anti-Semite League (Antisemitenbund), Austrian Hakenkreuzlers (often times university students) and far-right demonstrators protested against what they perceived as another racial defilement of their city.³⁸ Defending Viennese values, they argued that they needed to “save Vienna from the Negro shame.”³⁹ Cartoons and other images that appeared in Viennese daily newspapers portrayed Baker in the nude, often in sexualized positions or dancing enticingly with Viennese men.⁴⁰

Those who defended Baker usually sang her praises in a racial key. In a letter to the editor of the Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung, a man named Ganst Höllwerth wrote in favor of bringing Baker to the city and told citizens to stop being so outraged. She wasn’t that special, after all. “If it really matters, you could dunk our female entertainers in a chocolate factory and achieve the same effect. But they wouldn’t have the same full, beautiful lips and the charming smile … I believe that there are better things to do than stand for hours at the train station waiting for the Negress to show up [to harass her].”⁴¹ Again, critics clung to the language of chocolate to describe Baker. Moreover, by suggesting there was no difference between Baker and white performers, the critic refused to recognize Black creativity as distinct or unique from what white Central Europe already had to offer. Even some of Baker’s biggest advocates, including Count Adalbert Sternberg, who defended Baker in Viennese parliament, relied on racist notions of Black authenticity and dance to argue in favor of her appearance. Sternberg, for example, told his colleagues that “whites don’t know how to dance. Only Blacks conserve in dancing its human and sacred quality.”⁴² Much like in the nineteenth century, listeners believed that Black people possessed innate qualities that made them gifted with dance and song, thus denying them agency in their own cultural productions.

The most fascinating rebuttal of Baker’s enemies appeared in an editorial in the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt, and it directly connected Austria’s complicated history of empire, American racism, and global white supremacy to Viennese reactions to Baker. The author writes:

In the author’s telling, both Habsburg and post-Habsburg Austria lacked a historical connection to global exploitation and colonialism that would warrant holding such a racist position on Baker’s performance. White Anglo-American racism relied heavily on their belief (a false one, the author implies) that white people were better than people of color. But Austria, standing outside of a global history of colonialism and racism, did not need to participate in such racial constructions.

A few ideas appear in vivid color when we step back to consider the three tropes of anti-Blackness that were so prevalent in German-speaking Europe in the aftermath of WWI. First, all three tropes fixate on Black sexuality and center around the deep insecurities of white men in both Germany and Austria and the vulnerability (or lack thereof) of women, depending on their race. Second, the tropes all illuminate the fear of collapse or ruin—and both Austria and Germany were newly formed states born after the collapse of their empires. Each trope touches on fears of cultural and racial invasion, whether through France and its empire or through Americanism in the form of jazz and Baker. Lastly, it is worth noting that two of the dominant tropes center on music. By the 1920s, Black musicians had become powerful icons of a new age. Caught in an entangled cultural web in the post-WWI era, Black figures became signs that audiences relied on to orient their world.

Black Networking, White Patronage, and the Birth of the Black Classical Celebrity in Central Europe

Shortly after listening to the soprano Anita Patti Brown perform in Los Angeles in April 1921, a German Jewish socialist named Louis Michel wrote a letter of support to her that appeared in the Chicago Defender. In the letter, he invites the soprano to come to Germany so that her “conquering genius” could finally be fully admired. “As a German-Jewish-born admirer,” he writes, “I wish you a much broader future than you can ever attain in America, where even in the higher realms of art, injustice-forming derelicts are drawing race lines and color bars.”⁴⁴ Michel’s letter implies that while white Americans refused to recognize Black talent in classical music, Germans—the real listeners and tastemakers—did.

A similar article appeared in the same outlet in 1928, this time written by an African American doctor who had just returned from a long medical residency in Germany and Austria.⁴⁵ “Why go to Europe,” Wilberforce Williams asks, especially if the United States also has its own rich cultural institutions? Because in the United States, he writes, “there are libraries, art galleries, museums, and music halls of a cultural nature where people of color are not welcomed, nor even admitted.”⁴⁶ Yet in all of his travels to the continent, he had not once seen a poster stating that Black people were unwelcome in a public or private residence. In Germany and Austria, art was for all. For these reasons, he had made Central Europe his destination for his medical residency.

These two letters, one from a German-Jewish émigré in America and the other from an African American doctor returning from Vienna and Berlin, offered the same tantalizing, shimmering fantasy: go to Central Europe. There, outside of the United States, African Americans could find empowerment and success beyond their wildest imagination in the concert halls. Both letters carried semblances of truth. The poverty of German-speaking Europe, the wealth of American backers, the prestige of Central European aristocrats, and the financial savvy of concert management agencies meant that African Americans enjoyed unprecedented access to elite social circles and concert halls.

WWI cracked open a Pandora’s box of anti-Black rhetoric, rooted in the newly formed and insecure postimperial states of Germany and Austria. But WWI and the interwar era it birthed also made it possible for Black classical musicians to enjoy new opportunities to perform in some of the most sacred spaces in Austro-German musical culture. For the first time, Black classical musicians enjoyed celebrity status in Central Europe. Their concerts (and the audiences who followed them around) granted them fame and money beyond their wildest dreams.

As before WWI, Black classical musicians’ careers in Central Europe were greatly shaped by what they sang, where they sang it, for whom they performed, and how they appeared onstage. They were, like the singers before them, respectable spectacles who garnered the favor of their audiences because of what they performed and the musical culture surrounding it. The genre they performed gave them access to institutions and teachers that were not available to Black popular musicians, for example, and like the Fisk Jubilee Singers or pianists such as Hazel Harrison, they continued to dress in upper-class fashion, now including tuxedos and fashionable gowns, for their audiences.

Yet WWI had changed their circumstances abroad greatly. African Americans were ready and able to take full advantage of new platforms to perform on, new management agencies to represent them, and new patrons willing to support them. In fact, in the interwar era, African American performers such as Hayes outearned many of their fellow native German and Austrian classical musicians. By May 1924 Hayes had come to understand how much of a commodity he was in the classical music market. Writing to the African American intellectual Alain Locke in April 1924 from his hotel in Prague, Hayes gushed, “Dear Boy, my life is so beautiful and satisfying now that my cup of joy remains perpetually at a state of overflow. I never expected to have been so happy in this life as the success of my work (which is my meat and drink) has brought me.”⁴⁷ Two weeks later and still in Prague, a now-confident Hayes wrote to a new manager in the United States, “You will never book me anywhere nor with anybody or organization that is not anxious for my services. This thought also gives place to my saying—most emphatically—that I wish only to sing in important and conveniently accessible centres on my next tour …”⁴⁸ Clearly, Hayes understood his rising value following his Central European tour.

