Marian Anderson in Europe • With Timeline

Marian Anderson was a noted African American operatic singer who broke various racial barriers during her four-decades-long international career. Anderson, by her own account, did not like personal confrontation. When faced with racial bigotry in a one-on-one situation, which was unfortunately not that rare, she usually avoided making a fuss. But when confronted with public racial discrimination, she never shied away from openly defying the powers that be.

Most people today are familiar with the dispute between Marian Anderson and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in 1939, when that organization refused to allow Anderson to perform at the DAR’s Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Unwilling to accept that affront, she very openly defied the DAR by famously singing Schubert and African American spirituals on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to more than 75,000 people.

But that was not the first time that Anderson had encountered racism in a dramatic and public way. Throughout the 1930s, in Hitler’s Germany and in an Austria increasingly falling under his influence, Anderson refused to be daunted, more than once. When the 1935 Salzburg Festival, predictably, rejected her request to perform, she refused to accept the ban. We’ll cover more of the details below and also in the Timeline.

Born in South Philadelphia

Marian Anderson was an African American contralto who performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals. Born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 27 February 1897, she grew up there and later performed with renowned orchestras at major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe. Her active professional singing career spanned the four decades from 1925 to 1965.

Her family was never well off. Although she showed talent and began singing at the age of six, she couldn’t afford singing lessons, and was largely self-taught before eventually finding someone who could offer her formal music training for free – for a while. She was in her teens before she had any formal musical instruction. Later, in her early thirties, she was able to win two different modest scholarships that financed two separate trips to Europe for training and concert tours in 1930 (London) and 1933 (Berlin and Scandinavia). She also did several highly successful European singing tours in 1930-1932, 1933–1934, and 1934–1935, sailing back and forth between America and Europe, and appearing before royalty in England and Scandinavia. At that time she was still far better known in Europe than in her homeland. But her special rich voice and wide range, combined with her determination and defiance, would soon make her famous at home as well.

Europe Calls

Marian Anderson often faced racial discrimination at home in Jim Crow America, and not solely in the US South. As a young girl in Philadelphia trying to apply to a local music school, she had a traumatic encounter. She waited in line, being ignored until finally a young white woman at the desk rudely asked, “What do you want?” Marian told her she wanted an application form. “We don’t take colored.” Anderson later wrote that those stinging words had made her physically sick to her stomach.

As an adult, Anderson constantly encountered bigotry while touring for concerts in the United States. Turned away from segregated accommodations, she was often forced to find hotels and restaurants that catered to Blacks. During the late 1920s, she often faced rejection by white-only venues. Realizing that her singing career in the US was facing too many obstacles based on her race, and that she was performing mostly for Black audiences, Anderson decided to try to revive her career in Europe, just as some other Black opera singers had done before her. Following some negative reviews of her German lieder performances, the talented singer also understood that she needed to improve her skills, and up her game in operatic performing. She needed to go to Europe.

Her talent and limited fame in the US helped her win two scholarships to study in Europe, first in London, sponsored by the National Association of Negro Musicians to study in Britain. She also used her time in Europe to perform on tour. On 16 September 1930 she sang at London’s Wigmore Hall. Later, Julius Rosenwald’s philanthropic organization, the Rosenwald Fund, encouraged Anderson to apply for a Rosenwald Fellowship, which supported her with $1500 to study in Berlin in 1933, where she studied German, an important operatic language, and honed her skills in the art of singing German lieder. Again, she also took advantage of her growing fame in Europe to tour there.

The 1935 Salzburg Festival

On a personal, private level Marian Anderson avoided confrontation. She always avoided anything that might be viewed as activism. But when she faced public rejection in Nazi-influenced Austria, Anderson showed how defiant she could be, in her subtly firm and unflinching way.

Anderson had in fact been invited to take part in the 1935 Salzburg Festival by Archbishop Sigismund Waitz (1864-1941) of Salzburg. In 1934 in Vienna, near the end of an extensive concert tour that included performances in England, France, Sweden and Russia, the Austrian archbishop had met Anderson backstage after a concert, and extended an invitation to her to come to Salzburg for that year’s festival.

Although in 1935 Austria’s annexation into Nazi Germany was still three years in the future, Hitler’s influence was already being felt in his native land. At the time of his invitation to Anderson, Archbishop Waitz had to know only too well that there might be a problem with an African American featured prominently on stage as part of a revered Austrian tradition that had always been a white European affair in Mozart’s birthplace. He also knew that the last African American to perform in Salzburg, the baritone Aubrey Pankey, in May 1932, had experienced protests and was chased out of town.

