By John Ardoin

Remembering Marian Anderson

It was on Easter Sunday, in 1965, that Marian Anderson sang for the last time in public. No one present at Carnegie Hall that afternoon will be able to forget the sight and sound of her. She was a magnificent figure on stage -- tall and radiant. Her devout bearing and her affecting voice were such that even the most irreligious person must have felt the beauty of her faith. There has never been a more eloquent apostle of brotherhood through music than Miss Anderson, and, as she retraced for a final time songs and arias that had become identified with her for decades, there were hundreds of faces, black and white, unashamedly tear-stained. That sense of communal loss returned again in 1993, when she died at the age of 96.

She was born in Philadelphia, where her father was an ice and coal dealer and her mother was a teacher. She was in her early 20s when she was hired for her first professional engagement. But few dates followed, so she went abroad, where Germany and the Scandinavia countries discovered and applauded what America had not yet recognized -- here was one of the towering musical personalities and sounds of the century.

It was after a recital in Salzburg in 1935 that Arturo Toscanini gave her a now famous benediction: "A voice like yours is heard only once in a 100 years." The same year, after an appearance in Paris, she was signed to a managerial contract by impresario Sol Hurok. He brought her back to the United States and made certain that she would no longer be a prophet without honor in her own land. With his support, she became America's finest and most popular recitalist, the only platform open to her at the time.

The turning point in her career came in 1939, when she was thrust into the forefront of America's conscience and the growing struggle for racial equality. In one afternoon, she became a symbol of African-American hopes. Anderson had been booked for a concert in Constitution Hall in the nation's capital, a building owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Evidently, no one at the DAR realized at first that she was black. When this fact was brought to the organization's attention, her recital date was canceled. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest, ensuring that what had been a thoughtless act quickly became a national issue. This led to an invitation from the Secretary of the Interior to Anderson to give her concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This she did on Easter Sunday, 1939, before a crowd estimated at 75,000.

Finally, in 1955, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Rudolf Bing, invited the contralto to make her operatic debut at his theater. She became the first black singer on the Met's roster. She was also an American delegate to the United Nations, sang at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Later, a Congressional Gold Medal was struck expressly to honor her.

Long before the mighty struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960s, her accomplishments and her dignity stood as one of the most persuasive arguments for equality. At the time of her farewell recital, Vincent Sheean wrote: "To say farewell to Marian Anderson will not be easy for the American people. Rain or shine, war or peace, she has been before us as a living part of ... the American soul. To become what Miss Anderson has become in American history and legend required a formidable natural gift to begin with, a voice rich and splendid. But this wealth of voice ... really does not explain what Marian Anderson is to the United States. She came at a moment when a great Negro personality, which the whole world could esteem and love, had become very nearly a historical imperative; and in that mysterious way that destiny takes for its working, when she was needed most, there she was. And there she remained, a figure of universality who transcended all barriers and borders."

Writer Fanny Hurst put the same thought another way: "Marian Anderson has not grown simply great, she has grown great simply. It is a matter of national pride that she was ours. It is a measure of our sadness that we could not have had her with us longer."