One of the reasons for Hayes’s financial successes—one of the reasons why he could perform in sold-out venues and demand outrageous sums of money—was his network of white patrons. They provided financial advice, offered introductions to sought-after teachers, hosted Black classical musicians in their homes, and bought expensive, front-row seats to their concerts. “His excellency” Juliusz Jan von Twardowski and his wife (also friends with Locke), for example, provided Hayes with a lawyer, Dr. Pieta, who gave him financial and legal counsel in Central Europe—in consultation with the Twardowskis.

Yet Hayes, like the baritone Aubrey Pankey and other Black musicians, also provided something in return. Through their friendships, Black classical musicians often shared with curious Central Europeans their experiences as Black men and women in the United States. In so doing, they promoted their politics of racial uplift and anti-racist struggle that came to define the global interwar era. Because of these relationships and because of the networks that formed in Central Europe around Black classical musicians, those musicians thrived in markets hostile to many others. Their status as elite musicians meant that they offer a fascinating case study of how Black diasporic musicians and their social relationships functioned in the transatlantic jazz age, one that is altogether different from that of Black popular musicians.

What Black classical musicians participated in and practiced was often a form of Black internationalist cultural politics.⁴⁹ It was of immense importance to form alliances with international communities outside of the United States. Their lives and careers on- and offstage were often imbued with the same spirit of Black cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and sometimes even Black activism—even though musicians such as Marian Anderson often avoided engaging directly in political conversation, and even though the music Black classical musicians performed was not “Black music.”⁵⁰ It was important for Black classical musicians to find allies on their side, not because they implicitly believed white Germans or Austrians offered solutions to their problems but rather because the problems of American racism pushed them to join a world beyond American shores and to consider American racism a regional and local problem.⁵¹ Away from the United States, Black classical musicians such as Pankey and Hayes found in their white audiences, patrons, and allies comfort in the thought that not all white listeners were like white Americans.

Black classical musicians’ lives offstage in Germany and Austria were similar to those of other Black performers abroad in that they promoted the importance of resisting anti-Black racism and recognizing Black artistry. Peering into the social worlds of Black musicians in 1930s London, for example, Marc Matera demonstrates that “Black musicians often developed close ties to Black pressure groups in the city” who used antiracist and anticolonial causes as occasions for Black organizing and music-making.⁵² Like Black jazz musicians in Europe, Black classical musicians also became intimately involved in their new social environments. Through their new alliances, they participated in meaningful cultural exchange about the values of classical music and the importance of disavowing anti-Black racism. Similarly, Black classical musicians in Central Europe also created their own Black networks, often articulating the problems of American race relations to white Germans and Austrians and in so doing sharing what they believed were its solutions.

But the social world of classical music—steeped in prestige and bourgeois or even aristocratic respectability—meant that Black classical musicians created entirely different careers for themselves in interwar, jazz-age Europe. In the 1920s especially, Black classical musicians enjoyed the benefactions of aristocratic and wealthy patrons and the enthusiastic support of elite classical musicians in Vienna and Berlin like never before. They enjoyed having sold-out concerts that placed them in popularity above other white European and American performers, including other native Germans and Austrians. It is important for us to consider, then, how Black classical musicians’ careers, experiences, aesthetics, and lives differed both from those of white classical musicians and from those of Black popular musicians in the interwar era.

In the interwar period, unlike any time before, Black classical musicians became elite musical celebrities. They traveled, resided, and performed in spaces that remained off-limits to the vast majority of Black people in Central Europe.⁵³ Colonial African migrants, many of whom had been in Germany for decades or were the children of colonial African migrants, were in economically precarious situations throughout the Weimar period, for example. Lacking German citizenship papers as former colonial subjects, they lived in a liminal space that made them permanent residents of Germany but ineligible to receive state unemployment benefits as German citizens. Some worked in unskilled or menial jobs as porters, doormen, or waiters. Over time, more turned to performance on whatever terms as a way to make a living. Black workers who had trained as mechanics or who had first come to Germany as teachers now found themselves dancing in a revue or performing in a jazz band.⁵⁴

Black classical musicians, however, did not ever experience such dire circumstances. Where they resided offers just one example of how differently they led their lives. Some, such as Josephine Harreld, daughter of the African American violinist and former Berlin resident William Kemper Harreld, stayed in one of the top hotels in Salzburg for a summer while at the Mozarteum University Salzburg. Hayes resided for a summer in a villa owned by a Bohemian countess in Prague, and Anderson lived with the aristocratic von Erdberg family in the well-to-do neighborhood of Charlottenburg in Berlin.⁵⁵ With the advice and aid of his friends in Vienna, Hayes also considered purchasing a villa in the Austrian countryside.⁵⁶

Additionally, Black concert musicians often employed classical music management agencies to book them prestigious music venues. Both Anderson and Hayes became shrewd in dealing with these agencies abroad. In Hayes’s case, he experienced both the highs of having concert agencies compete for his attention in cities such as Prague and Budapest and the lows of being swindled by one small concert management firm who had sent him to Graz and Karlsbad but then refused to fully pay him.⁵⁷ After that incident, Hayes, through the advice of the Twardowskis, became savvier in his financial dealings. Although Hayes worked with the legendary Borkon management agency in Berlin in the 1920s, for example, his biographers write that “Roland got the word out that he was not under the exclusive representation of any continental European management.” At least five different music agencies tried to convince Hayes to let them promote his concerts in Europe, and he was happy to let them all fight with each other for the opportunity to represent him—and present him with the most lucrative contract.⁵⁸ By 1924, the New York Times reported, Hayes was earning $100,000 per year.⁵⁹ Anderson also had different agencies competing against one another to book her concerts in Europe. One of the reasons why Anderson hastened to return to Europe from the United States in 1933 was because her Swedish concert manager Helmer Enwall offered her an unheard-of contract of sixty arranged concert bookings. Under his management, she sang over one hundred concerts in Europe in a twelve-month period.⁶⁰