The archbishop himself had already butted heads with Austrian Nazi officials in the 1930s. He was known to be less than enthusiastic about the growing Nazi influence in Austria. Salzburg, lying so very close to Germany’s Bavarian border, was already a hotbed for Austria’s Nazi sympathizers in the early 1930s. Archbishop Waitz would later pay a price for anti-Nazi attitude after the Anschluss in March 1938. By October his activities were restricted; he was no longer allowed to supervise religious education in Salzburg’s elementary schools. In late May 1939 his offices in Salzburg’s famous Residenz palace were seized for Nazi use. He was kicked out and forced to take refuge in a seminary. But the archbishop was lucky. Over 400 Catholic officials and priests were interned at the Dachau concentration camp, and some of them did not survive. Hitler was born an Austrian Catholic, but as the Führer he persecuted Austrian and German Catholics who dared defy him and his Nazi regime.

As the date of the Salzburg Festival in August 1935 approached, Anderson and her European manager, Helmer Enwall, still had heard nothing from the Festival organizers since they had made their request in two letters on March 29 an April 24. At last, on 21 May 1935, they received a written response from the Salzburg officials: “…there can be no question of Marian Anderson [singing at the Festival] since earlier experiences firmly speak against it.”

Although the Austrian response was not a big surprise, it enraged Enwall. He promptly fired off an angry protest, stating among other things, that he wondered if the true reason for permission not being granted Anderson might perhaps be “her dark complexion.” He asked for a more detailed explanation. Baron Puthon, president of the Salzburg Festival committee, replied with the lame excuse that the program had been prepared months in advance, making it impossible to schedule Anderson as part of the official program.

But reports of Anderson’s Salzburg ban began to appear in the international and American press. In early August, facing increasing pressure to explain the ban of such a distinguished international artist, Festival officials relented somewhat. They agreed to permit Anderson to sing in the Mozarteum, one of the Festival’s concert halls, but her performance would not be part of the official program.

Anderson and her Finnish accompanist Kosti Verhanen performed on August 28. Because her appearance was not part of the regular program, and other elite artists were on the schedule at that time, Anderson sang before a fairly small audience. However, as news about an extraordinary African American singer spread, the number of listeners grew after the intermission. But that was not the last appearance of the Black contralto singer in Salzburg that summer.

A few days later, as even more of the distinguished artists and guests at the Festival heard about Anderson, there was a second concert arranged by two Americans in attendance. “Madame” Sara Cahier (the former Sara Jane Layton Walker of Nashville, Tennessee), with whom Marian Anderson had studied in Europe, introduced her to another well-known American patron of the arts, Gertrude Moulton. It was Moulton who arranged for a second private recital venue, the ballroom of the Hotel de l’Europe. A few nights after her Mozarteum concert Anderson sang again, this time to about 300 elite invited guests, including Archbishop Waitz in the front row. Also in the audience was none other than the esteemed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, along with German conductor Bruno Walter. Both men came back to speak with her after the concert. It was then that the now famous words of Toscanini were uttered (in his native Italian), words that would follow Anderson for the rest of her career: “What I heard today one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.”

But Anderson was so flustered and nervous upon meeting the great conductor that she really did not hear what he had said. She blurted out a few words of thanks, but later Madame Cahier had to explain the meaning of Toscanini’s statement before Anderson really understood the magnitude of his warm compliment. Once her agent and reporters made sure the world knew what Toscanini had said, Anderson would be known as “the voice of a century” for the rest of her life.

Toscanini’s words were music to Anderson’s ears, especially coming after two years of concerts in Europe. Salzburg was an encouraging, emotional highlight for her, but she still had four months of performing ahead of her before she was scheduled return to her homeland in December, after being away for two-and-a-half years.

She toured as usual in Scandinavia in September and October. November and December took her to European capitals such as Paris, Zurich, Vienna, Budapest, and Brussels. She would have her last concert of the European season in The Hague on 14 December 1935. But she had a few other things on her mind.

Back in the USA

Anderson had already decided to bring Kosti Verhanen back with her for the new US concert season under manager Sol Hurok, which meant she had to say goodbye to her longtime Black friend and accompanist Billy King. Billy had tried to deter the switch by pointing out that having a white accompanist on stage with an African American singer could be a problem in 1935 America. (In the end, it caused barely a ripple.) But Anderson had grown comfortable with Verhanen during the more than two years they had worked together all across Europe. She felt she needed his talents for her upcoming US concert season.

