![]() ![]() ![]() Audiences, I demonstrate, oscillated between seeing Black classical musicians as rightful heirs and dangerous usurpers of Austro-German musical culture. Yet Black performances of German music suggested that these typologies were not as fixed as listeners had been conditioned to expect. White German and Austrian listeners frequently assumed that the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. What my book demonstrates is that by virtue of what they performed, where they performed, and how they performed it, Black classical musicians consistently challenged their audience’s ideas of Blackness, whiteness, and German national identity. Playing the role of Venus in the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner’s 1845 opera, Tannhäuser, Bumbry sparkled with each turn, embodying the tempting seductress she had been cast to perform, singing of love and lust to an enraptured audience of nearly two thousand listeners, including international dignitaries, high-ranking classical musicians, music critics, and socialites. Her book, Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach. ![]() The African American soprano glided around the set of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre, shimmering under a dim glow of light filtered through laced netting that flooded the stage in gentle waves. In this presentation, Professor Kira Thurman turns to the past to consider how. ![]()
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