San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joshua Kosman: New collection of Marian Anderson music rights past wrongs.
Over the course of a distinguished 40-year career, the African American contralto Marian Anderson made dozens of recordings, performed regularly in recital and created an image for herself as a popular embodiment of classical music. Yet it was one public appearance above all that came to encapsulate her history in the public eye.
That was on Easter Sunday 1939, when Anderson mounted the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to sing before an outdoor crowd estimated at 75,000 listeners. Millions more tuned in on the radio to hear her sing “America,” selections by Schubert and Donizetti, and a group of spirituals.
The draw wasn’t exclusively musical, although Anderson’s artistry — her lush vocal tone, her prodigious range and the stateliness and precision with which she delivered a varied array of repertoire — were already widely known. Rather, Anderson’s performance was intended, and correctly interpreted, as a political gesture.
Earlier that year, the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused Anderson permission to give a recital at Constitution Hall, the Washington, D.C., performance venue of the lineage-based membership service organization. The racial angle was never stated explicitly, but in a still-segregated city, it wasn’t hard to read between the lines.
So a group of Anderson’s champions, led by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, organized the Lincoln Memorial event, which went on to become a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement.
It’s an inspirational story, with just one problem: Viewing Anderson as an icon for racial progress — a status she entirely deserves — makes it all too easy to overlook the extent of her musical achievements. That’s why a sumptuous new collection of Anderson’s complete recordings for RCA Victor, remastered and packaged by Sony Classical, comes as such a welcome corrective. The 15-disc “Beyond the Music: Marian Anderson” (Sony Classical; $99.98), a compilation of recordings made from 1923 to 1955, documents her remarkable musical gift and the successes of her career — as well as the ways in which racism blunted the splendors that might have been.
Right from the start, listeners were stuck by Anderson’s natural abilities. Her singing was both plush and tonally translucent, with a velvety sonority that encompassed an array of colors. Her deep and resplendent chest register was where she made her vocal home, but she could rise to powerful notes as well when the occasion demanded. The conductor Arturo Toscanini, on hearing her sing in Salzburg in 1935, supposedly described her voice as the kind that comes along only once in 100 years.
Already in her earliest recordings — programs of spirituals arranged by the pathbreaking Black composer Harry T. Burleigh, songs by Schubert and Sibelius — the depth of Anderson’s approach is striking. She sings with a combination of expressive intimacy and almost regal elegance, as if trying to forge a bond with the listener out of immediacy and awe.
The recordings become even more impressive as Anderson moves into a period of mature mastery. She sings Baroque arias by Bach and Handel, rendering them with a recognizable sense of religious conviction. She makes an eloquent recording of Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” with Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony. She gives a shapely, tender account of Schumann’s song cycle “Frauenliebe und -leben” with her longtime piano accompanist, Franz Rupp.
And throughout, she returns repeatedly to the spirituals she learned growing up in Philadelphia as a devout churchgoer. “Deep River,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Go Down, Moses” — these are central texts for Anderson, and her performances make clear the depth of that connection.
What’s almost entirely missing in these recordings, unfortunately, is music from the operatic repertoire. Anderson was renowned and celebrated worldwide as a concert artist, giving solo recitals and appearing with symphony orchestras; but for a Black musician, the operatic stage was still offlimits through most of her career.
That changed, famously, in 1955, when Anderson finally became the first Black singer to appear at the Metropolitan Opera. A few other companies, including the New York City Opera, had already broken the color barrier, but then as now, the Met was in a class by itself, and integration there gave a much-needed signal to the wider operatic world.
For Anderson, though, it was late in the day when she finally took the stage as the fortuneteller Ulrica in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” In the recorded excerpts included here, her voice is already beginning to decline, and although it retains its characteristic fervor and intensity, the sonority has begun to fray.
Just as important as the timing is the fact that Anderson never had the opportunity to develop the specifically theatrical skills that make a successful operatic career. The strictures of American (and international) racism that kept her off the stage also prevented her from bringing her vocal endowment to an entire swath of the musical landscape.
So there’s something slightly bittersweet about this collection. It’s an invaluable document of one of the great midcentury American musical artists, recorded often at her peak (and the coffee-table book that encompasses it, full of glossy photographs and biographical information, is delightful to dive into).
Yet at the same time, it reminds one all too starkly of the injustices perpetrated on that artist, even as she rose above them with a heroism that most of us can only aspire to. And it urges us to be vigilant against letting those injustices creep back into our society now.