Colored Contralto

From the Harlem Y. W. C. A. last week a slender, young Negro woman was lifted into a taxicab, driven away to Manhattan's Town Hall, where one of the most curious audiences of the season had gathered to hear a singer whose name had already spread the length & breadth of Europe. Some wondered why the curtain went up showing her so carefully posed in the crook of a grand piano. Not until she had sung four songs did she trouble to explain that her foot was in a cast, that she had injured it aboard ship, that she appeared that way "to make it pleasanter for your eyes."

Unable to stand on both feet, Marian Anderson managed to exhibit one of the richest contralto voices that has been heard in the U. S. for many a year. One Viennese critic described her as "a black Lilli Lehmann." That she is not. But she is an exciting, sure-voiced singer who would make any race proud. Her Handel songs instantly revealed a breadth and nobility of style. Her Schubert Ave Maria was not something interpolated to catch popular fancy; it was fervent, even as an organ tone, deeply impressive. Even more moving was Der Tod und das Maedchen, in which she made a sustained low D seem incidental to the horror of the dying girl, the call of Death itself. Thereafter came an aria from Verdi's Don Carlos, made vivid by canny restraint. With Sibelius' Die Libelle she proved that she could trill. After spirituals the audience clamored for encores for a good half hour, until the hall's lights were dimmed and the curtains finally closed. Most singers are all too eager to capitalize on a sure-fire success. To get a glimpse of Marian Anderson after last week's concert, it was necessary to travel to Philadelphia, to a respectable eight-room flat in the Negro section. There the season's outstanding new singer sat with her bad foot propped up, wrapped in a clumsy, grey woolen sock. That Philadelphia neighborhood represented home to Marian Anderson. When she was a child her father conducted a small coal & ice business nearby. Her mother went out to do white folks' housework. Marian's big day of the week was Sunday when, all stiffly starched, she went to sing at the Union Baptist Church. At 8 she was billed as "The Baby Contralto," sang Sing Me to Sleep with her dark, buxom aunt. The Negro parson was Marian Anderson's first critic. Said he: "It is amazing that so much voice can come from such a very small person."

The aunt saw to it that, at 13, Marian was moved along into the adult choir. After her father's death, her mother took a job as cleaning woman in a department store. At 16 Marian took over the support of the family, sang at community affairs, made what she calls her formal debut in a concert at a Negro school in Atlanta. Her church friends helped finance her study, felt richly rewarded when, in 1925, she was chosen from 300 applicants to solo with the New York Philharmonic at a Stadium Concert.

Engagements followed as a matter of course, but mostly in Negro schools and churches. In 1930 she gambled on a trip to Germany, studied intensively for a few months, finally hired a hall for $500. Critics then pronounced her a full-fledged artist, began to heap superlatives on her voice. Thereafter she toured widely in Europe. At the Salzburg Festival last summer Critic Herbert F. Peyser of the New York Times wrote of her as "one of the greatest living singers." Even with such praise she has remained levelheaded, happiest when with her own people. She could have been roundly feted if she had chosen to remain in Manhattan last week. Instead she preferred to hide away in her mother's Philadelphia home, with its starched lace curtains, its overstuffed furniture, its radio, its fireplace aglow with artificial flames.

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