She also worked with the NAACP who was discouraging Black artists from performing for segregated audiences.įranz Schubert: "Der Tod und das Mädchen" In the 1950s, Marian Anderson began "vertical" segregation with her audiences, where the hall was split into side-by-side racial sections rather than seating Black people in the back. Sony Music Marian Anderson in April 1951.
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Her command of the language and interpretive expression inspired one Austrian critic to write: "Whoever has heard her sing Schubert, Schumann or Brahms once knows that she is on utterly convincing terms with German musical art." Her recording of the first of Brahms' two "viola" songs was made in 1941 in New York and features violist William Primrose. She landed in Berlin, where she resumed an intensive study of German art song (lieder) and sang many recitals. In 1930, fellowship money financed Anderson's extended stay abroad.
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Johannes Brahms: "Gestillte Sehnsucht" (Stilled Longing) Op. The curious "bottled" timbre she displays in the final verse creates the otherworldly atmosphere of a traveler bound for heaven. If "My Soul" (above) represents the lustrous top end of Anderson's voice, "Trampin'," from the same 1941 recording session - also sung at the Lincoln Memorial - shows the rich, velvety deep end of her singular contralto. In 1961, she sang The Star-Spangled Banner at President Kennedy's inauguration. Kennedy welcomes Marian Anderson and her accompanist Franz Rupp in the Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C., on March 22, 1962, 23 years after her Easter Sunday performance at the Lincoln Memorial. Her mournful treatment of "Dido's Lament," from Purcell's opera, has the soulful quality of a classic Black spiritual. because of her race, Anderson delivered a historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939, before a crowd of some 75,000. Denied the stage of Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Just six weeks before Anderson cut this recording, she had instantly become a cultural icon and a living symbol of civil rights. Purcell: Dido and Aeneas, "When I'm Laid in Earth" She had spent most of the 1930s in Europe, where conductor Arturo Toscanini made his often-quoted proclamation that a voice like Anderson's appears only "once in a hundred years." She was particularly acclaimed in Scandinavia, where she met the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and learned some of his songs. She made her last recording with RCA in 1966.īy 1936, when this recording was made, Anderson had become a huge sensation - but not yet in her home country, where she was denied admission to the first vocal school she applied for. (later RCA Victor), Marian Anderson recorded Deep River, then known as the "Negro spiritual." She was afraid this performance in a studio was as much racial tolerance she would receive from white Americans. Sony Music Anderson at RCA Victor Studio in New York City in 1945. Anna Anderson's joy in her daughter's tremendous accomplishments was a song of its own. A domestic worker, she too lived the privations of her race and gender but, like so many others, created something else of that life.
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While snapshots of award ceremonies with dignitaries and glamorous headshots show us a version of the global star, we better understand her in and of a vast, intimate world when we see her in the semi-privacy of the recording studio or with her head thrown back in laughter while rehearsing with Leonard Bernstein or captured in her mother's embrace. Her interiority as an artist is differently heard in combination with these images that pulse with their own sounds and storytelling.
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We don't lose her in these studio recordings-she remains luscious and full of verve–yet neither do we hear all that she was. For years, Marian Anderson performed abroad in hopes of overcoming the limitations of race in America. Sony Music Marian Anderson with U Nu, the first Prime Minister of Burma, and his wife in Rangoon in 1957.