The seventieth anniversary of the Easter Sunday concert arrives on April 9th, and various commemorations are under way. The mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves will lead a tribute concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the twelfth ... Last month, at Carnegie Hall and other venues, the soprano Jessye Norman curated a festival of African-American cultural achievement, entitled “Honor!,” during which Anderson was often invoked. (In 1965, Norman saw Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, which had by then dropped its exclusionary policies.) Yet Anderson’s legacy seems in some way incomplete. The Lincoln Memorial concert has lost much of its iconic status; many younger people don’t know the singer’s name. Within classical music, meanwhile, black faces remain scarce. No African-American singers were featured at the Metropolitan Opera’s recent hundred-and-twenty-fifth-anniversary gala. A color line persists, more often politely ignored than confronted directly.
From The New Yorker.
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