Black classical musicians also appeared differently in marketing materials than jazz musicians—or white classical musicians. Dressed in gowns and tuxedos, their promotional photos suggested decorum and modesty. But their Blackness created an added excitement and novelty in the era of jazz. They were respectable spectacles who promised concert halls good money during an era rife with inflation, and agencies pitched them as such. They promoted performers such as Anderson and Pankey as “Negro singers” who could provide both the traditional German lieder that audiences desired and something new but still respectable in the form of Negro spirituals, which they considered to be a form of African American folk music. For example, advertisements that appeared in newspaper ads or on poster placards frequently highlighted or showcased a musician’s Blackness, calling musicians such as Roland Hayes a “Negertenor,” Pankey a “Negerbariton,” and Robeson “Der Negerbaß”.⁶¹

In advertisements for Hayes’s performances that littered newspapers in Vienna and Berlin, the texts also made it clear that both Hayes and his accompanist were Black. That might be in part because of Hayes’s own commitment to keeping a Black pianist with him throughout Europe (he alternated between two: Lawrence Brown, who toured with him in London, and William Lawrence, who performed with him in Berlin and Vienna). In a letter to his concert management agency, Hayes writes, “I am glad you have understood the necessity of my bringing my own accompanist, Mr. William Lawrence, who is also a Negro and an unusual accompanist. I ask only that you do for him (after he arrives and begins his work with me) what you would have done for the pianist you might have engaged there.”⁶²

Rarely did these advertisements mention the singer’s nationality—either because it was assumed knowledge or because it did not matter as much as the singer’s race or both. The one exception to this labeling practice was Anderson, who initially received the label “Negersängerin” but by 1936 only appeared in advertisements with her full name. She had become a big enough sensation to no longer need an explanation or introduction.

Concert halls and managers also heavily emphasized the performances of African American spirituals that always appeared at the end of a concert program for Black concert singers. African Americans also gave countless interviews with the press, where they informed them about African American spirituals, which they referred to as a form of art song.

The experiences of Black classical musicians differed radically from those of Black jazz musicians or African colonial migrants because of their relationships with their teachers. The continuing German nature of American music conservatories meant that teachers in the United States still maintained a belief in the supremacy of Austro-German music. Many also maintained connections to Central Europe, which they used at the behest of a student as they had done for earlier generations of Black musicians. In 1929, for example, a young woman named Princess Mae Richardson studied harp at the New England Conservatory of Music with the Austrian musician Alfred Holy. Impressed by her performances, the teacher helped her prepare to study in Austria for the year, most likely using his own connections to procure her a teacher abroad.⁶³ Other instrumentalists also found teachers in Central Europe, including the Fisk alumnus Warner Lawson, the son of Raymond Augustus Lawson, who had himself studied in Germany in 1911. Warner studied with Artur Schnabel after receiving a degree in music literature from Yale in 1929. Roy Tibbs, another Fisk and Oberlin alumnus, studied in Vienna between 1934 and 1935 while on sabbatical as the head of the piano department at Howard University.⁶⁴ Rudolph Dunbar studied with Felix Weingartner in Vienna in the 1920s.⁶⁵ Teachers were vital to the careers of many Black classical musicians abroad. Anderson’s teacher, Raimund von zur Mühlen, for example, introduced her to teachers and patrons in Berlin. Hayes’s teacher in London, George Henschel, most likely introduced Hayes to his Viennese teacher, Theodor Lierhammer, in 1923.⁶⁶

Lierhammer’s studio might be one of the most striking cases of a Central European teacher working with Black musicians. Lierhammer appears to have taught at least half a dozen Black male singers in the 1920s and 1930s in Vienna. Born to Polish and Austrian parents in Austria, Lierhammer became a respected singer of German lieder in Vienna.⁶⁷ He was an old veteran in the world of German lieder by the 1920s: he had trained at the Vienna Conservatory and sung lieder under the baton of Felix Weingartner, and Richard Strauss and his wife had personally requested that he perform Strauss lieder in concert.⁶⁸ Lierhammer lived in London as a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music, where he most likely became acquainted with Henschel, Hayes’s first teacher in Europe.⁶⁹

Figure 12. Marian Anderson’s concert program from Zurich, Switzerland, September 25, 1935. Courtesy of the Marian Anderson Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, MS 200, Box 179, Folder 8459.

Figure 13. The African American tenor Roland Hayes and his teacher Sir George Henschel in England in 1921. The label on the back states: “For: Roland Hayes, 58 Allerton St., Brookline 46. From: Mary Armstrong Melvin, 100 Boylston Street, HA 6–0413. Chatting in the sunlight are Roland Hayes, now a famous tenor, and Sir George Henschel, first conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in this picture taken in England around 1921 when Hayes was a pupil of Henschel.” Courtesy of the E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts, Detroit Public Library.

Lierhammer’s most prominent (and perhaps most beloved) student was Hayes. Through Hayes, for example, Lierhammer became acquainted with the world of African American art song and with African American musicians. After Hayes had performed a few spirituals for Lierhammer, the singer fell in love with the genre. “I vividly remember his astonishment on hearing me sing some Aframerican [sic] folk songs,” Hayes later recalled, “an astonishment caused by the spiritual affinity of my songs with the spirit and style of the great German master [Bach]. ‘But you have it all there,’ he assured me; ‘it is the same language.’ ” African American spirituals, like Bach or Heinrich Schütz’s cantatas, Lierhammer told Hayes, met “on the common ground of purpose, feeling, and fitting form,” and shared the same musical poetic style and religious spirit.⁷⁰ Even after Hayes finished his musical instruction with Lierhammer, he would visit his former teacher often in his home on Fasangasse whenever he returned to Vienna from then on, and corresponded from afar as well.⁷¹

But Hayes was not Lierhammer’s only Black student. For example, Lierhammer later taught John Payne, a friend of Hayes. Payne and Joseph Edwin Covington, who had performed as a vocalist with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an ensemble specializing in ragtime music and popular songs, both lived in Vienna in 1929 and studied voice with him, as did Pankey in the early 1930s.⁷² It is possible that Hayes introduced Pankey to Lierhammer, because, according to the Neue Freie Presse, Hayes was responsible for discovering the young baritone.⁷³ Black singers’ reliance on Lierhammer suggests a stable Black network built around one teacher in Vienna.