But now back in the USA she had new worries. Aboard the Ile de France on her return voyage, Anderson had had a mishap. She fell on a ship stairway and injured her foot. It was painful, but the ship’s doctor had treated her and bandaged the foot. She did not realize how serious the injury was until after she was examined at a Philadelphia hospital. She had broken her ankle and required a plaster cast up to her knee. She would have to give her first concert on December 30 at New York’s Town Hall wearing her cast and walking with crutches.

As usual, Anderson wanted no distractions, and no sympathy. She wanted no announcement of her injury. She had a plan and it worked. With the curtain still closed, she positioned herself on stage, standing at the grand piano in its curve. Her long gown hid the cast. All she had to do was stand still and sing – which she did, to a sold-out audience and rave reviews.

Howard Taubman, who would later ghost-write Anderson’s 1956 autobiography, writing for The New York Times, proclaimed: “Marian Anderson has returned to her native land one of the great singers of our time. The Negro contralto who has been abroad for four years established herself in her concert at the Town Hall last night as the possessor of an excelling voice and art. Her singing enchanted an audience that included singers. There was no doubt of it, she was mistress of all she surveyed.” Her program displayed variety in all ways. She sang Handel arias, Schubert lieder, Finnish songs, and Black spirituals.

Anderson would go on to have a long and illustrious career in the United States and internationally. It would be 1965 before her farewell tour and official retirement. She had to go to Europe in order to be appreciated in her own country. She had to work hard and prove herself in ways a white performer would not have had to undergo.

ALSO SEE: Black Americans in German-Speaking Europe – Three African Americans who studied in German-speaking Europe or were influenced by it

For more about Marian Anderson’s interesting life and career, see the Timeline below.

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Marian Anderson Timeline

A chronology of key events in the life of Marian Anderson:

1897
Marian Anderson (Marian Elina-Blanche Anderson) is born on 27 February in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She will be the oldest of three daughters born to African Americans John Berkley and Ann “Annie” Delilah (Rucker) Anderson. John is an ice and coal loader at the Reading Terminal Market. Annie had been a teacher in Virginia before moving to Philadelphia.

1903
With a natural talent for singing, at the age of six, Marian begins singing at the Union Baptist Church and other small-scale public venues. She earns pocket money by singing in public. As she grows older, she charges up to five dollars per performance.

1909
Marian is only 12 years old when her father suffers a head injury at work and dies a few weeks later. Annie Anderson and her three daughters move in with John’s parents (Ben and Mary Anderson). Annie finds work cleaning, laundering, and scrubbing floors.

1912
Anderson, now 15, graduates from the Stanton elementary school after completing the 8th grade. She does not enter high school in the next school year because the family needs her to work in order to survive financially.

1915
Marian Anderson begins attending high school at the age of 18, following three years of no public school attendance.

At a reception following a concert in Wilmington, Delaware, Anderson meets Orpheus H. “King” Fisher. She will eventually marry Fisher, but only after a 24-year on-again, off-again courtship. Fisher is the light-skinned son of a mixed-race couple. He is able to pass as white, and often does.

1916
Easter weekend: Although Anderson already knew the African American tenor Roland Hayes from the many times he had attended services and sung at the Union Baptist Church, it is in 1916 that the two perform together when she is the soloist singing Handel’s “Messiah.” Hayes will continue to be a mentor and significant influence on Anderson’s career.

Fall: At a church concert in Philadelphia, Anderson meets her accompanist, the pianist and choir director William “Billy” King, for the first time. Billy King will later become her regular accompanist and manager for many years.

1917
Anderson, now 20 years old, is invited to perform in Boston at Jordan Hall with singer Roland Hayes and composer Harry T. Burleigh in an oratorio (“Elijah”) by German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Hayes becomes her mentor.

December: Anderson travels for the first time into the Deep South, to Savannah, Georgia, accompanied by her mother, to perform at a gala concert sponsored by the (Black) Georgia State Industrial College. Aboard the train and after arrival, she experiences the strict Jim Crow laws that enforce racial separation. The audience of nearly a thousand people in the new Municipal Auditorium is segregated by race.

1918
As an entrepreneur, Anderson (still in high school) partners with Billy King as her manager and accompanist. They tour across the South and the Midwest, largely to churches and historically Black colleges and universities.

1919
Anderson enrolls in a six-week summer opera course at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and is caught in the dark period of race rioting that will become known as “Red Summer.” She enters and wins the National Association of Negro Musicians first award and is hailed as a voice ushering in a new era for Black singers.

1921
20 June: Marian Anderson graduates from the South Philadelphia School for Girls. She is 24 years old.

1922
Anderson receives a scholarship from the National Association of Negro Musicians.

1923
Anderson is the first African American to sign with the RCA Victor Recording Company. Her first release features “Deep River” and “My Way’s Cloudy.”

