Introduction
Grace Bumbry glittered in gold. The African American soprano glided around the set of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, shimmering under a dim glow of light filtered through laced netting that flooded the stage in gentle waves. Playing the role of Venus in the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner’s 1845 opera, Tannhäuser, Bumbry sparkled with each turn, embodying the tempting seductress she had been cast to perform, singing of love and lust to an enraptured audience of nearly two thousand listeners, including international dignitaries, high-ranking classical musicians, music critics, and socialites.
Built between 1872 and 1876, the Bayreuth Festival Theatre where Bumbry sang was a national monument of sorts, a shrine to the works of Wagner, and every summer pilgrims flocked to the small Bavarian town to hear Wagner’s operas performed in the house he had built. But in the summer of 1961, news that Wagner’s grandson Wieland Wagner had hired a young Black soprano to sing inside Bayreuth’s hallowed halls sent shockwaves across West Germany. Prior to her performance that warm July evening, hundreds of letters of protest had bombarded the opera house, declaring that Bumbry’s presence in Bayreuth would have that most “German” of composers rolling over in his grave.
Bumbry ignored them all. And on the first night of her appearance, the aspiring diva received a thirty-minute standing ovation. Her performance earned her international accolades and vaulted her to stardom.
Bumbry’s Bayreuth debut brings to light many different themes in German history that were hiding in plain sight. First, it illustrates how German audiences’ understandings of classical music—long heralded as the “most German of the arts”—could shift depending on the political era.1 No composer better symbolized how swiftly listeners could change their positions on music than Richard Wagner himself, an ardent anti-Semite and German nationalist, whose music Adolf Hitler later publicly avowed and generously supported. After WWII, however, Wagner’s operas came under close scrutiny by Allied forces because of the composer’s perceived proximity to Nazism, and many performances of his operas were either banned outright during the early occupation years or strongly discouraged. To bring Wagner back from the dead, the Bayreuth Festival Theatre embarked on a rescue mission. The music of Wagner could survive, the administrators believed, if given a new set of tools with which to perform and listen to it. One such tool was Grace Bumbry, a soprano with absolutely no experience singing Wagner.
The administration’s insistence on hiring her anyway—and the public’s vociferous response to her debut—illuminates another important theme in German history: namely, how cultural institutions wrestled with questions of race and racism. Bayreuth’s reclamation of Wagner through a Black singer was not only a bold act of rehabilitation but also an intentional insistence on rejecting the kinds of racist audiences who extolled the noxious ideologies Wagner espoused. Out of the ashes of Nazism, they proclaimed, West Germany had risen like a Phoenix to become a democratic society, and Bumbry’s performance on Bayreuth’s recently denazified stage was evidence of a new political era of racial acceptance. Her debut was meant to usher in a vibrant new moment in German history.
The initiative was deeply flawed. In order to disengage from a previous racial order, Wagner and the opera production team ultimately turned to historical myths of deviant Black female sexuality to transform Bumbry into an erotic goddess on stage. Called the “Black Venus” in newspapers and in casual conversation, Bumbry quickly came to symbolize earlier representations of sexualized Black women in European history, from Sara Baartman to Josephine Baker. Bayreuth’s 1961 production illustrates the problems and paradoxes of dislodging a cultural institution from its racist past by relying on historical stereotypes of Black people to do it. But even while Bumbry sang in scandalous dress and smeared in glitter, her symbolic significance as the vanguard of a new era could not be shaken.
To see Bumbry as representing a new era in German history, however, misses a greater story. Her premiere takes on new meaning when we treat it not as the beginning of something new but rather the product of almost one hundred years of Black networking and transatlantic activity. Since at least the 1870s, African American classical musicians were involved in the production and dissemination of classical music on German soil.2 Other Black musicians such as Sissieretta Jones, an opera singer who performed in 1890s Berlin, and the contralto Marian Anderson, who lived and performed in 1930s Germany and Austria, made Bumbry’s path to stardom a little more feasible.