When it came to forming their own Black networks, Black classical musicians rarely chose to socialize with Black popular musicians. Instead, they socialized with each other. Many Black classical musicians first networked with each other in London before arriving in Central Europe. Hayes and his pianist Lawrence Brown had first found contacts in London, including aristocratic white patrons, then later shared those with Anderson. Josephine Harreld lived an exciting summer in Salzburg in 1935. She befriended the soprano Anne Brown (who later originated the role of Bess in Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess), who asked Harreld to accompany her on one of her recitals. A witness to Anderson’s Salzburg recital of 1935, Harreld met the singer backstage after her recital and introduced herself as William Kemper Harreld’s daughter. “Josephine?” Anderson replied, “I never would have known you!”⁷⁴ Anderson asked Harreld to send her greetings to her parents back in the United States, then invited her to her hotel room to visit. Harreld visited Anderson several times that summer, writing home to her parents that the two had “chatted like two schoolgirls for a long time” over lunches and breakfasts in the city. Harreld also spent her free time touring around Vienna with Roy Tibbs and the singer Frank Harrison that summer. Together they saw “Beethoven houses, the Schubert house and museum, St. Stephansdom … memorials to many musicians, the opera, the hotel where Wagner stayed, and a dozen other remarkable sites.”⁷⁵

Above all else, however, the careers of African American classical musicians differed greatly in the interwar era from those of popular musicians because of their patrons. Artists, musicians, writers, and aristocrats from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia formed the majority of friendships that singers such as Anderson and Hayes acquired abroad. They represented an elite musical world to which a new generation of African American performers had access. Black classical musicians also enjoyed enthusiastic support from some of the most famous classical musicians, ranging from Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini to the Mahler singer Sara Cahier, and they benefitted economically, socially, culturally, and musically from the committed patronage of wealthy German-speaking and white American aristocrats and artists. Patrons arranged for different figures in society to come to their homes for tea, so that they might hear Black singers such as Anderson or Hayes perform lieder. Cleverly, these white patrons also frequently invited over agents from management firms who might be willing to represent these budding young singers. After hearing them sing at an aristocratic patron’s salon, elite agencies placed Black performers in venues usually reserved for top orchestras and singers.

What differentiated Central European support for Black classical musicians in the interwar era from before might have been the identities of the patrons. White evangelical and aristocratic patrons—tied to British and German royalty—had supported the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s, for example. But in the interwar era, Jews, ethnic minorities, and people of color from the global south formed the closest bonds with African Americans, confirming Wipplinger’s argument that German Jews stood at the center of African American cultural production and exchange in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.⁷⁶

In Vienna, Hayes and Locke befriended Jewish musicians and Bohemian or Eastern European aristocrats such as the pianists Theodor Leschetizky and Ossip Gabrilowitsch (both of whom had taught the Black pianist Raymond Augustus Lawson in the 1910s), Jakob Wasserman, the famed writer Arthur Schnitzler, and von Twardowski. Anni Schnitzler, Arthur’s daughter, was part of the management agency promoting and booking Hayes’s concerts, but it is clear from their exchange of letters that she and Hayes were also friends. In one letter, Anni teases him: “What are your plans for spring and summer? Where are you going to stop first in Europe? And are there going to be another 100 recitals in U.S.A. next season, poor man? Or are you going to sing 250 times?”⁷⁷

Many women were financial backers and social brokers of Black classical musicians. For example, the white American opera singer Edyth Walker wrote to Hayes in 1926 expressing her disappointment that he wouldn’t be singing again in Munich. “One lady said she would walk four hours to get anywhere to hear you! That means much for a woman of society!”⁷⁸ “Women of society,” to use Walker’s phrase, comprised a significant source of support for Black classical musicians in the interwar era. They arranged salons and hosted teas, lunches, and small private performances with exclusive, invite-only audiences. Anni Schnitzler, for example, put Hayes in touch with an agent in Denmark via her own piano teacher, Severin Eisenberger, who had attended one of Hayes’s concerts and loved it.⁷⁹ Vilma Jurenkova, a pupil and assistant of Leschetizky, also wrote to Hayes to ask him about his concert in Vienna in October 1923, suggesting to him that she could get the main correspondent of Musical America to attend. She invited him over for tea where, she promised, he would meet “very nice people who are very interested in your concert!”⁸⁰ Countess Marguerite Hoyos had been so moved by a performance by Hayes that she attended in Vienna that she wrote to her friend Countess Bertha Henriette Katharina Nadine Colloredo-Mansfeld to suggest that they meet in Prague for Hayes’s next concert in October 1923.⁸¹ Countess Colloredo-Mansfeld spent the summer of 1924 teaching Hayes German literature, history, and poetry.

But Hayes also socialized with leaders from the Global South. For example, he visited with the Liberian ambassador Momulu Massaquoi at the Liberian embassy in Berlin, along with other notable Black figures such as Paul Robeson, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes.⁸² Hayes and Massaquoi may have bonded over their earlier careers as students in Nashville, Tennessee—Massaquoi at Central Tennessee College and Hayes at Fisk University, albeit a decade later. Backstage after his recital in Berlin in 1924, Hayes met Suhasini Nambiar, the first female member of the Communist Party of India, wife of A.C.N. Nambiar, an Indian nationalist who spent most of his career in Europe garnering support for Indian independence, and sister of the feminist political activist Sarojini Naidu, who was the first female president of the Indian National Congress. “During my stay in London, Miss Douglas has very often spoken to me about you,” she writes to Hayes in a letter inviting him and William Lawrence, Hayes’s accompanist in Vienna, over for dinner at her home in Wilmersdorf on Prinzregentenstraße. She continues, “A few of our musician friends, mostly German, are also anxious to have a word with you and are waiting to hear from you.” Hayes’s connections with global leaders illustrate the varying and diverse social worlds Black classical musicians chose to inhabit.⁸³

White American patrons were also important interlocutors for Black classical musicians. Arguably one of the most important women and musical figures to mentor African American concert singers in Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 1930s was Sara Cahier, an American-born contralto tapped by Mahler to perform at the Vienna State Opera House in the early twentieth century. Under Bruno Walter, she gave the world premiere of Mahler’s “Lied von der Erde” in Munich. When Hayes came to Berlin in 1924, for example, she and her husband wrote to him privately inquiring about his Liederabend and gave Hayes two tickets to hear her perform in Lohengrin at the Prussian State Opera in Berlin.⁸⁴ They asked in return for three tickets for Hayes’s concert in Berlin.