1924
Still facing rejection by Anderson, Orpheus Fisher marries Ida Gould, a step he soon comes to regret. He and Ida have a son together (James Gould Fisher, 1925-2009), but they will live apart after only a couple of years of a failed marriage. James will grow up without his father around.

Fall: Marian and Billy King begin touring again, starting in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

1925
August 26: Anderson’s vocal coach, Giuseppe Boghetti enters her into the National Music League competition (sponsored by the New York Philharmonic) at Lewisohn Stadium. Chosen over 300 other singers, the judges cancel the auditions and award Anderson the prize after her performance. She becomes the first African American artist to solo with the New York Philharmonic.

1927
Late October: Anderson boards the Ile de France in New York bound for England. Using $1550 in savings, Anderson travels for the first time to Europe to study music in London. She rooms at the London residence of the famous Black baritone John Payne, and studies with voice teacher Amanda Aldridge.

November-December: Travels from London to Steyning in Sussex, where she has arranged to study with the respected Baltic German instructor and former tenor Raimund von Zur Mühlen (1854-1931), credited as the inventor of the Liederabend, and the top lied expert in England. About a week before Christmas, she returns to London, earlier than planned due to the aged Zur Mühlen having health issues.

1928
Back in London, Anderson finds Payne’s house is now filled with several other Black guests. She also meets Black musical stars including Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and Alberta Hunter. She enrolls at the Hugo Institute to study German and French. Though disappointed by Zur Mühlen’s illness, Anderson sought out other instructors in London, including the baritone Mark Raphael, who had also worked with Zur Mühlen and was a Schubert fan, like Anderson.

February: Begins working with the Jamaican-born voice coach Louis Drysdale.

15 June: Performs at London’s Wigmore Hall, her first concert in London and Europe.

16 August: Sings a successful concert at the Proms in London.

22 September: Anderson sails aboard the Aquitania from Europe to New York City – after recording sessions in London.

30 December: Performs in a solo recital at Carnegie Hall. While she is gaining some critical repute, her concerts are primarily drawing an African American audience.

1929
January: Anderson sails to Europe to study under Sara Cahier in Vienna. Cahier (born Sara Jane Layton Walker in Nashville, Tennessee) is a former American contralto opera and lieder singer who now teaches young and upcoming opera performers such as Anderson. She married the wealthy Swede Charles Cahier in 1905 and became a Swedish citizen some time between 1915 and 1918.

Fall: Concert in Chicago, applies for a Rosenwald grant to travel to Berlin for study and concerts.

1930
12 June: Anderson arrives in Berlin. Her Rosenwald grant is approved only days before her departure. She has a room in the private home of Matthias and Gertrud von Erdberg in the tony Charlottenburg suburb of Berlin west of the city center. The von Erdbergs spoke very little English and were happy to help Marian with her German.

July-August: Study in Berlin, with a monthlong visit to London, where Anderson gives two concerts.

September: After a short concert trip to Prague with Billy King, Anderson begins vocal lessons with Aachen-born voice coach and musician Kurt Johnen in Berlin.

10 October: At Berlin’s Bachsaal, Anderson performs her debut concert in the German capital. Among those in attendance is the renowned former contralto Sara Cahier. The German critics give her good reviews. Anderson is pleased, since she had to pay her German manager $500 upfront to book the concert hall.

Late October: At Cahier’s Berlin residence in Grünewald there is a small private concert for the elite of Berlin society, including the hotel founder Lorenz Adlon and his wife Hedda. But the last months of 1930 are dark days, as the German economy suffers and the Nazis are on the rise.

November-December: Anderson receives no additional concert offers in Germany, but she is happy when she gets an offer for concerts in Norway, Sweden, and Finland from the Norwegian tour manager Rule Rasmussen, who has traveled to Berlin with the Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen to hear Anderson. Rasmussen is impressed enough to offer her tour dates. Anderson also meets Vehanen for the first time, not knowing that she will collaborate with him over the next decade. Sverre Jordan, a renowned Norwegian pianist agrees to play for Anderson in Oslo, while Vehanen agrees to be her accompanist for the rest of the Scandinavian tour. The tour becomes so successful that additional concerts are added at the last minute.

December: Returns to the US from Berlin only a few days before Christmas.

1931
January: Anderson’s second US tour season begins under manger Arthur Judson. She now has more concerts, but attendance is down, due in part to the poor economy and a lack of publicity, which she has to pay for out her own pocket.

