When my wife and I heard Sidney Outlaw sing Harry Burleigh’s “Till I Wake” a few years ago, we both discovered ourselves weeping. The song was not new to me – but Sidney’s performance was a revelation. Not long after, he recorded “Till I Wake,” with the pianist Warren Jones, in concert at the Brevard Music Festival — and it’s now on youtube (above).
Burleigh is a major American song composer. And Sidney is a peerless singer of Burleigh – as I have had occasion to discover accompanying him in concert.
Once Dvorak’s assistant in New York, Burleigh is today mainly known for his landmark settings of spirituals (which are in some cases virtual compositions by Burleigh); my personal favorite is “Steal Away.” But – even in the midst of today’s resurrection of Black classical music — his high stature as a composer of art songs remains to be appreciated. In my experience, Burleigh’s peak achievement as a song composer is his final song, a valedictory setting of Langston Hughes: “Lovely, Dark and Lonely One.” You can hear Sidney perform it with me on my NPR “More than Music” documentary: “The Art of Harry Burleigh.”
I append commentary on both sings from an 11,000-word essay: “Deep River: Rediscovering the Quest of Harry Burleigh.” In fact, I further append, below that, the entire piece. It was deemed “too scholarly” for the essay collection in which it was to appear, and also not academic enough for academic journals. So I am self-publishing in this space. I have no doubt that it is an important contribution to the literature on America’s neglected Black composers.
ON “TILL I WAKE”:
Typically, Burleigh’s art songs are not obviously “Black.” His first success, “Jean” (1903), is a parlor morsel. But by the time Burleigh hit stride as an arranger of spirituals, he was composing concert songs clearly intended to stand alongside German-language Lieder – repertoire he knew both as a singer and a student of composition. A peak achievement is the Songs of Laurence Hope (1915), in which Burleigh’s composer’s voice is wholly unconcealed. “Laurence Hope” was a pseudonym for Adele Florence Nicolson Corey, whose “exotic Orientalist” love lyrics enjoyed an early twentieth century vogue. The fifth and last of the poems Burleigh set – “Till I Wake” (“from ‘India’s Love Lyrics’”) – reads:
When I am dying, lean over me tenderly, softly
Stoop, as the yellow roses droop in the wind from the South
So I may, when I wake, if there be an awakening,
Keep, what lulled me to sleep, the touch of your lips on my mouth.
From these four unexceptional lines Burleigh fashioned a four-minute song that, when premiered by John McCormack to a packed house at Carnegie Hall, had to be sung a second time. Unquestionably, it proved a bewitching vehicle for McCormack’s sweet tenor. “Till I Wake” shares with the idiom of Burleigh’s spirituals a concentrated structure. The piano part, as in the spirituals, is animated by a streak of independence – which here, however, empowers an impassioned and sonorous keyboard climax. The density of texture and eventful harmonic play are traits that set this song apart from the spiritual settings. And, not so incidentally, it discloses an easy melodic gift.
An interesting question is whether “Till I Wake” sounds at all “Black.” The baritone Sidney Outlaw, a supreme present-day exponent of The Songs of Laurence Hope, hears an African-American inflection. In any event, what anchors this setting is what anchors Burleigh’s “Deep River” or “Steal Away”: an act of faith. Of the spirituals he set, Burleigh wrote: “the cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man – every man – will be free.” And so it is that Burleigh’s “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” quite surprisingly ends in the major. In “Till I Wake,” the quiet turn to the major in the closing eight measures is inevitable, a divine shaft clinching a phased transition from darkness to light. The poem asks: “if there be an awakening.” The song answers with a stirring affirmation of a love inextinguishable.