Because Cahier had also been on the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Marian Anderson’s hometown, she also became acquainted with Anderson through their mutual friend, a physician and avid music lover named Charles Hirsch. An acquaintance of Kosti Vehanen, Anderson’s accompanist, Cahier worked with Anderson for an entire summer in Jáchymov, Czechoslovakia, strictly on Mahler lieder. Cahier used her status and privilege as a wealthy white American woman and prestigious Mahler singer to invite elite audiences to hear Anderson perform in her home and also introduced Anderson to Gertrude Moulton in Austria.⁸⁵

Gertrude Moulton played a pivotal role in Anderson’s career. Like Cahier, Moulton hosted a tea for Anderson at the Grand Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg (the same hotel where Harreld resided that same summer) after her celebrated Liederabend, where she invited many of the most established figures in classical music in the 1930s to attend—including, of course, Cahier. Harreld gossiped in a letter home to her parents, “Bruno Walter, Felix Weingartner, Erich Kleiber, Lotte Lehmann, … and Toscanini were there and were simply carried away.”⁸⁶ Following a Salzburg recital that Moulton hosted, Walter arranged for Anderson to perform with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Figure 14. A photograph of (L:R) Sara Cahier, Kosti Vehanen, and Marian Anderson in Salzburg in 1935, taken by Erika Gast. Courtesy of the Marian Anderson Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, MS Coll 198: vol. 3, p. 13, items 1–2.

There were a variety of reasons why patrons, listeners, and friends supported Black classical musicians. Some white Americans, such as Cahier and the poet Louis Untermeyer, were deeply critical of American racism. Cahier expressed her commitment to supporting the endeavors of African American musicians in an opinion piece she wrote for a Berlin newspaper, which later found its way into Hayes’s hands. Echoing the sentiments of African American musicality that went back to Dvorˇák, Cahier argued that only African Americans, an oppressed people, had any kind of musical talent or potential in the United States. Cahier wrote that “America was hard soil” for musical genius. “The trouble was,” Hayes recalled, “that the American people did not have to have music to live. Only amongst the Negroes, [Cahier] thought, could music be said to be a spontaneous accompaniment to the ordinary circumstances of living.” Cahier then pointed to Hayes’s musical career to further her argument.⁸⁷

Although Cahier’s views were in many ways reductionist by reaffirming the notion that African Americans were a distinctly musical people, her actions as a supporter of Hayes’s career were bold, especially in light of white American racism—even in Europe. Indeed, the specter of Jim Crow continued to affect social relationships in Europe. Hayes, for example, had been kicked out of a hotel in France after white Americans had complained about him being there.⁸⁸ In 1920s London, Lord and Lady Astor had to reassure a very nervous Hayes that he was welcome at their home after he learned that the couple had invited some white Americans from Virginia. Prior to the white Southerners’ arrival, Lady Astor told them that Hayes was their esteemed guest and that if the white American couple were unhappy about it, they would be asked to leave.⁸⁹ A decade later in 1935, Josephine Harreld also experienced bullying from white American students at the Mozarteum University Salzburg. Like African American students had discovered generations before her, white Americans were not a reliable source of allyship abroad.

Not only were more white Europeans coming into contact with American culture in the global 1920s and 1930s but they were also coming into more contact with American racism. Indeed, European support for African Americans often went in tandem with their denouncements of American society. Well before the Nazis came to power, Meredith Roman writes, “US racism was identified in the Soviet Union as the most egregiously horrific aspect of capitalism, and the United States was represented as the most racist country in the world.”⁹⁰ Stories of lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and unjust trials such as the Scottsboro boys trial proliferated in European news media, including German-speaking presses. By the early 1930s, protest movements such as the global campaign to clear the names of the Scottsboro boys were central episodes in the formation of global racial politics in the 1930s.⁹¹ Many patrons and friends of Black classical musicians responded to these developments with horror. Applauding African American concert performers sometimes functioned as a symbolic gesture of protest against American racism and a proclamation of what they believed to be a universal brotherhood.

Black cultural politics—in the form of racial uplift, political organizing, and creative expression—were part of Black classical musicians’ lives off stage. Some, like Anderson, avoided discussing the politics of race in the United States, choosing instead to perform the politics of racial uplift through singing African American spirituals. Yet others, Aubrey Pankey or Paul Robeson, were outspoken Marxists by the late 1930s. Hayes’s private correspondence offers another example of Black cultural politics and intellectual exchange with Central Europeans. He frequently disseminated pamphlets and books to German and Austrian friends and patrons on Black history and culture. Writing to Walter White, a leader of the NAACP, from Paris in 1924, Hayes asked White if his forthcoming book would be available in French and German translation, for he wished to disseminate it abroad. “I have already distributed the pamphlets you gave me among my aristocratic and interested friends who tell me that they will order it,” Hayes writes.⁹²

Three different letters from friends in Vienna to Hayes in 1926 indicate the immense cultural impact Hayes’s dissemination of materials had among his Central European friends and patrons. In February 1926, Anni Schnitzler wrote to Hayes to thank him for sending her Alain Locke’s new book, The New Negro, in the mail from the United States when he had been home on leave. She had asked him for reading recommendations the last time he was in Vienna, and he had delivered: “I think that book The New Negro is as complete an answer to all my inner questions as it is possible today,” she writes.

