Marian Anderson and Grace Bumbry: African American Trailblazers Navigating German National Identity in Music

This project analyzes newspaper reviews and press coverage of select performances by African American classical singers Marian Anderson and Grace Bumbry in Germany and Austria to see how inter and post-war racial ideology impacted their careers. 

I focus on the Austro-German critical reception of two of Anderson’s performances: her 1930 Liederabend at the Bachsaal in Berlin, and her 1935 performance in the Mozarteum at the Salzburg Festival. I focus on Bumbry’s role as Venus in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the 1961 Bayreuth Opera Festival.

The foreign influence that was so eagerly integrated into the compositions of German musicians of the seventeenth century came to be regarded as a threat when Anderson was performing in the interwar period and Bumbry in the postwar period, both flourishing on German stages as foreigners. Despite Anderson and Bumbry’s performances being understood by the German public in a very racialized way, they were not perceived by the press as true threats to German musical supremacy, the very thing that has held an incomprehensible German nation together. The public perception of these performers indicates that Pamela Potter’s generalization of foreign influence as a threat should perhaps be considered simultaneously with the German nation's paradoxical relationship with race as both a disaffirmation and an obsession, as seen in the work of Fatima El-Tayeb.

Many thanks to Dr. Gwynne Brown and Dr. Kristopher Imbrigotta, advisors, for their contributions to this project.