The fact that audiences persistently viewed Bumbry’s debut as a novelty also occludes the most telling fact: Bumbry was not the first Black singer to grace the Bayreuth stage. In fact, the Afro-European contralto Luranah Aldridge had been invited by the Wagner family to reside with them in Bayreuth in the 1890s. Welcomed into the arms of Cosima Wagner and her daughters, Aldridge was supposed to perform as a Valkyrie in Wagner’s Ring Cycle before falling ill in 1896.3
Bumbry’s Bayreuth debut takes on greater meaning, then, if we understand it as one of many Black performances that caused a listening public to work out the ties between music, race, and nation. Performances like Bumbry’s were especially powerful because they challenged the deeply entrenched notion in German history that Blackness and Germanness were discrete categories. Angry protestors against Bumbry’s debut argued that a Black musician performing Wagner was paradoxical in nature, thus reinforcing the notion that Germanness was synonymous with whiteness and that Black people existed outside of it. Bumbry’s insistence on singing Wagner rejected the sonic and racial boundaries that white German audiences had constructed.
Bumbry’s debut is important because it placed a Black musician at the center of a national debate. But her premiere wasn’t the only time a Black musician had been called upon to perform this important cultural labor. Using documents collected from over thirty archives in Germany, Austria, and the United States, this book traces the long history of Black classical musicians—both singers and instrumentalists—from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe who studied and performed in Germany and Austria, the musical heartland of Europe. It narrates this story across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, beginning in the 1870s after the abolition of slavery in the United States and German unification and ending in the early 1960s and the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, one month after Bumbry’s debut. It follows Black musicians through every political era in modern Germany and Austria, starting with imperial Germany and Austria (part 1), the vibrant and volatile 1920s and 1930s (part 2), and the creation of three separate political states after 1945 (part 3): Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
What my book demonstrates is that by virtue of what they performed, where they performed, and how they performed it, Black classical musicians consistently challenged their audience’s ideas of Blackness, whiteness, and German national identity. White German and Austrian listeners frequently assumed that the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet Black performances of German music suggested that these typologies were not as fixed as listeners had been conditioned to expect. Audiences, I demonstrate, oscillated between seeing Black classical musicians as rightful heirs and dangerous usurpers of Austro-German musical culture.
It might seem strange to associate Blackness with German national identity in performances of classical music, but it is precisely this strangeness I wish to confront. Although we now recognize the long history of German antisemitism, scholars and others have been more reluctant to pay heed to Germany and Austria’s Black populations (past and present) and identify anti-Black racism in Central European history. Since the 1980s, a growing Afro-German movement, spearheaded by figures such as the Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde and the Afro-German poet May Ayim, has called for the recognition of Afro-Germans in society as both Black and German.4 When people of African descent in Central Europe appear in public discourse, they are usually described as a post-WWII phenomenon, thus ignoring the long history of Black diasporic migration to Europe over centuries. In general, transatlantic discourses of Black people in Europe explain them as a current manifestation of globalization, as immigrants and outsiders, reinforcing the assumption that Black people lack the historical connection to claim European identities or truly be European citizens.5 Afro-Germans, however, have been declaring themselves German since at least 1919.6 Many white, German-speaking institutions have refused to recognize them for just as long.
Yet musical performances, I argue, had the power to render racial categories malleable or fluid. Repeatedly, Black classical musicians’ interpretations of “the great masters” suggested to audiences that identities were not stable categories passed down genetically but instead were transmutable through the very act of performance. Their performances suggested that cultural identities had the power to supplant racial ones and that German national identity was something that could be mastered through performance and study rather than being inherited biologically through whiteness. In the concert hall or opera house, Black people musically performed both Blackness and Europeanness, collapsing the categories of Blackness and whiteness, “foreignness” and Germanness, race and culture.
This book, however, is also a study of how white audiences then responded to those epistemological collapses by shoring up hegemonic boundaries anew on European soil. Musical reception reveals that listeners constantly policed the boundaries of Blackness and whiteness in performance arenas. Across political eras and amid competing and even opposing political ideologies, white German and Austrian audiences consistently participated in the practice of racial listening, one that frequently rendered Blackness alien and foreign, as far removed from German culture as possible, even while their own ears contradicted that fact. Occasionally, however, music critics recognized the daring possibilities that Black interpretations of classical music performed: German music could be recreated and represented by “outsiders.” In other words, the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms might be discoverable, translatable, and reproducible after all.