A month later, she also wrote to thank Hayes for sending her poetry by Countee Cullen. “The other day I received your parcel: Countee Collen’s [sic] volume, “Color,” and was very glad to receive it … Don’t you think that some of his poems might have tempted [composer] Hugo Wolf to compose them?”⁹⁴

It appears that Hayes sent out multiple copies of Locke’s edited book, The New Negro, one of which landed on the desk of Hayes’s attorney and financial adviser, Dr. Pieta. In a lengthy letter to Hayes, Pieta writes that he was ashamed to admit how little he knew about Black struggles as a white man. “[It] was you, Mr. Hayes, who first showed me and so many others how little the outward appearance tells us of the inner life of your people,” he writes, “and how much that is beautiful and ideal you and your race are able to give to the world.”⁹⁵

These comments capture exactly the kind of simultaneity that Föllmer and others have argued dominated Central Europe in the interwar era. Pieta’s remarks illustrate the developing political consciousness among Central Europeans of white American racism, even while denunciations of the Black Horror or Baker dominated German-speaking cities such as Vienna. White patrons’ enthusiastic support for Black classical musicians, coupled with the familiar concert hall environment in which these musicians performed and the established management agencies representing them, made it easier for German audiences to continue supporting Black musicians even during the wave of anti-Black propaganda. Thus, the unique and elite social networks in which Black classical musicians operated make it possible for us to see more clearly how some of the very same audiences who denounced jazz could also adore musicians such as Roland Hayes or Marian Anderson.

In this environment, the careers of Black classical musicians expanded beyond any previous capacity. Their status as elite musicians and even as celebrities placed them in spaces inaccessible to many Black jazz musicians and African colonial entertainers and on par with many other white classical musicians at the time. Yet their experiences as Black men and women and their political positions meant that they shared similar perspectives with other African Americans abroad on the values of Black networking and the goals of anti-racist work at home and abroad. Their racial positions ultimately set them apart from white classical musicians in how they navigated their lives and careers in Central Europe and how audiences and patrons treated them.

German-speaking audiences admired Black classical musicians and Black jazz musicians for different reasons. White German and Austrian listeners could support Black classical musicians because what and where they performed made them respectable. The genre of music and the culture associated with it had opened doors for Black classical musicians in ways that other genres could not. Audiences took note when prominent musicians such as Walter attended Black musicians’ concerts—which functioned as a form of endorsement. Accordingly, the public granted Black classical musicians the most favor and admiration because of their institutional affiliations, patronage networks, and the genre of music they performed.

Sitting in on Hayes’s debut in Vienna in 1923, Locke said as much. His essay, written for the African American media outlet Opportunity, is a veritable Who’s Who list among musical elites and also a testament to these politics of racial uplift. Locke writes that Hayes’s concert was so thrilling that listeners

In Locke’s essay, the politics of racial uplift and the power of white elite support are all wrapped in one. The growing power of the audience in shaping the careers of Black classical musicians was beginning to have an immense effect. If during the Kaiserreich white audiences of Black classical musicians were largely unknown, now during the interwar era they were making themselves known. Attending Black concerts became a performative statement, and in so doing, white musical elites endorsed Black classical musicians like never before. Not only were Black classical musicians worthy of teaching; as the presence of white elites in sold-out concerts suggested, they were now worth listening to as well.

Anti-Black Backlash on the Concert Stage

Nonetheless, Black classical musicians were not immune from the mounting anti-Black politics of the day. “Between 1925 and 1933,” Christine Naumann argues, “no year passed without manifested nationalist opposition to African American performers.”⁹⁷ And while musicians from England or France also faced resistance to their performances, Susann Lewerenz points out that Black entertainers faced not only xenophobia but also racist attacks.⁹⁸ The figures of the Black Horror, Jonny, and Josephine endured throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and although Black jazz musicians and African colonial migrants most likely bore the brunt of racist antagonism, Black classical musicians faced it as well.

Hayes’s career in Central Europe offers a striking example of how essentialized notions of Black people wound their way into audience reception of Black classical performers. The fact that Hayes, an African American tenor, became associated with the Black Horror campaign provides an example of how race trumped nation in white German-speaking Europe. Protestors erased Hayes’s American citizenship in order to make him into a Black man (vaguely defined) who threatened white Europe. Their claims baffled Hayes, who wrote, “I refused to believe, however, that they would hold me, a private Negro citizen of the United States, responsible for the presence of French-speaking Africans …”⁹⁹ Yet white Germans continued to associate Hayes and other African American musicians such as the Four Black Diamonds with the stereotype of French colonial troops stationed along the Rhine.¹⁰⁰

Even when critics or protestors acknowledged his American identity, they weaponized it as a way to discredit his performances. An open letter published in a Berlin newspaper that asked the American ambassador to forbid Hayes from performing “called for the prevention of a certain calamity: namely, the concert of an American Negro who had come to Berlin to defile the names of German poets and composers; a Negro, the writer said, ‘who, at best, could only remind us of the cotton fields of Georgia.’ ”¹⁰¹ Black musicians, including American classical musicians, had nothing to offer civilized white Germans.¹⁰²

In addition to being a Black Horror on the Rhine or an American Negro picking cotton, Hayes also became a Jonny character in the German imagination. Print media and visual culture made Hayes into a Jonny entertainer in many different ways. First, like the Jonny character in Krenek’s opera, German and Austrian audiences associated Hayes with greed and money. As Alan Lareau points out, in Krenek’s opera, money is the only thing powerful enough to lure Jonny away from women.¹⁰³ Press characterizations of Hayes also emphasized his ruthless desire for capital. They decried him as a wealthy foreign artist who was profiting from German demands to hear beautiful music and taking away money from local German artists. Unlike real artists, who exist only to serve art, Hayes was a greedy and manipulative Black trickster who thrived on deviance and manipulation.

At the heart of this characterization of Hayes as a greedy Black entertainer was a miscommunication in Berlin in 1926. The event caused the audience that had supposedly fallen in love with Hayes in 1924 to turn against him two years later. Hayes earned the ire of concertgoers for apparently refusing to perform at his own concert until the seats were filled. Appearing in gossip columns in both Germany and Austria the day after, the story of his hour-long delay on the concert stage was subject to many calls of denouncement. Though he was scheduled to sing at 8 p.m., newspaper columnists gossiped that Hayes had apparently looked out into the audience prior to his performance, saw that it was empty, and “climbed into his car and drove off.” A frustrated audience sat waiting while the concert board had to search for him and cajole him into performing for the crowd, which he did an hour later. “The audience remained confused and disconcerted, for the concert board hadn’t even bothered telling the audience a white lie [to appease them].”¹⁰⁴