June: Returns to Berlin, using the second part of her Rosenwald stipend. She again rooms with the von Erdbergs, and continues her training with Johnen. She has some success in arranging concert tours based on her previous year’s concerts in Berlin and Scandinavia. Her German concert bureau, the prestigious Wolff and Sachs firm agrees to manage Anderson’s concerts outside of Scandinavia. Helmer Enwall promises her a better organized Scandinavian tour.

August: Sings at a well-reviewed Berlin concert. But it is her only Berlin concert in 1931.

Early October: Taking a break from her studies, Anderson travels to Paris for a holiday with the Johnens and their niece.

14 October: Anderson arrives in Prague for the first of four concerts.

30 October – 8 December: Anderson has 22 concerts on her second Scandinavian tour, which is better organized, as promised by Enwall. The highlight for both Anderson and Vehanen comes on 13 November. On that day the two are granted an audience of 30 minutes (arranged by Vehanen) with the noted Finnish composer Jean Sibelius at his home in Järvenpaä. Using a piano in the house, Vehanen plays for Anderson. Sibelius is so impressed with her singing, he tells her: “My roof is too low for you.”

1932
January: Anderson arrives back in America as the Great Depression reaches new depths. In mid-January her new tour season begins with a concert in Quebec. The schedule is now only 20 concerts over a period of five months, with very few concerts in the South, and none at all in California. The ailing economy is taking its toll. The dark mood of the times also affects Anderson’s singing in a negative way.

May: The African American baritone Aubrey Pankey is scheduled to perform a Liederabend at the Mozarteum concert hall in Salzburg. After learning where and when Pankey will perform, local Nazis distribute flyers calling for protest. The police make an effort to help by posting officers in front of and inside the concert hall. Although Pankey is able to perform, the mob outside is horrifying. He later tells an American newspaper: “I thought I was in some of the southern sections of the United States when I heard the mob. I never expected this in Europe.”

1933
September: Anderson and Kosti Vehanen begin a European tour consisting of concerts in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. During her tour, her work is well reviewed and she plays for royalty.

1934
May: In Paris, having decided not to return to the US in the summer, Anderson and Vehanen meet with Sol Hurok, an American tour manager, to discuss him taking her on as a client, replacing Arthur Judson. He makes her an offer that she promises to consider.

20 June: Anderson writes to Arthur Judson, telling him she is not happy with her current contract conditions.

August: Anderson wants to work on her opera skills for her upcoming fall tour. In Stockholm she works with Tullio Voghera, who studied in Bologna and Padua, and had a long career in opera. She then goes to Berlin to study Mahler songs with Sara Cahier.

5 September: The fall tour begins in Göteberg with two concerts there before moving on to other Scandinavian cities. In September and October. To help with the grueling schedule, Anderson, a reluctant flier, and Vehanen travel by air.

1935
6 January: The first Russia tour begins. Vehanen and Anderson travel by train from Finland to Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg) in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union. They stay at the Europa in Leningrad, a luxury hotel dating back to the czarist Russia, but the bathroom plumbing is less than luxurious. Anderson’s four concerts in Leningrad are all sold out. In between concerts, the two sightsee in the city, which Vehanen last saw before the Russian revolution.

15 January: Travel by train to Moscow, where Anderson has three concerts scheduled. The small, close-knit Black community in Moscow warmly welcomes Anderson at the train station. Before her departure for Russia, Anderson had been warned about singing spirituals, but she refuses to censor herself. Russian audiences react enthusiastically to the religious songs she sings, both in Leningrad and in Moscow. Anderson had encountered suspicion and a search at the Finnish-Russian border when customs officials had discovered a small phonograph and records in Anderson’s luggage. An earlier live broadcast by Paul Robeson singing “Steal Away to Jesus” had caused the resignation of Soviet radio officials just weeks before. But Anderson encountered no repercussions. One difference was, ironically, that Robeson was an outspoken, professed supporter of the Soviet revolution, while Anderson was never a political activist. And Stalin probably had other, more important concerns.

22 January: Departure by train to Riga (now the capital of Latvia), where Anderson has three concerts. Her tour continues throughout the winter and spring.

February: The tour enters Eastern Europe. Anderson debuts in Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.

April: Concerts in Monte Carlo and six Italian cities, including Rome, Milan, and Trieste.

16 May – 5 June: The second Russia tour revisits Moscow and Leningrad, with a few more concert dates than for the first Soviet tour. Following that, Anderson travels to Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan for concerts there.

July: In the spa town of Kislovodsk, located between the Black and Caspian Seas, Anderson and Vehanen enjoy two weeks of vacation following their exhausting tour itinerary. They really need two weeks to recover from the nightmare journey by truck and air they took to get there from Baku.