Beethoven Goes Global: Musical Universalism and Black Migration
When asked by an American journalist in 1897 if there was a difference in her reception between American and European audiences, Sissieretta Jones responded, “Yes, a marked difference. In Europe there is no prejudice against my race. It matters not to them in what garb an artist come, so he be an artist … It is the artist[’s] soul they look at there, not the color of his skin.”7 About a decade later, the African American violinist and recent transplant to Europe Clarence Cameron White made the same argument in an interview with the African American newspaper the New York Age: “On every side you find [that] the European musician and music-lover [sic] as well, realizes that music is too broad and too universal to be circumscribed by the complexion of the skin or texture of the hair.”8 Both performers turned to powerful notions of classical music’s universality and to myths of European color blindness to explain why they believed Black classical musicians were better received in Europe than in the United States.
Their reasons for doing so were not rooted entirely in praise of European culture. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Black classical musicians expressed their righteous anger and frustration with the American classical music market, which used extreme measures to exclude them.9 While many had trained at conservatories of music such as Oberlin College or the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) since the late nineteenth century, once they stepped off the podium at graduation they encountered constant institutional barriers to their success. Although Americans now laud Marian Anderson for breaking the racial barrier at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1954, countless Black musicians had been available to sing prior to her debut. And where were they to perform?
Take, for instance, an incident in 1925, when the Italian opera singer Edoardo Ferrari-Fontana staged a competition at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to find a Black woman to sing Verdi’s Aida, an opera about an Ethiopian princess who must choose between the Egyptian general Radamès (her father’s enemy) and her loyalty to Ethiopia. Ferrari-Fontana confessed, “It has always been a mystery to me why impresarios have not sought a Negro voice for an opera like Aida.”10 Much to the shock and later horror of the Metropolitan Opera House, over two hundred and fifty women responded to Ferrari-Fontana’s request for Black singers, all stating that they were ready to sing the part. And many of them were: classically-trained singers such as Muriel Rahn, who in 1959 became the first Black musical director of what is now the Frankfurt Opera, and Florence Cole Talbert, the first Black woman to perform Verdi’s Aida in Europe, were both shortlisted. Yet despite the overwhelming proliferation of letters and telegrams seeking an audition, the Metropolitan Opera House shut down this vocal experiment.
Spurned by classical music institutions in the United States, by the late nineteenth century African American musicians began to argue that Europe was a place of racial acceptance for their musical gifts. Black praise of Europe, however, frequently had less to do with European racial attitudes than with African Americans’ dissatisfaction with life in the United States.11 Nonetheless, Black musicians claimed that while classical music in the United States operated along rigid racial fault lines, in Europe classical music was simply too universal to be debased by racism; European support for their performances, they said, was proof that musical universalism was transcendent.
Yet if music is a universal language, it has a strong German accent. The compositions of Mozart or Beethoven in particular have earned a reputation for universality because of their supposed ability to transcend national boundaries as they transport listeners to another realm. By the mid-nineteenth century, musicians and critics such as Robert Schumann had come to argue that only music “speaks the most universal of languages, one by which the soul is freely, yet indefinably moved; only then is it at home.”12 More important, according to these critics, only German art music remained pure enough, spiritual enough, and sufficiently unmarked by the aesthetic and moral depravation of Italian or French music to express the universal message of art. By proposing that universal music was serious, pure, and soulful and by positioning German music as the only true expression of these universal values, German aesthetes, nationalists, and even politicians transformed a universalist message into a nationalist idea. Simultaneously belonging to all and also authentically German, the Austro-German musical canon paradoxically tied the universal to the nation like no other.
Much to the surprise of German-speaking audiences, it was precisely classical music’s paradoxical nature that led Black musicians such as Clarence Cameron White to claim it. The fact that Black classical musicians in the Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America came to espouse the gospel of musical universalism is, if anything, a testament to German music’s hegemonic and expansive reach. Indeed, as we will see, many of the Black musicians who traveled to Germany and Austria had been reared on the Austro-German canon by German immigrant teachers. One of the reasons why Black musicians could preach the gospel of German music so effectively was because their German teachers had taught it to them.
It is no accident that the majority of Black classical musicians performing in Germany and Austria were from the United States. Due to the transatlantic slave trade and Afro-Caribbean migration, by the late nineteenth century the United States possessed both a large Black diasporic population and elite conservatories of Western art music such as Oberlin College—modeled after German schools of music—that trained Black students. Moreover, German musicians also taught or collaborated with Black students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) such as Fisk University. German immigrants were a formidable force in the lives of Black classical musicians and often worked behind the scenes to procure their students concertizing opportunities and teachers abroad. Imbued with the teachings of “the great masters,” African American classical musicians, like many white Americans, were eager to book passage across the Atlantic Ocean to pursue their dreams of living, studying, and performing in the musical promised land.
