|
|
|
That
day the editorial page carried the headline "Miss Anderson to the
Met" and commented: "that she has fulfilled a lifelong ambition is
not nearly so important as the fact that we will have an opportunity
to hear her in still another medium. Whenever there was
'discrimination' against Miss Anderson the real suffering was not
hers but ours. It was we who were impoverished, not she."
As the first African American to be engaged by the Met,
Marian Anderson made her operatic debut on 7 January 1955--one month
before her fifty-eighth birthday--as the fortune teller Ulrica in Giuseppe
Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. Ulrica is a highly dramatic
role, and although she appears only in the first act of the three-act
opera, she provides the underpinning of the plot with her prediction of
the hero's death. Ms. Anderson's performance met with critical acclaim,
although her vocal accomplishments were somewhat overshadowed in the press
by the historic importance of the event: Marian Anderson was once again
breaking racial barriers and was paving the way for an entire generation
of singers who were to follow. While her appearance with the Met was a
logical step in her career, it was, indeed, long-overdue.
| Table of Contents | Introduction |
Last update: Wednesday, 11-Jul-2012 11:24:23 EDT