13 July: Anderson leaves Kislovodsk for Moscow. She is now thinking about the Salzburg Festival that is only a few weeks away.

Early July: The news that Marian Anderson has been banned from appearing at the Salzburg Festival in August begins to appear in American newspapers. Anderson’s European manager, Helmer Enwall, uses the negative publicity in the US to angrily protest the rejection, not so subtly accusing the Austrians of racism. Anderson herself knows what is going on, but she avoids getting directly involved, as usual in such situations.

Early August: The Salzburg officials relent, permitting Anderson to give a concert in the Mozarteum, one of the festival’s concert halls, but only under the condition that her concert would not be recognized as an official event of that summer’s Salzburg Festival.

28 August: Anderson sings in the Mozarteum, initially to a small audience, but after the intermission the numbers grow, as news of the notable African American singer spreads.

31 August: In the ballroom of the Hotel de l’Europe, Anderson sings for a distinguished audience of 300 invited guests that includes many of the artists appearing at the festival, government officials. Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini come back to greet Anderson after the concert. It is then that his famous words spoken to Anderson and Madame Cahier were uttered: “What I heard today one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.”

1936
20 January: Anderson performs at Town Hall in New York City. Her audience includes celebrities like Katharine Hepburn and Gloria Swanson. Later she sings at Carnegie Hall once again.

February: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invites Anderson to perform at the White House for the President and guests. Marian arrives with her mother, Annie Anderson and is accompanied by Kosti Vehanen. A lifelong friendship between Marian Anderson and the First Lady begins.

April: Anderson and pianist Kosti Vehanen arrive in a turbulent Europe for a months-long concert tour, starting in Italy, followed by Spain (where the trains were no longer running because of an impending civil war)

17 June: In Vienna, just prior to Anderson’s scheduled solo performance of Brahms’ “Alto-Rhapsody,” the Berlin-born Jewish conductor Bruno Walter (1876-1962) and Anderson herself receive death threats. The concert goes on as scheduled, but plainclothes police are called in for help. Walter had invited Anderson to sing in Vienna at her August 1935 recital in Salzburg, which he had attended. Walter insisted on teaming up with Anderson, partly as a political statement as a Jew, and the Nazis kicking him out of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1933. – Following the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, Bruno Walter, then working in the Netherlands, flees via a circuitous route, until finally sailing to the US in November 1939. He later buys a home in Beverly Hills, California, where some of his neighbors were fellow European refugees.

1-16 August: The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin featured several African Americans, most notably the track and field athlete Jesse Owens. Owens had a generally favorable reception in Germany, but his circumstances were different in many ways from those of Marian Anderson. The Germans went to great lengths to make the 1936 Games seem racially tolerant, but it was truly a classic Potemkin village situation, with the existing Nazi bigotry and discrimination only hidden away for the Olympics.

The 1936 Salzburg Festival In 1936, a year after Marian Anderson crashed the 1935 Salzburg Festival, the Trapp Family Singers were featured at the Festival. The Trapps were most notably made famous by the film version of the musical The Sound of Music. The segment of the film showing the Trapp Family singing at the Felsenreitschule is misleading, since the film scene is inaccurately set in 1938. But of course that is not the only thing that the Hollywood film got wrong about the real-life events.

1937
26 January: Anderson begins her second US season with Sol Hurok as her manager. It is a coast-to-coast tour lasting 44 days.

16 April: On tour in the US, Anderson gives a concert at McCarter Theatre, a concert hall in Princeton, New Jersey. (Princeton was a very segregated town, as bad as anywhere in the Deep South. The concert that night was sponsored by Princeton Group Arts, an organization that provided African American children art instruction not available in Princeton’s inferior Black schools.) In the packed-house audience that night is Princeton resident Albert Einstein. After the concert Einstein goes backstage to meet Anderson. He offers to escort Anderson to the Nassau Inn where she has a reservation. When they arrive at the hotel, the manager denies her a room because of the Inn’s “whites only” policy. Einstein invites Anderson to stay with him, his stepdaughter, and his secretary at his nearby home. This is the first of many times that Albert Einstein will step in to host Anderson at his Princeton home. Einstein, a well-known advocate of racial equality, later hosted Anderson whenever she was in the area. The last time was in 1955, only months before his death. The two became good friends. The 1937 incident became the inspiration for the 2021 play “My Lord, What a Night” (a slight variation of the title of Anderson’s 1956 memoir). The play, written by Deborah Brevoort and directed by Sheldon Epps, debuted in October 2021 at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC.

