March 2, 2025

March daily: Singing Like Germans

Construction of race, cultural amnesia

Kira Thurman‘s 2021 book Singing Like Germans is an essential part of a music library. If you haven‘t read it, you should read it now; I devoured it in one, long rainy Cincinnati afternoon. Packed with information and analysis, written with the flow of an epic saga expertly delivered, it remains one of the most significant new books to me of the last five years.

At one of my opera house jobs where I regularly listened to auditions, I got used to my bosses‘ reactions to foreign singers who presented arias in the bosses‘ native languages. “Ich verstehe kein Wort,” said one coolly as always, after hearing an American soprano offer some Wagner. As he proceeded to coach her on improving her language, she and I both knew that she was fluent in German, having lived and studied in the country for years. But clarity of pronunciation is just one part of language, and she was ready to take expressive advice from an acknowledged great musician. Satisfied with her work at the end of the session, he turned to me with a smile and said “Americans never take the time to explore the meaning of words. All the detail and none of the substance.”

Language and its “substance,” its perceived expression, form the basis of much debate around opera coaching and casting. In my experience, national origin and race came up frequently in these discussions. I remember a long explanation from an early mentor of how you could tell the sound of black singers because of their differently shaped vocal tracts. Another boss in a different opera house objected to the casting of an Asian soprano - a good singer, he admitted, but unable to be effective as a comedienne because “they all have impassive faces.” Expressions like “Italianate warmth” and “Nordic coolness” are ubiquitous in commentary about singers. Opera’s obsessed with such typing and coding, which then of course gets baked into our training, a performance on top of a performance.

Thurman’s book shines a light on over a century’s worth of Black musicians’ experience in Germany and Austria. She recounts how Black Americans turned to the pursuit of musical excellence as a way to advance socially past barriers still erected and maintained in their way. Reactions to them in Europe were all over the map, and inextricably bound up with other stories. Some heard a racially-based “characteristic” sadness in their music-making, while others speculated on how Black performers were, making careful distinctions like mulatto to explain their successful performance of European music.

Thurman also illuminates how classical music deals with memory, reinforcing the shared narrative pathways that keep us close to Beethoven while simultaneously enabling our forgetting of his close contemporary George Bridgetower, a Caribbean-Polish violin prodigy raised in the Esterhazy household and the original dedicatee of the Kreutzer Sonata. We don’t have to look far for examples of this amnesia in our own time. As Olivia Giovetti points out in her LA Review of Books piece about Thurman’s text: “In the summer of 2020, The New York Times dubbed Sheku Kanneh-Mason “what the classical music world has long lacked: a Black headliner.” Through this historical forgetting, “outsiders” to an accepted and reinforced mainstream narrative can be perpetually seen as newcomers, ever needing to establish and prove themselves as worthy.

This book hit me just as we were started to come back from the worst of the pandemic, in the thick of many, many industry discussions about race and how training, casting, and leadership were still driven by unconscious, constantly re-forgotten biases. Kira Thurman shows that listeners perceive race, gender, and power through the lenses of their own cultural and political narratives. With clarity but with no step back from complexity, she teaches us that these identities are mutable, constantly shifting, and perpetually remade.

Whose stories will you tell and retell?

Which memories will you hold up to the light and the air, giving them a chance to survive?

thanks for reading.