In Hayes’s memoir, he claims that he had performed late out of protest because his manager had withheld his concert fees. But the damage had already been done. Berlin residents had paid money to hear him perform, and they left the concert hall feeling betrayed. Newspapers such as the Wiener Morgenzeitung reported, “During his appearance on the podium, the Negro received hisses from a part of the audience.”¹⁰⁵ (The choice of noun—“the Negro”—is striking in the last sentence. Pointing out his Blackness worked to reinforce German biases against foreign musicians as greedy entertainers who only performed for money, not for the purity of their art.) Newspapers in several major cities, including Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna, caught wind of this resentment and cast shame on Hayes with headlines such as, “The Naughty Negro who would not sing until he heard the money ringing in the till,” and, “The Negro tenor who was mad because the concert hall was not sold out.”¹⁰⁶

Hayes’s financial drama only added more intensity to ongoing debates that Black musicians were taking jobs from German musicians and that they were ungrateful for all of the professional opportunities Central Europe offered. “The contortions of these exotic guests has not any connection with art and culture,” complained a right-wing German newspaper. “German artists who have undergone long years of training are starving, while troops of colored performers are getting enormous salaries.”¹⁰⁷ African American performers were detrimental not only to German art and culture but also to the German economy, some Germans protested. Hayes was no longer a cultivated artist who strove to create art instead of earn money; he had become a greedy Black entertainer just like anyone else, motivated by money and lacking in culture or civilization.

Like the Jonny character, not only was Hayes ruthless in his desire for money, but he was also lustful for white women. The Viennese began calling him a womanizer, claiming that he “won the confidence of all women’s hearts.”¹⁰⁸ Reporting on Hayes’s sexual appeal to women, one journalist wrote, “They had regular wars here to secure tickets to his concerts. The women here almost killed each other in order to get into the concert hall to hear and more importantly to see the Black singer.”¹⁰⁹ Gossip columnists intimated that Hayes had been having affairs with several women, and the press attributed to him the same sort of heightened male sexuality that was often attributed to Black men in Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s. One newspaper, for example, gossiped that “the public must not be surprised if, after [Hayes’s departure], they were to see Black babies wheeled through the Ring in coroneted prams.”¹¹⁰

Multiple presses also picked up on a brewing scandal as well: Hayes had begun having an affair with a countess in Vienna.¹¹¹ The sheer mention of Hayes’s association with Viennese aristocracy brought a whiff of scandal to the city. The Viennese daily newspaper Die Stunde mentioned that Hayes had become engaged to “a central European princess,” while other newspapers specifically linked him to Countess Hoyos and later reported his engagement to a countess from the Colloredo-Mansfeld family. ¹¹² When Hayes returned to the United States in the late 1920s, he left in part because he was frustrated by critics who were so fixated on his skin color and sexuality that they were unable to talk about anything else.

For Black women, the primary trope with which they had to contend was Baker. The figure of a scantily-clad dancing Baker dominated European culture and determined the treatment of Black women in Germany and Austria. For example, Fasia Jansen, an Afro-German woman who survived the Nazi regime, recalled in an interview how Baker was one of the few symbols of Black womanhood for her as a child. “I always wanted to be a dancer,” Jansen told Campt, “and my [white German stepfather] was crazy about Josephine Baker.”¹¹³ In a letter to her parents in the summer of 1935, Harreld, a student at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, writes, “[Anderson] and Josephine Baker are certainly the outstanding Negro celebrities here. I hear more about them than about anyone else. In fact they are the only ones that one hears of. Several people say I look like Josephine Baker! They think they are paying me a magnificent compliment when they say that.”¹¹⁴ Harreld’s irritation at being compared to Baker of course reveals her own respectability politics as the daughter of wealthy professors who had also traveled to Europe before. Yet her comment also illustrates the ubiquity of Baker’s image in Central Europe at the time, years after the entertainer had left.

Figure 15. A cartoon appearing in the Baltimore African American newspaper, the Afro-American, on January 8, 1927, depicted the scandal of Roland Hayes’s affair with a Viennese countess. Courtesy of the AFRO American Newspaper Archives.

Yet other Black women offered alternative models of Black womanhood in Central Europe in the interwar era. Trying to combat the stark image of Baker as a Black jezebel conquering Central Europe, the German Jewish journalist Anna Nussbaum published an essay in Der Tag in 1928 called “The Afro-American Woman” (“Die afro-amerikanische Frau”). While applauding Baker, Florence Mills, and other Black women entertainers, Nussbaum also intentionally presents counterexamples to the overpowering image of Baker in her essay. She brings in Phyllis Wheatley, the nineteenth-century opera singer Marie Selika Willams, the Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, and the sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller as examples of respectable Black women who also created high art. Even though Black women are doubly burdened by their identities in the United States and face varying forms of discrimination, Nussbaum argues that “there are today women of the African race in America who work as physicians, nurses, and teachers; and in political, industrial, and art life, with success.”¹¹⁵

Anderson represents the strongest counterexample to Baker in Central Europe. A devout Protestant, Anderson especially drew countless life-long committed fans, in part for playing the role of the anti-Baker. Arriving onstage in elegant, expensive, yet modest-looking gowns, she exuded primness, sincerity, and artistry. Her sartorial choices were never supposed to distract the audience from the serious purpose of her art. Where Baker was wild and outrageous, Anderson was modest and humble. While Baker indulged white male fantasies of erotic primitivism, Anderson performed a bourgeois, Victorian, pious, modest, respectable womanhood with what many considered to be graceful elegance. She became a perfect foil for German-speaking audiences who denounced jazz but still wished to claim a kind of racially harmonious cosmopolitanism. She was, in short, the most acceptable and respectable Black commodity in Central Europe.

She had achieved this image in part through her networks, patrons, and management agencies, who presented modest images of her to the public. Newspapers gossiped about her arrival to different German-speaking cities and the aristocratic patrons and teachers who met her at the train station, where she always appeared in modest dress stepping off the train. Images, produced and disseminated by management agencies, certainly presented her in this manner. Lotte Meitner-Graf, a legendary photographer to musical celebrities, took a series of photographs of Anderson in Vienna, which Anderson most likely used for promotional materials.

In one such image (figure 16), Anderson appears youthful as she gazes upward past the camera, her hands clasped in prayer. The photograph offers no hint of scandal, but rather a highly stylized image of an innocent young maiden. In another (figure 17), she is demure, dressed fashionably yet modestly and turned slightly away from the camera, revealing only her profile.