November: Anderson’s last European tour comes only a few months before Hitler annexes Austria. His soldiers will invade Poland less than two years later, on 1 September 1939, starting World War II and the Holocaust.

1938
Anderson’s third tour season with Hurok includes 60 concert dates! In addition to the US, Anderson tours South America for the second time.

1939
January: Exhausted by the latest tour schedule set up by Sol Hurok, and upset that he had not reacted to her previous complaints about his grueling tour schedules, she sends Hurok a letter threatening to refuse future engagements if her tour schedules are not adjusted to allow her more time to rest between performances.

9 April (Easter Sunday): After being refused the opportunity to schedule a concert at Washington, DC’s Constitution Hall, Anderson performs in front of 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial. She is accompanied by pianist Kosti Vehanen.

June: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt invites Anderson to sing at the White House, as the President and First Lady host the king and queen of England.

July: Marian Anderson is awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, presented at the ceremony by Eleanor Roosevelt.

1940
June: Anderson sails to Hawaii for a month of concerts. In letters, she expresses frustration about the fact that Orpheus still has not found a house for the two of them.

7 July: The $18,000 purchase of a 100-acre farm with a three-story Victorian farmhouse near Danbury, Connecticut becomes final – while Marian is still in Hawaii. Following an extensive search, and battling racial restrictions, Anderson’s future husband, architect Orpheus Fisher, finally finds them a house. They will name the property Marianna Farm. It will be Marian’s home for almost five decades.

October: For her new concert season, the German pianist Franz Rupp replaces Kosti Vehanen following a scandal and illness. Critics praise Rupp’s playing, calling it more dynamic than that of Vehanen. For Anderson the change causes some adjustment problems, but the two soon become a real team. She also revives her recording sessions with Rupp.

December: Orpheus finally obtains his divorce from Ida Gould. Although Orpheus and Marian live together at Marianna Farm when Anderson is not on tour, their marriage will have to wait for personal and career reasons. Meanwhile Orpheus, the architect, devotes time to remodeling the house and planning the farm layout.

1941
During World War II, Anderson uses her talents to support the war effort, performing for charity concerts, at veterans’ hospitals and military bases, making a special effort to visit with Black troops.

1942
2 November: Anderson makes her first radio appearance on NBC’s weekly Bell Telephone Hour, singing Bizet’s “Agnus Dei” and other numbers. She becomes a regular and popular guest over the next decade. Broadcast from New York City, the show’s small-audience format suits Anderson well, and does not require a long trip from her new home.

1943
7 January: Anderson sings at a sold-out concert in Constitution Hall to an audience of 4,000 that included many dignitaries, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt among them. She accepts the DAR’s invitation only after extracting an agreement that the audience will be completely unsegregated. She also decides at the last minute to change the recipient of her benefit concert to United China Relief, most likely reacting to the DAR’s recent refusal to allow Paul Robeson to sing in the same hall to benefit China Relief.

17 July: Marian Anderson and Orpheus Hodge “King” Fisher (1900-1986) marry in a private ceremony in Bethel, Connecticut. Fisher had first proposed to Marian in 1915. Fisher’s first wife was Ida Gould, with whom Orpheus had a son named James Gould Fisher (1925-2009). Marian and Orpheus will remain married until his death in 1986.

1950
4 June (in West Berlin): At the request of the US military, Anderson sings in two sold-out shows, one in West Berlin and another in Munich. In West Berlin she appears at the Titania-Palast cinema before an enthusiastic audience of 2,000, composed of Allied soldiers and Germans. But it is highly ironic that the US military at this time is still racially segregated, and when Anderson stays at the US Army-run Hotel Excelsior in Munich, there are protests by white Americans against her staying there.

1951
January: The NAACP calls for a boycott of Marian Anderson’s concert in Richmond, Virginia due to its segregated audience. Marian agrees with the NAACP and stipulates that in the future all of her concerts will have an integrated audience.

1955
7 January: Now almost 60 years old, Marian Anderson becomes the first African American to perform on the main stage at the Metropolitan Opera, as “Ulrica” in Un Ballo in Maschera.

18 April: Albert Einstein dies in Princeton, New Jersey, only a few months after hosting his friend Marian Anderson at his home for the last time.

1956
Anderson publishes her bestselling autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning (Viking). It will be republished in 2002 by the University of Illinois Press, Urbana. (See Marian Anderson Books below.)

1957
20 January: Anderson sings for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second inauguration.

Later in 1957 she begins serving as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United States State Department. Her travels begin with a tour of Asia and the honor of performing as the first American at the Gandhi Memorial. In all, she makes a 12-nation, 35,000-mile (56,000-km) tour sponsored by the Department of State, the American National Theatre and Academy, and Edward R. Murrow’s television series “See It Now.”