Black longing to visit the musical capitals of Vienna and Berlin demonstrates that German-speaking Europe functioned as its own metropolis for Black travel and migration, and for reasons that differed entirely from those surrounding England, France, and other regions that have dominated historical narratives of Black lives in Europe. British imperialism functioned as a key determinant connecting Anglophone Black intellectuals and artists across the Atlantic Ocean from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, England.13 In the Francophone world, intellectuals such as René Maran and Léopold Senghor strengthened and complicated Black diasporic politics in the twentieth century.14 Soviet Moscow became a site of Black intellectual and cultural production in the twentieth century, in part because a global vision of Marxism invited thinkers and artists to the capital city from across the Black diaspora.15 But in the case of Black classical musicians, their reasons for living and working in Germany and Austria had little to do with empire or popular entertainment, thus providing us with a peculiarly German origin to a form of Black travel and migration. German music itself was the draw.
Moreover, the social worlds of Black classical musicians in Germany and Austria functioned differently from those of Black jazz musicians or African colonial migrants in Europe. They partook in the elite social customs and rituals expected of professional classical musicians more generally, adhering to an apprenticeship system that emphasized highly individualized musical instruction and joining patronage and pedagogy networks whose aims were to promote classical musicians in their endeavors. The concert hall as an active musical and social space also differentiated Black classical musicians from Black entertainers.16 Performance venues such as the Sing-Akademie in Berlin or the Musikverein in Vienna functioned as sites of legitimation that granted Black performers musical credibility and even authority in a manner that other musical spaces could not. The fact that Black classical musicians had infiltrated these sacred locales was testament to their exceptional qualities in the eyes and ears of many of their listeners.
What also distinguished Black classical musicians from popular entertainers concerns the discourse surrounding Western art music itself. Transatlantic musical discourse upheld the belief that edification and uplift distinguished art music from popular or vernacular music, which classical musicians eschewed for its commercialistic overtones. An intense, all-consuming enterprise, classical music supposedly demanded complete and utter devotion. Hours of solitary practice, individual lessons, and rehearsals in symphony orchestra halls or opera houses cultivated distinct social rules—rules that Black classical musicians also wished to obey. Studying with the right teacher, attending a prestigious conservatory of music in Germany or Austria, and auditioning for a management agency were equally important pursuits. Tapping into established patronage networks, Black classical musicians formed intimate relationships with white Germans and Europeans, many of whom advocated both formally and informally on their behalf. Their worlds were uniquely Germanocentric, for what had brought them to German-speaking Europe and what made it possible for them to form these ties was Austro-German musical culture itself.
Yet at the same time, these musicians’ Black diasporic identities obviously informed their experiences. As I discuss throughout the book, they often sought out other Black classical musicians and intellectuals abroad and formed intimate relationships with white Germans and Europeans at a time when most white Americans refused to acknowledge them. The pianist Portia Washington, daughter of Booker T. Washington, benefitted from her fellow pianist Hazel Harrison’s connections to find housing and teachers in Berlin in the early twentieth century. Marian Anderson mentored the pianist Josephine Harreld while Harreld studied abroad in Salzburg in the summer of 1935. African American opera coach Sylvia Olden Lee pulled a young Jessye Norman aside in 1960s West Berlin to discuss with her how to navigate her career in opera as a Black woman.
Their experiences were also gendered. Black women overwhelmingly dominated the world of opera, in part because Black men were rarely cast as romantic heroic leads with white women. Black men trained and performed in German-speaking Europe as conductors, an opportunity denied most women. The gender of Black musicians certainly shaped their encounters with their fellow musicians, their auditions, their concerts, and the audience’s reception of them as well. As we will see, Black men and women were sexualized and fetishized by the German and Austrian press and by their fellow musicians. Black performers were also often vocal in rejecting how German and Austrian media portrayed them.