ON “LOVELY, DARK, AND LONELY ONE”:
“Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One,” Burleigh’s 1935 setting of a Langston Hughes poem, may be his supreme compositional achievement. Re-encountered today, it seems a valedictory. Only two minutes long, it is — even for Burleigh – a superb exercise in concentration: of mood and expression, of melody, of mobile harmonic activity. It achieves a compositional voice as personal as the spiritual arrangements are elemental. The piano part, virtually symphonic, is co-equal with the voice, with which it eloquently interacts. The mediation between Black (bluesy harmonies) and white celebrates the duality of Burleigh the man and artist. (Nowhere is Burleigh closer to Wagner; he virtually quotes the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde — an opera he attended sixty-six times at the Met.) But the most distinguishing feature of this exceptional song is that Burleigh has re-interpreted Hughes’ poem, which reads:
Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.
Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists–
And wait.
Processing this expression of impatience, Burleigh turns the poem upside down. “Child of night” becomes “child of light.” “Bare brown fists” turn into “tireless hands.” Crucially, he first scores the closing word, “wait,” as a fortissimo exclamation crowning the vocal line – and then twice reconsiders it, softening and caressing it so that the meaning turns serene: an expression of forbearance and faith. He then reprises the poem’s first two lines, so that the final pianissimo ascent to the tonic consecrates youth and sunlight. In this 12-bar sequence, it is the intervening piano that becalms the singer, claiming a lasting philosophic repose. Not for Burleigh is the agitation of a Du Bois, Hughes, Cook, or Robeson. Estrangement from the present moment is superseded by values more eternal. Nor is there the merest hint of modernist dissonance. We do not have to agree with him in order to admire the eloquence with which Burleigh here sustains his credo that “deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man – every man – will be free.”
It remains to be observed that Burleigh intended “Lovely, Dark and Lonely One” for Marian Anderson, that Anderson was likewise anchored by faith in a better future, and that she nonetheless chose not to sing it. It is in fact a song personal to Harry Burleigh, a testimonial as unfashionable politically as musically.
AND HERE’S THE WHOLE ESSAY:
DEEP RIVER: REDISCOVERING THE QUEST FOR HARRY BURLEIGH
If you go to YouTube and listen to Marian Anderson sing “Deep River” – an iconic performance – there will be no mention of Harry Burleigh. But there would be no Marian Anderson “Deep River” without Harry Burleigh, because he composed it. In fact, Burleigh is the pivotal figure in the transformation of the sorrow songs of the American South into solo concert songs, and “Deep River” was his pivotal creation. You might even say that Black classical music begins with the five versions of “Deep River,” for solo voice or chorus, that Burleigh created between 1913 and 1917.
Burleigh was also for a time the pre-eminent African-American vocal recitalist. In that role, he mentored Anderson. He proudly tracked her emergence. He attended her landmark 1936 recital at New York’s Town Hall – but did not greet her afterward. She sent him a note expressing disappointment. His written response takes the measure of the man:
Marian dear: — I am very pleased to know that you noticed my absence from the hosts that crowded to greet you . . .
The truth is – my beautiful Marian – that your great art had moved me so deeply that I was loathe to risk losing any of the exaltation I felt by mingling in the general company of congratulating devotees.
Had I gone back stage I should no doubt have fallen on my knees before you or (preferably) on your neck in adoration of your transcendent art.
Sincerely – you gave us all a clear, generous look into our great soul and I, for one, found the beautiful things that I’ve always believed existed there; this which yielded not only aesthetic pleasure of the deepest sort, but a measure of incredulous delight, that linger in my memory like the strains of beautiful music. – HTB [ii]
As Marian Anderson – and Roland Hayes, and Paul Robeson – drew inspiration from Burleigh, Burleigh was instructed and empowered by the example of Antonin Dvorak. He was Dvorak’s assistant at New York’s National Conservatory of Music from 1892 to 1895. That this master European composer, himself a rural butcher’s son, should have chosen a twenty-five year old Black baritone from Erie, Pennsylvania, to become his amanuensis tells us a lot about both men. Burleigh would visit Dvorak’s East Seventeenth Street as often as once a day. They might
travel to the Battery to watch the steamships recede into the horizon, or to 155th Street where from a knoll they could see the Boston or Chicago express race by (these being favorite pastimes of a displaced Bohemian lonely for home). He might perch Dvorak’s son Otakar on his lap during rehearsals of the conservatory orchestra.