Anderson did not disavow her identity as a Black woman. Rather, she frequently tied her identity as an African American woman to her religious identity as a pious Christian. In interviews with the press, she frequently instructed listeners to hear the beauty and religiosity in African American spirituals. Steeped in racial uplift, intentionally quiet on the matter of Black politics in the press, she instead emphasized what she deemed to be the values of African American culture through her performances of songs such as “My Lord, What A Morning.”

The almost unending flow of fan letters, love letters, and marriage proposals to Anderson that fill her archive attest to the level of celebrity she had reached by August 1935. Harreld gossiped to her parents in August 1935 that “there is a Baron following Miss Anderson around. The men are crazy about her. She does look grand.”¹¹⁶ But unlike Baker, Anderson’s public image (and private persona) always emphasized her moral purity and humility in addition to her beauty. Most important, Anderson also became a Black woman against which Central Europeans could compare others. In contrast to the irritation she expressed at being compared to Baker, Harreld did not mind being mistaken for Anderson. One day, while walking around Salzburg, she was stopped by a woman who asked if she were Anderson. She joked in a letter to her parents, “I may have gained ten pounds but I evidently have not grown six inches … I have not tanned that much. I was very flattered, however, and told her so.”¹¹⁷

Anderson became a powerful image of Black womanhood that stood in direct contrast to European media portrayals of sexually loose Black women, as embodied by Baker, even as Baker tried to fight her own image as sexually lascivious. When Baker appeared onstage in Vienna in March 1928 in a long, cream-colored gown singing African American spirituals, critics and audience members asked why the city had made such a big fuss over her. The Wiener Zeitung, arguably one of the most influential daily newspapers in Vienna, attempted to correct the image: “After seeing Ms. Baker, one realizes that there wasn’t a more fraudulent and evil trick in how she was publicized: as the daughter of a wild bushman. In reality is she such an expressive, distinguished, tender, and if not beautiful then certainly charming young woman.”¹¹⁸ The gendered politics of respectability and racial uplift in African American culture became an important tool for Black women resisting white modes of sexualization and fetishization in interwar Central Europe.

Figure 16. Marian Anderson studio portrait photograph taken by the legendary Viennese photographer Lotte Meitner-Graf, 1934. This is just one of over eighty photos taken together in collaboration; the majority of the images depict Anderson looking youthful, modest, and pious. In this one, Anderson’s hands are clasped tight, as if in prayer. Marian Anderson Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Coll. 198: vol. 2, p. 19, item 1.

Figure 17. Marian Anderson studio portrait photograph taken by legendary Viennese photographer Lotte Meitner-Graf, 1935. In this image Anderson appears youthful and fashionable in her floral-print ensemble and braided hair. Marian Anderson Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, MS 198: vol. 3, p. 28, item 2.

The Promises and Pitfalls of Music-Making in Interwar Central Europe

When Anderson decided to go to Europe in the late 1920s, she had reached an impasse in her career in the United States. “I was going stale,” she writes. “I had to get away from my old haunts for a while; progress was at a standstill; repeating the same engagements each year, even if programs varied a little, was becoming routine; my career needed a fresh impetus, and perhaps a European stamp would help.”¹¹⁹ Like many other Black musicians, the promises of European success—and, just as important, European validation—pulled Anderson abroad and into a new social world of European art music. Going to Europe also meant more to Hayes than financial gain. “I wasn’t so interested in the money,” he insists in his memoir. “I was intoxicated by the fact that I hadn’t broken through [in America].” Frustrated with constantly bumping up against glass ceilings in the United States, Hayes decided to leave altogether.¹²⁰ For many talented Black performers, Germany and Austria offered them the promise to realize their full potential and find affirmation of their musicianship.

However, Germany and Austria also became a site of anti-Black racist backlash to their performances. Enraged by the so-called “Black Horror on the Rhine” and by the popularity of Black entertainers real and imagined (such as Jonny and Baker), white audiences protested against Black musicians in greater numbers than before WWI. At the same time, other listeners supported and endorsed Black classical musicians with greater substance and verve than before WWI.

The experiences of Black classical musicians on- and offstage highlight the complexities of anti-Blackness and social opportunity in interwar Central Europe. In spite of his various aristocratic backers and music teachers, Hayes became a symbol of the Black Horror and Jonny in German-speaking Europe. In fact, one could argue that it was because of his newly acquired wealth, earned from his concertizing in Central Europe, that he drew the ire of audiences angered by a Black man’s success on the stage.

Anderson’s story offers us an example of the gendered nature of audience reception in the age of the Black Horror campaign. Both she and Hayes shared the same networks and patrons, both becoming popular Black classical celebrities unlike anything Central Europe had witnessed before—yet she escaped the most severe anti-Black criticism. In part because of her own self presentations as a modest, pious, anti-Baker, and in part because of the gendered response from her fans, Anderson was simply not a threat to Central European audiences in the way that Hayes was. She nonetheless also attracted romantic offers from white Central Europeans, but her gender, public persona, and private life were safeguarded from these racial and gendered relations.

Regardless, Black classical musicians had to manage their careers within the shifting racial terrain of the 1920s and 30s. Sometimes, like the Black Horror case, their Blackness was right at the center of protest, regardless of their American nationality. At other times, their nationality as Americans was precisely how they earned the favor of the very same people who denounced the supposed Black Horror threat in Germany.¹²¹ Constantly faced with white audiences’ ever-changing and kaleidoscope views of them, Black classical musicians learned how to navigate the Central European marketplace with remarkable flexibility. Their rise to the status of celebrity indicated the social and economic possibilities afforded to Black classical musicians at the time. They stood apart from Black jazz musicians socially because of what they performed, and they also maintained different and wealthier careers than many white classical musicians because of their race. In Weimar Germany and Red Austria, Black classical musicians could be adored or loathed for the exact same things on completely different grounds. What they could no longer be, however, was ignored.

“There is a horde of white people who believe that Negroes can or should only sing hymns, spirituals, and jazz,” the Black writer Ernest Rice McKinney wrote in 1932. “It has taken some pretty long and arduous work on the part of Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and say, Hazel Harrison, to convince whites that Negroes had, or ought to have, any adaptability for Chopin, Beethoven, or Bach.”¹²² In part because of their powerful networks and careers in Central Europe, Black classical musicians had finally broken through into a greater transatlantic world to prove that Black people could also claim the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. But how convinced were white audiences of their performances?