In short, what the experiences of Black classical musicians in Germany and Austria reveal is the global dialectical power of “musical Germanness” and the ways in which it transformed lives and institutions across the Atlantic Ocean.17 Its endurance and mutability in transatlantic musical discourse suggest the lengths to which musicians and audiences were willing to go to maintain it. The global function of “musical Germanness” ultimately encouraged everyone, including non-Germans, to reinforce its hegemonic power. Indeed, Hoi-eun Kim argues that this is precisely how Germanness has operated in modern global history. Rather than seeing Germanness as an essence, Kim suggests that we consider it as “a collective sum of variable attributes of a nation and its members that both German nationals and non-Germans envisioned, articulated, and even embodied.”18 Germanness, he posits, has long been “subject to global production and articulation by non-Germans who wanted to define it for their own interests and agendas.”19 Black performances of classical music belong to this greater story of how discourses of German musical greatness were produced and reproduced around the world.
Settling down in cities such as Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, and Salzburg, Black musicians performed the music of German composers and indulged long-held dreams of residing in their musical homeland. Some came for a summer. Some came for the rest of their lives. Their feet planted firmly on German soil, they made it their mission to study “the great masters” and sing like Germans. Audiences frequently responded to Black performers with rounds of applause. But, as Inga Clendinnen asks, how real was the listener’s comprehension?20
Hearing Race: Blackness as Discourse in German History
While Black classical musicians often sang their praises for Austro-German music in a universalist key, white German and Austrian responses to their performances suggest that they were attuned to a different ideological modality. Austrian and German modes of listening to Black performers of Wagner or Brahms often belied the transnational and supposedly transcendental relationships fostered in the name of German music. Decade after decade, white German and Austrian listeners expressed surprise and even shock when hearing Black musicians perform the music of “the German masters.” More important, however, their critical reception of the performances produced and reproduced nationalist and racist discourses of music. Their criticisms are proof that audience reception is never a passive experience but rather an active process where social, cultural, and political categories are constantly arbitrated.21
In order to interrogate how audiences listened to Black classical musicians, I draw on theories of listening that have been developed by historians, musicologists, and sound studies scholars over the last decade. Their work fundamentally rejects the assumption that listening is a universal, objective experience—namely, that listeners all hear the same sounds in the same way.22 Rather, they argue, listening has historically functioned as a method of social boundary drawing. Audiences listen along racial lines, drawing from preexisting racial vocabularies and systems of knowledge to contextualize the sounds that they hear.23 Over time, audiences learned how to listen for Blackness and used sounds they coded as “Black” and “white” to draw what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls the “sonic color line,” creating a hierarchical division between Blackness and whiteness.24 This practice of racial listening, beginning in earnest in the nineteenth century, made it possible for white elite audiences to see themselves as arbiters of taste, citizenship, and personhood.
Owing its methodology to new theories of racial listening, this book also investigates when and how audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Mark Burford, for example, argues that certain genres became white in the ears and minds of many “because of the barriers, caveats, bargains, and apologias performers of all races and ethnicities have faced when attempting to perform and voice complex selves through it.”25 White German and Austrian audience responses to Black classical musicians, therefore, may tell us just as much about their own constructions of whiteness and German national identity as they do about their perceptions of Blackness.
One of the ways in which classical music became associated with whiteness was through the insidious practice of racial un/marking. Classical music, like whiteness itself, is frequently racially unmarked and presented as universal—until people of color start performing it.26 Audiences, in turn, then employ practices of racial listening to compose the sonic color line in classical music anew, even as they consider the porousness of its boundaries. As we will see, German-speaking music criticism consistently fell along racial lines, at various times praising or condemning Black classical musicians for sounding either “white” or “Black,” German or un-German. Across decades, listeners tuned their ears for inaudible social cues and drew on racial discourses to make aesthetic judgments on performances of Schubert or Brahms. Their sonic observations were never benign or objective. Rather, they produced and maintained racial difference.
For example, in the 1920s listeners praised Black classical musicians such as Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes as “Negroes with white souls,” which suggested that through their dedication to classical music they had overcome their Blackness and the limitations it posed. The practice of describing “good” Black people as white has its origins in German colonialism. In 1912, for example, the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius praised an African sergeant named Bida along the same lines during his time in Sudan. “Above all,” he writes, “I must praise my hardworking Sergeant Bida, who, although of dark skin, has demonstrated that he has a white heart.”27 During the American occupation of West Germany after 1945, white German commentators used a similar rhetorical device when pleading with Germans to be more accepting of children born to African American soldiers and white German women. Heide Fehrenbach writes, “In efforts to establish the children’s ‘innocence’ and untainted moral state, liberal commentators would remark that while they might be Black on the outside, on the inside—where it counts—the children had a ‘white heart.’ ”28 Even in the case of Black Germans today, “if their Blackness is recognized, their Germanness is not, and if they are allowed to be German, they are not so Black, after all,” argues Fatima El-Tayeb.29 German national identity, scholars find, has operated in a Black-white binary that has been difficult to dismantle.