1961
20 January: Anderson sings the National Anthem for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

1963
28 August: Roy Wilkins, President of the NAACP invites Marian Anderson to sing at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Martin Luther King, Jr. famously makes his “I Have a Dream” speech. She sings “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

1963
Anderson is honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but before the ceremony can take place, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in November. President Lyndon Baines Johnson presents Marian Anderson with the Medal of Freedom.

1965
18 April (Easter Sunday): Anderson’s 50-city farewell tour ends in New York’s Carnegie Hall. Although she no longer sang in public after retirement, Anderson remained a public figure, active at public events and as a supporter of various causes.

1986
Marian’s husband, Orpheus Fisher, dies at 85 after 43 years of marriage. Anderson continues to live at Marianna Farm in Connecticut.

1992
Anderson, now in her 90s, moves to Portland, Oregon to live with her nephew, conductor James DePreist. (Note: DePreist’s name is often seen online and in print misspelled as “DePriest.”)

1993
8 April: Marian Anderson slips into a coma and dies in Portland, Oregon at the home of her nephew. Her death occurs just one day before the 54th anniversary of her iconic 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert. The cause is congestive heart failure. She is 96 years old.

TIMELINE SOURCES:
Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey by Allan Keiler (University of Illinois Press, 2002); My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography by Marian Anderson (University of Illinois Press, 2002); The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights by Russell Freedman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004); Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman (Cornell University Press, 2021) – Also see the web links below for other sources.

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Marian Anderson Books: Recommended Reading

The following books are related to Marian Anderson’s life and career. You can order them using the Amazon.com partner links below, or at your favorite online or local bookstore.

Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey (Music in American Life) by Allan Keiler
The best, most comprehensive biography of Marian Anderson – Her personal life and career
Buy it from Amazon.com: Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey – University of Illinois Press, 2002 (hardcover, paper, mass paper)

My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography by Marian Anderson
A 2002 reprint of Marian Anderson’s 1956 autobiography, ghost-written by music critic Howard Taubman, based on tape-recorded interviews. With a foreword by her nephew, James Anderson DePreist.
Buy it from Amazon.com: My Lord, What a Morning – University of Illinois Press, 2002 (hardcover, paper, mass paper)

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman
Marian Anderson was not the only Black singer of classical music who spent time in German-speaking Europe. This interesting book is an overview of that aspect of musical history, including Anderson’s role.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Singing Like Germans – Cornell University Press, 2021 (Kindle edition)

The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights by Russell Freedman
This insightful, illustrated account of the great African American vocalist examines her life and career in the context of the history of civil rights in the US. Winner of the Sibert Medal.
Buy it from Amazon.com: The Voice That Challenged a Nation (paperback, audio CD)

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Next | American Black History and Germany

Related Pages
Some Other African-Americans in German-speaking Europe

• Black Americans in German-Speaking Europe – A look at three African Americans who studied in German-speaking Europe or were influenced by it: (1) the only African American man known to have talked with Hitler; (2) the African American sculptor who studied in Vienna and Paris, and influenced the design of the US dime; (3) the Panamanian American fashion designer of African descent who married into European royalty two decades before Meghan Merkle.
• Bruce Darnell is an African American who has had success on German television.
• Ron Williams, the other Williams in Germany, is an African American from Oakland, California who has lived and worked in Germany for decades.
• Hans-Jürgen Massaquoi (1926-2013) was an African-German, born in Hamburg, who gained success in the US as the editor of Ebony.
• Black History and Germany – The largely unknown story of African Americans and other black people who have had an influence on German and world history.

More | Featured Biographies

MORE FROM THE GERMAN WAY

• Featured Biographies – More detailed bios of notable people from the German-speaking world
• Mini Bios A-Z – Brief biographies of people from the German-speaking world
• Notable Women from Austria, Germany, Switzerland
• Famous Graves in Germany – Where are they buried?
• Germans (and Others) in Hollywood – About the three main waves of Germanic immigration to Hollywood

ON THE WEB

• Marian Anderson (1897-1993) – An Anderson bio from blackpast.org
• PBS: Marian Anderson: Voice of the Century – Part of PBS’s “American Experience” series
• Orpheus Fisher – Find A Grave – The grave of Anderson’s husband is in Wooster Cemetery, Danbury, Connecticut.
• How Marian Anderson Became the Voice of the Century by Kirstin Butler – Before the legendary singer was a civil rights icon at home, she battled white supremacy abroad. From WGBH Boston and PBS

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