Time.news — On January 24, 2022, as 40,000 freedom-loving people thronged outside the Lincoln Memorial alongside prominent speakers such as Robert Malone, Richard Urso, Peter McCullough, Native American Del Bigtree of Informed Consent Action Network and Robert Kennedy, son of the senator and presidential candidate assassinated in 1968, we see like a dream the revival of the civil rights movement which led to the abolition of apartheid in the United States in 1965.
If it were possible to affirm that the end of apartheid, this triumph for Man in a racist United States, was the work of a single individual – a risky affirmation, but in this precise case to be meditated on, this individual would be opera singer Marian Anderson (1897-1993).
Who is Marian Anderson?
Born in Philadelphia on February 17, 1897, into a very poor family, Marian Anderson did housework from the age of six. Noted for her musical talent in the Church, the parishioners then financed her studies with Giuseppe Boghetti, trained at the Milan Conservatory — studies which she pursued in Europe from 1925. A specialist in German Lied, her career took off in Europe where she was adored, while in the United States the large recital halls and opera houses were forbidden to her because of her skin color. In fact, she did not set foot on the operatic stage until 1965 (as Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera), when, at the very end of her career, she became the first black person to sign a contract with the Metropolitan. Opera.
For black Americans, the turning point may have been April 9, 1939, when impresario Sol Hurok convinced her to return to live in the United States.
Since 1935, when she sang at the White House, Marian Anderson had the full support of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President. The latter, faced with the refusal of the Daughters of the American Revolution to allow Miss Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall, arranged for her to sing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where 75,000 people gathered on April 9, 1939.
The beginning of the end of apartheid in the United States
Very tall, majestic in bearing, draped in the silks of the best Italian and French designers, her beauty, her grace and her elegance could have been enough to captivate the public. By the way, she was almost certainly a soprano, not an alto, but that’s not our point today.
Because Marian Anderson had everything else: humility, great European singing technique, perfect mastery of diction, rhetoric and poetics in German and Italian, a fertile imagination, a conviction absolute carrying away the coldest audiences and an understanding of the human condition that is given only to rare mortals.
Marian Anderson has always resisted political statements, preferring to leave it to others to directly confront white supremacists. By her art alone, she would know bandage wounds ” and ” open the cage in his own words. There is no doubt, however, that she saw her mission as that of liberating the black people of America.
Note the lifelong collaboration between Marian Anderson and the German pianist Franz Rupp (1901-1992). This one had to leave Germany in 1938, because his wife was Jewish; he had accompanied on the piano Fritz Kreisler, Casals, Schlusnus, Lotte Lehmann…
Fortunately, from their collaboration, many recordings remain:
They crucified my Lord
stay
4 songs by Schubert