Ein lesenswerter Artikel über Marian Anderson vom New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/when-marian-anderson-defied-the-nazis
Ein Auszug:
Anderson discovered the depths of anti-Black racism for herself, when she sought permission to perform at the Salzburg Festival, in 1935. The last time that a Black musician had sung in the city, Nazi rioters chased him out. “I thought I was in some of the southern sections of the United States when I heard the mob,” the African-American baritone Aubrey Pankey told the Chicago Daily Tribune. “I never expected this in Europe.” An op-ed that appeared in the local Austrian newspaper the following day denounced Pankey’s performance as an act of desecration. “A negro who sings German lieder,” the author wrote, “jeopardizes German culture.”
Unsurprisingly, the Salzburg Festival rejected Anderson’s petition to sing. But what Anderson did next illustrates a pattern of behavior that she would deploy as a weapon throughout her career: she showed up anyway. The first night of the festival, she sang at the Mozarteum concert hall, to a small number of listeners. Word spread. A few nights later, she sang again, this time in a hotel ballroom to hundreds of élite musicians, who applauded her act of defiance—and, by sitting in their seats and thumbing their noses at the festival’s administration, joined her in that defiance. After her recital, the conductor Arturo Toscanini came backstage to utter his now famous declaration: “What I heard today one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.” Anderson became an international superstar overnight.
…
In June, 1936, just a few months before the track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany, Anderson was scheduled to perform with the conductor Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The menace of Nazi stink bombs at their concerts were reason enough to deter most singers. The death threats that Anderson and Walter received were another matter. But Anderson stood on the main stage of Vienna’s Musikverein concert hall with him anyway, and sang Brahms’s “Alto Rhapsody” to a sold-out house, observed from the shadows by plainclothes detectives. One Viennese music critic stated that the audience had witnessed something bigger than itself—a performance of musical brotherhood despite a rising tide of racial hatred.
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba