Bing found not only the best solution, but the only available one, and that was the role of Ulrica, the seeress, in Un Ballo in maschera. The part is confined to a single scene, but one to which she is central. It stays within the true contralto range. Its primary acting demand is of concentration on an object, and its blocking is virtually stationary. Of all the parts that might have seemed fairly certain of success for the Anderson of 1955, I can think of only one other, the Rheingold Erda. But that was not in the repertory. And Ulrica had one other side benefit: she is designated as a woman of color, which gave Anderson one problem fewer to deal with.

As one can hear on the disc of highlights from the score that Victor recorded to commemorate the event, Anderson was still able to pull things together for a respectable, if very careful, showing. In the theatre, though, the effect was less successful, at least at the performance I attended the following December. The crucial lower part of the range was tremulous, hollow, and slippery of pitch, and while the voice as a whole did not sound as uncontrolled as Paul Jackson describes it on the broadcast of that same month,^(I) the impression was of a veteran artist just eking by. Still, that was sufficient for the occasion. The color line at the Met had been broken, and by the right person.

Not long ago, a colleague told me about the curator of a Marian Anderson exhibition who had termed Anderson’s debut as Ulrica a “racialist” event. I wasn’t able to track this down definitively, but in the course of trying, I reached what may have been the source of such a view. Carol Oja is a professor of Music Historical Musicology at Harvard who in 2016 delivered an illustrated “life and times” lecture on Anderson at Radcliffe, which has been preserved as an online video. So far, so good—Anderson should be remembered and studied, for both her art and her struggle. I enjoyed much of Oja’s presentation. It reminded me of things I’d half-forgotten, and turned up at least one I hadn’t known about, which Oja came across in a book by Howard Taubman, an NYT critic. Even in the context of racial attitudes of the 1940s, it’s a shocker: following complaints by some of its white patrons, the Met’s box office adopted a policy of assigning ticket buyers of color to aisle seats only, with the adjacent seat on the other side left unoccupied so that no white audience member would be obliged to sit next to a black one. Oja also takes note of the incremental moves toward integration, all made after Bing had taken the reins from Edward Johnson: the engagement of dancer Janet Collins; the admittance of people of color to Sherry’s, the restaurant and bar on the Grand Tier level of the old auditorium, etc.

Along the way, however, there are signs that Oja understands a great deal less about opera than she does about the history of racism, and that she can mix up one with the other. Some are errors of fact, and not terribly substantive—she refers to “New York critic Hugh Thompson” when she must mean Hugh’s father, Oscar. She claims that Anderson recorded an album of duets with Jan Peerce, when the closest we come to that is a disc from the sketchy early-LP label Allegro/Royale (best remembered for its pirated release of the ’53 Bayreuth Ring), which threw together one side each of miscellaneous solo items of those two singers (“NOT Together,” cautions Amazon’s blurb). Others are questionable interpretations, as when she slates white critics (including Virgil Thomson) who found Anderson’s singing most communicative when she came to the spirituals, on the presumption that those opinions were racist. But it often is the case in recitals that an artist opens up more completely when on home ground, or simply singing favorite pieces. Yes, Thomson could be snippy (although “lovely icicle,” his description of Anderson in her classical selections, is not an example). He also had keen musician’s ears and, let’s recall, was the composer of Four Saints in Three Acts (1934, libretto by Gertrude Stein, with a stipulated all-black cast). Was his opinion of Anderson’s performing racially biased? I have no reason to think so, and neither, I believe, does Oja. Then there are Oja’s fleeting recorded examples  (for instance, an opening snippet from a 1951 Der Erlkönig that is only long enough to reveal the voice in immediate pitch difficulty and with only the narrator’s “voice” involved, even though Anderson made a terrific version of the song in her prime years), and Oja’s often dubious observations about them.