The subject of Black classical musicians on German stages, percolating on the Web thanks to amateur historians, has been grievously absent from monographs. This book, albeit the work of a historian, will likely be the most important contribution to the music history of Central Europe in decades. Kira Thurman spans nearly a century in her call to confront the racism of classical music. Drawing on her University of Rochester dissertation, Thurman covers more than singers, and the composers in the subtitle are inconsequential to the narrative. The argument follows a lucid tripartite sequence—part I on 1870-1914, part II encompassing the two world wars, and part III on the postwar era—and the three chapters within each part rely on a largely thematic organization with some historical narrative.
Singing Like Germans succeeds brilliantly in “showcas[ing] the number of Black performances of canonical German composers over time,” yet its second stated goal of interpretation of the “hidden racial logics that then erased their presence on German stages” (272) will be embraced or occasionally contested, depending on the audience. Any history of racism is a painful and onerous read, but the denial and anger of some opera fans who have encountered Thurman's work demonstrates its necessity, since the field of classical music and academic music disciplines have failed to recognize and uproot racism.
Straddling journalism and scholarship, the book will prompt others to test its theories and follow through on its provocative observations. For example, Thurman points out the inconsistency in racial views. In colonial German South West Africa, the “one drop rule” identified anyone with African blood as a “native,” yet in Germany, reviewers of the pianist Hazel Harrison (1883–1969), the soprano Sissieretta Jones (1868–1933), and the Fisk Jubilee Singers showed that “white ancestry was responsible for ‘rescuing’ these Black musicians from themselves” (91). Other Germans “sometimes . . . attended a performance because they wanted to see a performer who was ‘fully Black’” (92). Thurman suggests that after World War II, more Whites protested Black musicians while other listeners offered stronger support than before. How did these clashing racial dynamics relate to other political tension, such as Germans who accepted national responsibility for National Socialist crimes versus those who felt no such involvement?
It is hard to pinpoint the “primeval” (71) or “primitivist” (141) rhetoric which Thurman attributes to music critics, but there is no doubt that racial commentary was pervasive, whether in fulsome praise or angry tirade. How did racial logics align with the antisemitism that music critics practiced or fought against? Elsa Bienenfeld and Julius Korngold, both Jewish champions of Jewish composers, wrote for liberal newspapers but disparaged Roland Hayes in racist terms in 1923 and 1925—albeit with less demeaning rhetoric than their peers. Did precarious assimilation into upper bourgeois Viennese society result in a defensive move, observing racial difference in the gifted Black tenor, as if their own status as White Viennese would be more secure thereby? By contrast, Wiener Zeitung critic Hans Ewald Heller, a Jew living amongst Austro-fascists and Nazi sympathizers, must have identified with the racism that Marian Anderson faced. Heller acknowledged the divide between the “personality” (144) of the conductor (a codeword for “Jew” (150): Bruno Walter was barred from working in Nazi Germany) and the quintessentially German Brahms, stressing Walter's supreme success. Notably, Heller did not mention that Walter was Jewish, nor that Anderson was Black. For earlier critics, “guttural” (274) referenced the aurality of Black difference (a term also used to characterize German and some non-Western languages). As with Walter, Heller acknowledged the racist trope, showing the beauty of difference—“the guttural expression bestows to her voice the timbre of an Italian viola” (155)—making clear his admiration of Anderson's singing.
Thurman speculates that Blacks performing Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms threatened Germans because their presence meant that German identity could be learned. Her argument aligns with the polemic (espoused by Richard Wagner) that Jews could recreate music (as performers and conductors) but lacked the genuine creativity of non-Jewish Germans, who had sole ownership over the field of composition. It would be fascinating to interrogate the universalist claims about German music, which were supposedly reinforced by the success of Black American singers in Germany. (Mozart's first biographer, in 1798, proved that composer's significance by citing the popularity of his music “in the remotest part of the world. . . the Philippines.”) The alleged cultural superiority of German music nevertheless excluded women as composers and imposed barriers on women as performers (except singers and harpists). Gendered language was the norm in musical discourse during the nineteenth century but, rejected as sexual in the cultural anxiety of the early twentieth century, became a way to denigrate music, which was to be universal and unmarked by gender. Thurman's amassed sources will support a broad study of how racism and sexism intersected in the cultural aspirations of classical music.
Retracing Thurman's steps, one finds citations that could point in new directions that the text leaves unexplored. According to a July 1942 New York Times article cited in passing, when a shoe clerk in Georgia reminded Roland Hayes's wife to sit in the back of the store (away from the refreshing breeze), she reprimanded him as a racist comparable to Hitler—and was ordered to leave. Hayes, returning to apologize on behalf of his wife, was beaten by police officers and jailed. Interviewed by the reporter, Hayes referred to the Nazi protests he had faced when singing in Germany in the 1920s, insisting that the shoe clerk should feel humiliated by what happened and said he felt “ashamed” to experience racism in his beloved home state, Georgia.
Reception history is a field with underdeveloped methodology, poised between cultural history and social history. Thurman sometimes writes interchangeably about “critic” and “audience,” when their equivalence is by no means obvious. Her bold statement “The growing power of the audience in shaping the careers of Black classical musicians was beginning to have an immense effect” (124) calls out for an better source base than just selected reviews. Indeed, it is a challenge for reception history to avoid the feel of stringing together quotations: paraphrase or restatement can position the author uncomfortably above their sources.
There have been few studies of ticket sales and the influence that concertgoers (rather than critics) had on future programming. What data shows that Black musicians “outearned many of their fellow native German and Austrian classical musicians,” or that tenor Roland Hayes was earning “outrageous sums of money” for his engagements (110)? How do we know that “applauding African American concert performers sometimes functioned as a symbolic gesture of protest against American racism” (122)?
Scholars can disagree on how to interpret sources, but the material in Thurman's book is always riveting. We learn that in 1909, “a stormy colonial debate reached parliament about a Black musician named Gustav Sabac el Cher” (91). In fact, the matter before the Reichstag was the downsizing of troops stationed in Cameroon, which provoked a lengthy speech from General Eduard von Liebert. Briefly lamenting the music budget (why did German battalions need a bass drum and why couldn't musicians double as combat soldiers?), von Liebert mentioned a rumor that a Prussian cavalry regiment had a Black drummer and a Prussian infantry regiment had a Black “conductor or drum major.” There was, however, no debate: von Liebert (who later joined the Nazi Party) acknowledged that “race is a question normally avoided” and quickly returned to the subject of the military budget.Footnote 1 Quibbling with details does not undermine the book's forceful argument. For example, the sexist and racist term “pretty, exotic bird” is how one man, in 1975, recounted first seeing the Black woman who became his partner—it was not a trope in “West German magazine articles” (227)—but the fascination with sexuality and celebration of interracial unions are crucial to changes in the reception of Black musicians.
The attentive reader will be surprised that musicians and institutions are reintroduced in subsequent chapters, but flawed copyediting in no way diminishes the significance of the book. Thurman's courage to tell a different story, one suppressed for generations, will inspire musicologists and historians to listen more carefully to how race and gender were experienced in the exalted spaces of classical music.
