Europe hailed Marian Anderson's voice while American hotels turned her away
Jean Sibelius was so moved after hearing her sing in Helsinki that he told his wife to serve champagne instead of coffee. Arturo Toscanini said a voice like hers came along once in a hundred years. Yet back home, the contralto Marian Anderson was routinely refused rooms at hotels and service at restaurants.
Anderson was born in Philadelphia in 1897. Her aunt Mary pulled her into the junior church choir at six and arranged little paid engagements, twenty-five or fifty cents for a few songs. Her father died when she was twelve, and there was no money for lessons or high school. Her church and the city's Black community raised it for her. When she applied to a Philadelphia music academy, it rejected her under an all-white policy, so she studied privately. One teacher, Giuseppe Boghetti, wept when she auditioned with a spiritual.
Success came haltingly. A 1924 recital in New York played to a nearly empty hall and drew poor notices, but in 1925 she won a New York Philharmonic competition and sang with the orchestra to acclaim. Prejudice still stalled her American career, so a fellowship of 1,500 dollars from the Rosenwald Fund took her to study in Berlin. Europe embraced her. Scandinavian audiences caught what was called Marian fever, and Sibelius arranged and wrote songs for her for years.
Even as she gave about seventy recitals a year in America, the barriers stayed. In 1937, denied a hotel room while performing at Princeton, she was put up by Albert Einstein, who went on to host her many times; her last stay came months before his death. In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from their Washington concert hall under a policy reserving it for white performers. With help from Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, she sang instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that Easter Sunday, before an integrated crowd of more than 75,000 and millions on the radio.
In 1955 she broke the colour line at the Metropolitan Opera, no Black American singer having appeared on its stage before. In 1963 she sang at the March on Washington and received the first Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Source: Marian Anderson