And he was plied with Dvorak’s questions about African-American life. This was because Dvorak was instantly smitten by the plantation songs that Burleigh, among others, shared with him – music, wholly unanticipated, which Dvorak declared a singular motherlode certain to foster a “great and noble school” of American classical music. He set an example with his New World Symphony (1893), in which Burleigh detected the influence of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” on the G major flute theme of the first movement.[iii] The symphony’s most famous melody, beginning the Largo, was assigned to a solo English horn – an instrument whose timbre was said to evoke Burleigh’s baritone. (In the same work, and others composed in the United States, Dvorak’s ear favored the combination of oboe and flute to evoke Native American voices.)
A decade after Dvorak’s prophecy, W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), designated the sorrow songs “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.” [iv]No less than Dvorak, Du Bois envisioned a canon of concert works based upon the African-American vernacular. He pinned his hopes on the celebrated Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. And he was not alone.
Dvorak had spawned a New World coterie advocating something of this kind. It included Burleigh (never formally a student of Dvorak’s) and also his former composition students, among whom Rubin Goldmark (1872-1936) became best-known. Goldmark taught Burleigh composition when both were National Conservatory students. Much later, he taught both George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. His own compositions included a once popular Negro Rhapsody(1922)..Another former Dvorak student, William Arms Fisher, would play an important role in Coleridge-Taylor’s American career. Meanwhile, Burleigh and such leading African-American artists as Paul Laurence Dunbar joined Du Bois in urging Coleridge-Taylor to pursue his interest in the sorrow songs of the American south. [1]
Coleridge-Taylor was more than game. Born in 1875 in London to an unwed African father and British mother, he proved a musical prodigy. He entered the Royal Conservatory of Music at the age of fifteen. He was taught composition by Charles Villiers Stanford – a British Victorian composer exceeded in prestige only by Edward Elgar, who also lent support. His oratorio Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), setting Longfellow, swiftly proved a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1900 he was the youngest delegate at the First Pan-African Conference, organized in London by Du Bois. The same year saw the premiere of Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha Overture, based on the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
Three years later, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was prominently produced in Washington, D.C., by that city’s Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society. Burleigh was one of the soloists. A product of the city’s African-American elite, the Society invited Coleridge-Taylor to conduct his oratorio in D.C. in 1904 and again in 1906, with Burleigh as a fixture. Meanwhile, William Arms Fisher (who years later would transform Dvorak’s Largo into the faux spiritual “Goin’ Home”), working for Oliver Ditson and Company in Boston, commissioned Coleridge-Taylor to compose a set of “Negro Melodies” for solo piano. It may have been Burleigh who suggested that Coleridge-Taylor invite Booker T. Washington (with whom Burleigh was regularly touring) to write a Foreword. And Washington did, closely advised by Burleigh, who counselled him to rebut “the growing tendency to neglect the old plantation songs for more modern kinds of music; forgetting that as folk songs of a people they should never be slighted or forgotten.” They were “rapidly passing away.” Coleridge-Taylor, Burleigh predicted, would develop the old songs “in a musicianly manner.” His arrangements might “popularize the melodies without running any danger of their descending to the level of the so called ‘ragtime’ and more reprehensible ‘coon’ songs.” [v]
Of the twenty-four “Negro Melodies” Coleridge-Taylor chose for his 1905 piano book, his personal favorite was “Deep River.” He discovered it in an 1877 collection published by the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tennessee – historically, the first African-American choral group to popularize the sorrow songs in concert. Notably, the Fisk singers had to overcome their initial reluctance to revisit the songs of enslaved Blacks. But these proved crucial to their success beginning in the early 1870s. It remains a fascination that the Fisk “Deep River” was, however, an obscure spiritual of which only the tune survives. And it proves relatively upbeat and brisk – a rhythmic, march-like “Church Militant” song. [vi]Coleridge-Taylor re-imagined “Deep River” as a song slow and reverent. His seven-minute keyboard adaptation begins with whispered rolled chords (marked “Lento,” “molto cantabile,” and “pianissimo”). There are two secondary themes, the first languid, the second stentorian in double octaves – an opportunity for display. His most memorable inspiration comes at the end (or “coda”), where the main theme is revisited in lapping, recessive waves of song.