In sum, German and Austrian reception of Black classical musicians reveals the limits of German musical universalism despite its global reach. Listeners’ evaluations illustrate how universalizing beliefs actually obfuscated music’s role in reinforcing racial hierarchies and shaping ideologies of cultural belonging. Confronted by the politics of race and nation, listeners fiddled with the timbre and tone of German musical universalism in response to the different kinds of performers praising it. However much the audience believed in the transcendental powers of the Austro-German canon, and however much Black classical musicians praised European society for being more receptive to their musicianship than the United States, race still informed white audiences’ criticisms of Black performers and their renditions of the supposedly universal music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
Crossing Time and Space: German History over the Longue Durée
Searching for Black people in German musical spaces has occasionally felt akin to chasing ghosts. While some musicians reached international stardom and continue to live on in public memory, others such as Hazel Harrison, who performed with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1904, have fallen into obscurity. Many names are simply unknown in African American history because their careers and lives flourished entirely on German soil. The African American conductor George Byrd, for example, was a protégé of Herbert von Karajan and a conductor who worked on both sides of the Berlin Wall from the 1960s until the collapse of the GDR in 1990. Claudio Brindis de Salas, an Afro-Brazilian violinist, spent well over a decade in Germany in the late nineteenth century before retiring to Argentina. J. Elmer Spyglass, a graduate of Ohio’s Toledo Conservatory of Music, traveled abroad to Germany in the early 1910s and simply never came back. At the end of WWII, he was among a crowd of German villagers greeting American soldiers who had defeated Nazi rule.
In order to find these individuals, I turned to print media as the primary source base for my histories of transatlantic musical exchange, even though I recognize the difficulties of relying on concert music criticism to inform historical and musicological scholarship. Although many American and Austrian newspapers have been digitized and made text searchable, German newspapers still exist primarily in analog form and are accessible only through archival research.30 I supplement historical newspapers with memoirs, unpublished speeches, musical scores, concert programs, private letters, and personal diaries located in German, Austrian, and American archives in order to create a panoramic perspective of how music critics, audiences, Black performers, their teachers, and their friends understood Blackness, whiteness, and German musical culture.
While sound recordings are worthy of investigation, I have privileged eyewitness accounts, interviews, diaries, and memoirs over musical albums to focus on audiences’ reflections on their encounters with Black performers on Central European stages. It was simply more important to me to counter myths of European historical whiteness by providing irrefutable evidence that Black people traveled to, lived in, and performed in front of German and Austrian audiences than it was to analyze sonic materials, divorced as they are from the Black men and women that produced them. The advantage to privileging live performances over sound recordings lies precisely in illustrating how Black musicians performatively detangled the relationship between sight and sound, race and culture, in front of their audiences for nearly one hundred years.
Writing a longue durée of this kind offers many advantages, the first being that it becomes possible to see how musical performances can change their meaning in a new political context. Anderson’s renditions of Handel, Bach, and Schubert made her an international superstar in the 1930s. In 1950, she offered a recital featuring much of the same music she had sung in previous decades. But the context had completely changed. She performed in Berlin in front of German music lovers and American soldiers at the behest of the US military, who hired Black classical musicians to perform in Germany in order to “teach the Germans a racial lesson.”31 Her performances of Schubert were now heard in a different key.
Second, narrating a longer history reveals both how historical agents were shaped by the political and cultural context in which they resided and also how the varying discursive practices in which they were engaged had, in actuality, preceded them. Following Neil Gregor’s observation that the “same underlying habits of thought” structured the way Germans listened to the composer Anton Bruckner’s music across the twentieth century, this book also provides occasional clues to patterns of reception that undergirded Austro-German musical culture.32 Rather than seeing German and Austrian audiences, patrons, and social networks as static or unchanging over time, it presents moments of intense political rupture and change while also uncovering underlying logics that continued to generate theories of racial difference or musical sameness.
