Anthony Tommasini: Voice of A Century: The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson.
Penguin Press, 323 pages.
BOOK REVIEW — The title of Anthony Tommasini’s new book on the legendary American contralto Marian Anderson (1897-1993) comes from Arturo Toscanini’s backstage comment after hearing her sing: “What I heard today one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.” Sol Hurok, her manager, tweaked this into “Marian Anderson, the voice of the century — Toscanini” and plastered it on posters and programs.
Anderson’s musical life began in her church choir in South Philadelphia and gradually took her to the Metropolitan Opera, where, in 1955, at age 57, she became the first Black artist to perform there when she made her debut as Ulrica in Un ballo in maschera (the second came just three weeks later, when baritone Robert McFerrin sang Amonasro in Aida). Her rise to fame meant overcoming ferocious challenges, and Tommasini’s book reads like a suspense thriller as it chronicles her concerts in Europe, where the continent was gripped by “Marian fever,” then enduring racism back home, where she was banned from hotels and restaurants in the very cities in which she appeared to cheering crowds and rave reviews.
She was repeatedly turned away from buying a house with her future husband, Orpheus Fisher, who was light-skinned. “Marian I am so sorry about the Gidden house,” he wrote her in 1940, “but my dear one must expect these things in a country so full of prejudice and hate.” Anderson told a friend that “in the end we had to buy a place with twice the acreage we needed so we wouldn’t contaminate the neighborhood.” Through all this, Anderson maintained dignity, discipline, and focus on her art, constantly reshaping opportunities for Black classical artists.
The most dramatic moment in a career that stretched from 1925 with the New York Philharmonic to 1965 was her historic Easter Sunday concert on April 9, 1939, for an “awestruck” interracial audience of 75,000 crowded in front of the Lincoln Memorial after she was banned from Washington’s whites-only Constitution Hall. The Daughters of the American Revolution had denied an effort to have her perform at the Hall, causing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and thousands of others to resign from the D.A.R. “You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way,” Roosevelt wrote them, “and it seems to me your organization has failed.”
This is Tommasini’s most riveting chapter, sometimes narrated in the present tense. It traces not only the cathartic event itself but the behind-the-scenes machinations, including the last-minute intervention of the Roosevelts, the NAACP, and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, who said in introducing Anderson to the crowd: “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free…Genius draws no color lines.”
There are plenty of other suspenseful moments, including Anderson’s putting up her own money to book her Berlin debut in an all-or-nothing gamble; her rescue by Albert Einstein, who took her into his home following a Princeton concert after the Nassau Inn refused to let her stay there; her fearless inclusion of spirituals in her Soviet Union concert after she was warned not to; her frantic attempts to learn her part in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera when Rudolf Bing booked her at the Met with little time to memorize her vocal lines — “one of the most high pressured debuts in opera history”; and her grueling Asian tour as a goodwill ambassador for the United States Information Agency in 1957, when she was pressed by reporters at every stop to comment on racism in America.
In the audience at Anderson’s Met debut was Leontyne Price, who told Tommasini in a 2000 interview, “I wanted to be her” when she heard Anderson sing in Jackson, Miss., as a young girl, a life-changing event: “This is it, mama. This is what I am going to be.” It was not only the stunning voice that moved Price, but “this whole aura she exhibited.” In a parallel epiphany, Anderson, when she was a young girl growing up in a poor section of South Philadelphia, heard the sound of a piano and peeked into the window. “I saw a woman seated at a piano, playing ever so beautifully. Her skin was dark, like mine. I realized that if she could, I could.”
Thus, Anderson first dreamed of becoming a pianist, and her accompanists over more than three decades — Billy King, Kosti Vehanen, and Franz Rupp — were crucial in her career. Tommasini, a pianist himself, offers seasoned analyses of their contributions, which went well beyond accompanying. He credits Vehanen, who played the Lincoln Memorial concert, with galvanizing Anderson’s career and Rupp with deepening her artistry.
She had an especially deep connection with Rupp, her collaborator throughout the 1940s and 1950s: When asked about her work with Rupp, Anderson liked to share what he often told her: “We have learned a great deal from each other, Marian.” This meant a lot to Anderson, coming from a colleague with such deep knowledge of the European song repertory and consummate musical skills. She always appeared on the stage holding Rupp’s hand, “even when presenters in the South warned her sternly not to.”
Tommasini’s book exists because a New York Times article he wrote in 2022 on her artistry was noticed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who invited him to contribute a book on her for his series on prominent Black figures called Significations. This is more than a biography. Though Anderson said in 1943 she was “deeply touched” to be a “symbol of democracy,” she later feared she would be remembered for breaking barriers rather than for her artistry.
Tommasini reports that in 1956 she wanted all mention of her Lincoln Memorial “affair” expunged from her forthcoming autobiography, agreeing to leave it in only at the last minute. He suspects — and believes Gates does, too — that she is indeed underrated as an interpretive artist and that he wrote this book not only as a biographer “but a critic commenting on Anderson’s superb vocal artistry.”
His critical commentary is rendered in the lucid, evocative style familiar to readers who followed his columns in the New York Times during his 21-year tenure and to those who know his compulsively readable book on Virgil Thomson, Composer on the Aisle.
Tommasini is sharply analytical when he needs to be but often informal and personal. As with his Thomson book, he often throws away detached biographical omniscience and assumes a first-person storytelling voice. He writes for those who have musical training and those who do not, paralleling Anderson herself: “One must never forget that an audience is many people,” she said in her autobiography, “some who are deeply musical by nature and cultivation and others who have little musical background…I seek to put together music that will appeal to both sorts of listeners.”
The opening chapter sets the book up by summarizing her art: “Anderson’s deep, mellow singing could take on an almost baritonal cast…In midrange she shaped lines with pliant lyricism and plush vibrato. She could ascend into her upper register like a radiant soprano. Yet, her shimmering high notes seemed to emanate from those awesome low tones.”
We get analyses of performances from all periods in her long career, including songs by Schubert (her favorite classical composer), Handel, Donizetti, Verdi, and Sibelius (with whom she forged a long-lasting friendship) as well as vernacular material. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, writes Tommasini, Anderson’s singing is “so naturally warm, textured, and vulnerable that she is never temped to wallow in emotion and grief.”
In the spiritual “Crucifixion,” an indirect commentary on the lynching murders of Black Americans, Anderson sings at a “near-glacial tempo, so slow you wonder how the music does not grow limp and lose any sense of direction. But her singing is so mournfully, tremulously intense that you hang on every moment.” (This is the song Anderson sang that left Toscanini and others “too overcome to break the silence with applause.”) For those who want to listen as they read, Tommasini has created a playlist of Anderson recordings, including Spotify links, which Penguin is posting on its social media accounts.
The book ends with jubilation and a bit of bittersweet irony. On June 8, 2024, some 30 years after Anderson’s death at age 96, Verizon Hall, the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Kimmel Center, was renamed Marian Anderson Hall. A day of joyous events culminated in a gala concert by the orchestra under music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin hosted by Queen Latifah and featuring prominent Black guest artists and the premiere of Fanfare for Marian by Valerie Coleman.
Among the individuals and organizations who were Gold Sponsors of these events was the Daughters of the American Revolution.
