Raymond Arsenault's THE SOUND OF FREEDOM reviewed in the New York Times

‘Voice of the Century’ Broke Racial Barriers

By DWIGHT GARNER
April 2, 2009; New York Times

In the early 1930s, years before the concert at the Lincoln Memorial that made her an international symbol of the American civil rights movement, Marian Anderson, the great Philadelphia-born contralto, was probably better known overseas than she was in the United States.

Anderson’s concerts, which combined opera arias and German lieder with black spirituals, won over not just crowds and critics but also Europe’s classical music luminaries. After she performed at the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s country house in 1933, singing his compositions in his native language, he called out for “not coffee, but champagne.”

When Anderson (1897-1993) was smuggled in to sing at the 1935 Salzburg Festival after non-Aryans were banned by the Nazis, Arturo Toscanini was in the audience. “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years,” he told her. His words stuck. For the rest of her life Anderson would be referred to as “the voice of the century.”

In his new book, “The Sound of Freedom,” Raymond Arsenault delivers not a proper biography of Anderson — there have already been a couple of those, in addition to her 1956 autobiography — but a tightly focused look at the political and cultural events that led up to and came after her famous 1939 concert. It’s a story that’s well worth retelling.

For the full review, click here.