Whatever popularity Coleridge-Taylor’s “Deep River” achieved was presumably due to Maude Powell, the most prominent American concert violinist of her time. She transcribed the piece for violin and piano and, in 1911, became the first white artist to record a spiritual. Auditioned today (it’s on youtube), Powell’s “Deep River’’ does and does not evoke the Burleigh “Deep River” Marian Anderson recorded in 1924. Certainly the song is recognizable – and yet surprisingly mobile and prolix. It also bears the stamp of the composer, and nowhere more than in the coda – a personal creative inspiration. It must be significant that Burleigh waited until 1913 – a year after Coleridge-Taylor died – to ingeniously turn “Deep River” into a choral song so concise and concentrated that it transcends authorship. Burleigh’s achievement – which, juxtaposed with the Fisk and Coleridge-Taylor versions, is as much a “composition” as an “arrangement” — in fact clarifies the shortcomings of Coleridge-Taylor’s Negro Melodies and of such kindred Coleridge-Taylor compositions as Keep Me from Sinkin’ Down for violin and orchestra (1911). The latter is a lovely cameo in the style of Dvorak. But the Coleridge-Taylor metier is ultimately too decorous, too Victorian, too British to do the job at hand. Burleigh must have realized that he could do it better.
The instantaneous popularity of Burleigh’s “Deep River” was much remarked upon. According to the New York Tribune of November 24, 1916, it had been featured “on a majority of programs of song recitalists” in the preceding three weeks. In Boston, it was reportedly the single most popular recital song. Its initial exponents included illustrious Metropolitan Opera artists: Frances Alda, Alma Gluck, Louise Homer, Marcella Sembrich – and also, somewhat later, the young Roland Hayes, soon to become the first internationally celebrated African-American vocal recitalist.
Of the five “Deep River” versions Burleigh composed, the one for unaccompanied male chorus tells us something startling. It begins by citing the chordal introduction to Dvorak’s Largo – a tune, inspired by the sorrow songs, that Dvorak initially shared with his students “with great passion and fervor, his eyes bulging out; his blood purple red in the neck veins . . . his whole body vibrating.”[vii] The intense spirituality of the New World Symphony Largo, its expansive gravitas, was in Harry Burleigh’s ear.
***
Burleigh’s singing career began while he was still a student at the National Conservatory. By the 1920s, he was known as “the foremost baritone of his race.” The extraordinary impact of his spiritual arrangements began with “Deep River.” At the same moment, his art songs – music distinct from African-American sources – were notably championed by the likes of John McCormack, possibly the most celebrated lyric tenor of the twenties, and Lawrence Tibbett, America’s supreme operatic baritone.[2] Dapper and composed, a model of dignity and self-possession, Burleigh was widely esteemed and admired.