Third, taking the long view of German musical reception also encourages us to listen carefully to German constructs of Blackness across time, to see how they drew from earlier archives and repositories of knowledge and how they curated an ever-changing body of rhetoric, iconography, and musical vocabulary to make sense of what they perceived as novelty. For this reason, white German audiences’ comparisons of Black musicians to their Black predecessors or contemporaries actually matter more than when they were compared to Jewish musicians or others labeled as different. Being attentive to how German audiences compared Black musicians across time reveals how past and present notions of Blackness piled atop one another and incited public interest.33 In a concert hall, listeners frequently located older Black references, demonstrating a remarkable awareness of Black musicianship in different political eras—even while occasionally still expressing surprise at seeing a Black classical musician in front of them.
Fourth, by addressing moments across time when German and Austrian listeners tapped into racial discourses, this book also challenges conventional forms of periodization. It intentionally pushes through well-established vanishing points such as Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 or the end of WWII in 1945, choosing to see them neither as beginnings nor endings of important conversations about race or music. Transgressing the 1945 barrier in German history becomes especially important for writing histories of race and racism because for a long time many postwar historians operated under the assumption that the problem of racism disappeared after the demise of the Nazi state. In doing so, they propagated the postwar notion that constructs of race were no longer necessary to define or understand.34 Yet German reception of Black classical musicians demonstrates how difficult it was for audiences to dislodge their perceptions of Black talent and musicianship, even in a new era of Allied occupation. Their praise for, or rejection of, a Black performer’s voice and appearance often relied on older racial vocabularies, in spite of their new political reality.
Yet as much as this book offers us a history of durable memory, of drawing on older racial practices to make sense of the new, it is also a history of forgetting. Or, perhaps more fitting, it is about how German and Austrian listeners employed what Katrin Sieg calls technologies of forgetting in order to maintain certain kinds of public memories. Forgetting historical knowledge, she argues, is a complex and deliberately dishonest process: “The work of forgetting faces a conceptual dilemma: how to forget something you cannot acknowledge knowing, since that acknowledgment would consign matter to memory rather than oblivion?”35
The act of forgetting made it possible for listeners to feel a sense of discovery and novelty each time a Black musician performed on stage, thus presenting Black performances as rare occurrences. This pattern of forgetting or erasure recurs time and again. For example, audiences today still assume that André Watts was the first Black pianist to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1967 when in fact Hazel Harrison broke that barrier in 1904. Likewise, our assumption that Grace Bumbry was the first Black singer in Bayreuth erases Luranah Aldridge’s experience. The career of the Juilliard-trained conductor George Byrd is also a striking example of this history of forgetting: when he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1959, newspapers in both the United States and Germany reported that he was the first Black conductor to do so.36 Yet fourteen years prior, Rudolph Dunbar had conducted the ensemble in one of their first concerts following the end of WWII.
White German denial or erasure of the presence of Black classical musicians within German history was a complex process. Because Black classical musicians were often rendered as exceptions to German understanding of Black musicianship, with its emphasis on jazz or popular music, they were easy to forget—or, to put it more succinctly, they could be made forgettable. Black classical musicians could exist as strange aberrations outside of German history as opposed to being a part of it. German histories of forgetting were simultaneously histories of compressing, of repeatedly associating Black musicianship with jazz, popular music, and degenerate entertainment, thus presenting classical musicians as an extraordinary anomaly. Across time, a curated iconography of Black popular entertainment overlaid performances by Black classical musicians, rendering them potentially inscrutable on their own terms.
In addition to crossing time, this book also travels across borders. In particular, it transgresses the Austro-German boundary that has shaped much of German historiography. The reasons for this are many. First, Black classical musicians themselves rarely stayed within national borders. Their musical migrations between Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Salzburg suggest instead a fluidity of movement in what they perceived to be a shared cultural space. Especially after the 1933 rise of Hitler, Black classical musicians left Germany and took advantage of musical communities and markets in Austria to continue staging their concerts. Similarly, after 1945, Black classical musicians were also willing to cross the Berlin Wall into East Germany to advance their careers.
