Kira Thurman

When African American concert singers began to perform German lieder in central Europe in the 1920s, white German and Austrian listeners were astounded by the veracity and conviction of their performances. How had they managed to sing like Germans? This article argues that black performances of German music challenged audiences' definitions of blackness, whiteness, and German music during the transatlantic Jazz Age in interwar central Europe. Upon hearing black performers masterfully sing lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others, audiences were compelled to consider whether German national identity was contingent upon whiteness. Some listeners chose to call black concert singers “Negroes with white souls,” associating German music with whiteness by extension. Others insisted that the singer had sounded black and therefore un-German. Race was ultimately the filter through which people interpreted these performances of the Austro-German musical canon. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and when audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Simultaneously, it offers a musicological intervention in contemporary discourses that still operate under the assumption that it is impossible to be both black and German.

This chapter examines how white Germans and Austrians defined the relationship between art music and black musicianship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that listeners came to believe that African American spirituals – more than any other form of ‘black music’ or ‘Negro music’ – were capable of entering the realm of high art music. Audiences worked out fluid, contradictory and fragile constructs of blackness and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they struggled to locate spirituals within the world of ‘black music.’ What if, Germans wondered, African American spirituals were proof that blacks were capable of civilization? What if these spirituals belonged in the opera house more than in an ethnological exhibit? Debates about African American spirituals and ‘Negro music’ in cities such as Berlin and Vienna illustrate how Austro-German musical culture accepted or denied black people’s ability to create high art.

Called the "Colored Wagner" throughout his life, African American opera composer Harry Lawrence Freeman wrote dozens of operas during the Harlem Renaissance. In 2015, the Morningside Opera Company, Harlem Opera Theater, and the Harlem Chamber Players performed one of his grand operas, Voodoo. This article analyzes their performance, contextualizing it with archival documents located in Columbia University's archives.

In 1877, the African American musical ensemble known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers traveled to Germany to raise money for their university.  The choir’s ten-month tour provided German listeners with one of their first significant and sustained encounters with African Americans and African American culture in the nineteenth century. As listeners throughout Germany heard the ensemble perform, they began to debate the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ musical, cultural, and ethnic origins. At the heart of their growing ethnomusicological and anthropological interest in the Jubilee Singers’ music lied the question of whether or not African Americans were fulfilling the powerful promise of the civilizing mission: were they proof that people of the black diaspora were capable of accepting “Western” art music and cultural values? This article illustrates how African American music contributed to global conversations on the civilizing mission in the nineteenth century.

African American soprano Grace Bumbry sparked a controversy in West Germany when she became the first black musician to sing at the Bayreuth Festival Opera House in July 1961. This article demonstrates how race served two separate functions for the Bayreuth Opera Festival and its postwar audience. For opera director Wieland Wagner, hiring a black singer was part of a larger agenda to sever Bayreuth’s ties from its most recent and turbulent past. German audiences discussing this historical moment, however, expressed concern that protestors of this performance were preventing Germans from moving forward into a new, democratic, and racially accepting Germany.