Because it was so hard for an African-American singer to make her way on the American classical music scene, Anderson’s early successes were in England and Europe, principally in Germany and Austria. After her return to the U. S. following her triumphant recital at Salzburg in 1935, however, now under the powerful management of Sol Hurok and with recordings for RCA Victor and radio broadcasts to give her art broad dissemination, she made rapid headway. The famous Lincoln Memorial concert in 1939, with 75,000 in attendance and, in effect, the U. S. government’s official seal of approval after the Daughters of the American Revolution had denied her a date in their Constitution Hall, ensured her standing thenceforth as the living symbol of African-American aspiration in classical music and, by extension, in American life. She was steadfast in fulfilling that role by example, rather than through militancy.

As frequent and remunerative as Anderson’s concert and recital appearances became, they did not include opera. That option was foreclosed for her in this country, as it was for all singers of color, and from the mid-Thirties on, the rise of Fascism and then the war closed off Europe, as well. So it was not until the season of 1954-55 that Marian Anderson became the first black singer to assume a solo role with the Metropolitan Opera. For the U. S., it was sort of opera’s Jackie Robinson moment, except that it was as if Branch Rickey had chosen Satchel Paige instead of Jackie as his barrier-breaker. And with analogous results: when Paige did crash the majors (1948, at the age of 42), he could still pitch, and astonishingly well for a man of his years, but he was naturally not quite the Satch of yore, the legendary Satch. Anderson’s Rickey was the Met’s General Manager, Rudolf Bing, an Austrian Jew who had been aware of Anderson’s stature for at least twenty years, and understood that Anderson was, for many reasons, the artist for this moment. He also understood that her performances must not be merely honorific events. Perhaps Anderson did not need to tear the old place up, but she needed to hold her own. It was late in the day for her, and while she was clearly a cool cookie under pressure and had plenty of platform experience, she’d never stepped onstage as a character, and that’s a whole different animal.

Whether Anderson at her best might have succeeded with the great challenges of the grand-opera contralto/mezzo-soprano repertoire, I don’t know. Her youthful aria recordings show a voice encompassing the music easily enough, and a late example, the magnificent 1950 NYPO Alto Rhapsody under Fritz Busch (and by the way, have you heard that orchestra sound remotely like this lately?) shows plenty of amplitude in its tessitura. But one does not find in any of her recordings that I have heard much suggestion of the kind of temperament wanted for the big antagonist roles, and the other major operatic languages do not seem as much at her disposal as was German. Her talent and determination might have overcome these and any other deficiencies if the door had been open, and certainly there would have been a place for her in a non-racist operatic world. We just can’t say what the place would have been. In any case, it would have been foolhardy to tax any 57-year-old concert artist of no operatic experience, and no role even musically prepared, with an Amneris or an Ortrud or a Carmen.