Not Here, O Apollo

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 349, 1 March 1946, Page 12

Not Here, O Apollo

VINCENT SHEEAN, in a _ recent ‘" book, describes the impact of the Negro art of Marian Anderson on the Salzburg Music Festival of 1935. What she did, he says, "was something outside the limits of classical or romantic music: she frightened us with the conception, in musical terms of course, but outside the normal limits, of a mighty suffering. Without the conventional training of an art-singer she would probably never have been able to do this, and yet she did it most of all by a quality of tone and expression which transcended even her rare gift and related her to millions of others; it was most of all a racial quality . . . Anderson’s tragic music, coming from a world outside the formal design and limited aspiration of the baroque town, seemed too much to be contained there, and even at moments when it was most wedded to German romantic music. . . invested the whole with a barbaric wildness, a sheer tribal terror for which our musical experience gave us no clue." I was vividly reminded of this quotation -my excuse for repeating it-by a pro-

gramme of negro spirituals sung from 3YA by Gerald Christeller. Mr. Christeller chose several spirituals-‘‘Go Down Moses," "I Stood on de Ribber," "Oh, Didn’t it Rain’ — which are. too seldom heard. It was clear from his manner and approach that he was quite aware of this strange quality of which Sheean speaks, and put forth all his powers to capture it. But the thing could not be done, through no fault in the singer — though I cannot feel that the accompaniment helped him; Mr. Christeller’s training and background is essentially that of the Central European baroque tradition into which Marian Anderson so disturbingly broke, and the return journey simply cannot be made. As a rule, these negro songs can hardly be satisfactorily presented by a singer of another race. Anderson, Robeson, or the Inkspots, all have a unique and unproduceable cachet.