Music-making has also always been a transregional and transnational activity, and many musicians and audiences in German-speaking Europe found various ways to lay claim to the Austro-German musical canon.37 I do not wish to conflate all regions of German-speaking Europe, but rather to recognize the tensions that developed between cultural space and geographic place and to identify if or how these tensions changed in response to the arrival of transnational actors.38 Indeed, the strength of crossing political and regional borders is that we may bring German-speaking cultural centers into conversation with one another.39 It makes it possible to see how audiences in Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin claimed cultural and musical Germanness throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in different ways, and to see how they held figures such as Beethoven and Brahms central to their cultural identities.
Music was not the only value Germans and Austrians shared. Consideration of how notions of Blackness crossed borders also illuminates a history of anti-Black racism that likewise knew no national boundary. While the historiography of Black migration to Germany has grown considerably, substantially less scholarship exists on Blackness in Austria.40 Yet Austrians and Germans frequently relied on their presumed whiteness to understand performances of German music, even when their political situations differed. Germans and Austrians often assumed a shared culture when it came to discussing Black musicians. Most disconcerting, their comments suggest a racist comprehension of musical Germanness, one that betrayed its universalist spirit. Although critics in Austria and Germany did not always agree on what musical Germanness was, this book demonstrates that they all nonetheless believed Blackness lay outside of it, even when provided sonic evidence to the contrary. In twentieth-century Germany, Priscilla Layne writes, “Blackness [was] posited as always already outside of German culture and in opposition to German culture, foreclosing the possibility of being both Black and German.”41 One thing was for certain: musical Germanness was defined along racial lines, even during moments of international support and universalist aspirations.
Resisting White Expectations
This book is not about jazz. It is not about hip hop, gospel, or other genres of music that we associate with Black identity. It is, however, about the assumptions, expectations, and desires that white audiences placed on Black bodies across the Atlantic Ocean and that they ascribed to Black musicianship of whatever genre. In fact, the strength of this book is its location of Black performances within the realm of classical music, which has escaped many of our historiographical conversations on race and Blackness.42 Black musicians performed in German-speaking Europe long before the invention of jazz and have performed long since. Yet our historiographies of Black musical migration and travel have given us the most limited sense of their accomplishments. Repeatedly, books on Black musicians in the diaspora have refused to examine anything outside of a narrowly-defined conception of “Black music.” There must be space in scholarship for Black cultural activity and agency that both expands and calls into question what we have come to define as Black aesthetics. Discussing these activities does not diminish or jeopardize the work of racial justice.43 Instead, it bolsters us to consider new definitions of Blackness and music in ever-shifting global contexts.
Black performances of classical music in Germany and Austria take on new meaning when we consider them not only as musical interpretations of canonical works but also as performances of cultural citizenship in Europe. The question of whether different racial minorities can claim a German or Austrian identity has only become more urgent in the twenty-first century.44 Black musical renditions of Brahms or Beethoven are especially powerful in this light because these performances struck right at the heart of German culture and how its listeners understood it. Black musicians’ rigorous study and successful execution of German music suggest that, contrary to contemporary conservative, essentialist claims to German national identity, Germanness is something that can not only be performed but also learned.
Yet by the time the popular African American choral ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers arrived in Germany in 1877, German demands for a particular kind of musical Blackness had become a powerful force of their own. For over a century, white German-speakers continually demanded a Black musical authenticity that often countered what the musicians themselves wished to perform. In the 1890s, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son requested African American spirituals when the Hampton Institute Choir came to visit, and in the 1920s, Afro-Germans took up American jazz music to satisfy white German interest—in spite of the fact that they had little training in the music or familiarity with it. Even in Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi officers demanded that Black prisoners perform jazz. After 1945, Black musicians still found themselves the objects of a particular kind of musical desire. The mezzo-soprano Shirley Verrett, who spent the majority of her career in the 1960s and 1970s in West Germany, recalled giving recitals in Europe in which she had omitted African American spirituals from the text of her concert program, only to be obliged to sing them anyway after hearing repeated calls for “spiri-chu-elles” from the back of the concert hall.45 At the request of the West German government, Sylvia Lee taught spirituals to German choruses during her seven-year residency in West Germany, where she also worked at the Bavaria State Opera.46 Trapped by German expectations of Black authenticity, Black musicians were supposed to give German and Austrian audiences the sounds of themselves.
The title of this book, however, encourages us to consider what happened when Black classical musicians defied those expectations, to linger in those moments when they sang music that did not supposedly “look” like them, when they performed brilliantly and under considerable scrutiny. So let us hear what they gave their listeners instead.