
W.E.B. Du Bois (above), who spent several years studying in Germany in the 1890s, greatly admired German classical music, and considered it a repertoire full of freedom and possibility for black performers. He especially loved the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and in 1936 he made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the opera house in Bavaria where a festival of Wagner’s operas is put on every year. By this time, it was widely known that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer: here is Hitler at the 1934 Bayreuth festival.
As Alex Ross describes the trip:

Inspired by Du Bois, and by the remarks made by historian Kira Thurman (above) in the “Studying the Lied” colloquy in the Summer 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, here is a playlist of most of the singers mentioned by Thurman, singing German repertoire. Read a transcription of the colloquy here.

A live recording of the African-American baritone Aubrey Pankey from 1941 (starts at around 15:00; I couldn’t figure out how to cue the audio, so you may need to listen to a violin sonata by Paul Hindemith first).

The great tenor Roland Hayes, a native of Georgia and the son of former slaves, “fell in love with European art music as a student at Fisk University.” He toured with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and later studied music in Germany, making it his goal, as he wrote in his memoirs, “to establish myself throughout Austria and Germany as a singer in the great Lieder [German art song] tradition.” Nevertheless, Hayes asserted:
I may be old-fashioned, but I like to think that I am a better singer for having learned to plow a straight furrow when I was a boy in the [Georgia] Flatwoods.
Hayes explained:
When he made his recital debut in Vienna, a critic observed that
No German could sing Schubert with more serious or unselfish surrender.
Back in the United States on tour, however, Hayes was brutally beaten by a white shoe store clerk in Atlanta when his wife and daughter sat in the “whites only” area of the store. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the incident, which he later re-titled “A Warning”:
Roland Hayes Beaten (Georgia, 1942)
Negroes,
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble, and kind:
Beware the day
They change their minds!
In the cotton fields,
Gentle breeze:
Beware the hour
It uproots trees!

As Martin Luther King, Jr. described this even in a speech he gave as a high school junior in 1944:

Ellabelle Davis:
Kenneth Spencer:

Leontyne Price:
Simon Estes:
William Warfield:
Grace Bumbry:
Reri Grist:
Kathleen Battle:
The late, great Jessye Norman, who, in the tradition of Roland Hayes, devoted much of her rich artistic life to German music:
Why do you think Black American singers would have found a particular kind of artistic and personal freedom in German classical music?
Young Black singers of our own time: here, South African soprano Pretty Yende improvises in Zulu, her native language, in a spoken monologue in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment at the Metropolitan Opera:
Pretty Yende singing an aria from the same opera:
Tenor Russell More recalls being told “Too bad you’re black,” at an audition.
Thomas talks about his debut as Otello:
Thomas sings:


Trinidadian soprano Jeanine de Bique singing an aria by Handel in a decidedly non-operatic setting:
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