His mediation of worlds Black and white may already be observed in Erie. When Burleigh’s parents arrived there in 1838, Pennsylvania voters had just ratified a new state constitution barring Black citizens from voting. By the time Harry was born twenty-eight years later, Black citizens were laborers, barbers, waiters. The Black ice cream manufacturer John S. Hicks built the city’s first steel-frame brick building. Harry’s father, who died of heart disease in 1873 at the age of thirty-five, was a bank messenger, then a sleeping car conductor. Harry’s mother, a crucial influence on his education, studied Greek, Latin, and French at Avery College in Allegheny (today Pittsburgh’s north side), a co-educational institution chartered for African-Americans. She later taught Sunday school in Erie. Though her students there were white, Black Americans could not yet teach in the city’s public schools – and she became a public school janitor instead.She taught Harry the sorrow songs, as did his blind grandfather, who in 1832 had purchased his freedom for fifty dollars. Burleigh’s biographer Jean Snyder adds: “The middle-class social and cultural values Burleigh’s family shared with many free African Americans did not include the reluctance to sing spirituals that was common at this time among the well-educated children of former slaves.” [viii]
Young Harry participated in impromptu family concerts. And there was the Episcopal Church of St. Paul, a hub for the city’s social and financial elite. Its rector, John Franklin Spaulding, was an activist who welcomed Black members – including the Burleighs. Snyder writes: “Burleigh’s mother and her family did not experience the blatant discrimination in the 1870s and 1880s that black members of St. Paul’s experienced in the twentieth century (when they worshipped separately for some years).” [ix]In 1885 Harry became one of three African-American members of St. Paul’s new Men and Boys Choir, whose repertoire would include Palestrina, Tallis, Haydn, Beethoven, Weber, and Gabriel Fauré. He also began singing at the Park Presbyterian Church, the First Presbyterian Church, and the Reform Jewish Temple. His musical education was supplemented by touring artists for whom Erie was a logical stop between Buffalo and Cleveland. Burleigh later testified that when Rafael Joseffy, one of New York’s pre-eminent pianists, performed at the home of the bank director Robert W. Russell, he stood in the snow outside a drawing room window to watch and listen. His mother served as a maid at this event. Mrs. Russell agreed to engage Harry as a doorman for her next musicale, featuring the prodigious Venezuelan virtuoso Teresa Carreño.
Another vignette: on September 30, 1889, Harry hid in the balcony of the Park Opera House (whose audiences were not integrated) to hear the Metropolitan Opera tenor Italo Campanini. And yet he was by then a well-known local performer, studying arias and Lieder with an Erie church musician, giving dozens of solo performances enthusiastically reviewed in Erie and its environs. The swaggering Toreador Song from Bizet’s Carmen became a Burleigh staple. He also toured for eight months with the New Orleans University Jubilee Singers. This crescendo of activity in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State peaked in January 1892, when he returned from New York City with a four-year full scholarship at the National Conservatory of Music. A subscription fund was created to help with his forthcoming expenses. The pledged donations, from citizens Black and white, totaled $460.50 – a substantial sum. The subscription list read in part:
We, the undersigned, hereby subscribe and pay the amounts set opposite our names respectively, towards a fund now being raised for Mr. HARRY T. BURLEIGH of this city, as a testimonial of appreciation from his friends and acquaintances for the many favors gratuitously conferred by him in singing at funerals, entertainments, and concerts, etc. etc., and for the benefit of churches, societies and other associations in the city.
While Harry could get a living as a book-keeper, stenographer and typewriter no one will question his commendable ambition to continue the study of music and under the best masters to train a voice so seldom equaled in this country.[x]
* * *
When Harry Burleigh arrived in New York, the city’s three most prominent classical-music institutions were segregated: no Black singers or instrumentalists performed with the Metropolitan Opera, New York Symphony, or New York Philharmonic.[3] Race relations were sufficiently volatile that in 1900 a “race riot” erupted in the Tenderloin District when a policeman in civilian clothes grabbed a Black woman and was fatally stabbed by her lover. For two days white mobs indiscriminately attacked Blacks and burned their homes – an event that may have prompted Burleigh his wife to move from West Thirty-third Street to Park Avenue.[xi]
Nonetheless, for Burleigh New York proved a city of opportunity. And the opportunities did not merely arise in spite of his skin color; often, they materialized because he was self-evidently a Black American unusual in talent and character.
In 1894, still a student at the National Conservatory, he obtained his first sustained employment when he was named the baritone soloist – one of two choir soloists, the other being a boy soprano — at St. George’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Its chief warden was J. P. Morgan. Its rector was the Reverend William S. Rainsford, whose friends included Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis, and whose agenda included abolishing paid pews for the rich. Sixty singers auditioned for the baritone position. Aware of Burleigh’s candidacy, Rainsford decided they would sing behind a screen. When Burleigh won, Morgan played a key role in over-ruling committee members who wished to rescind the decision. Burleigh’s prominence abetted Rainsford’s priorities. As of 1899 – sixteen years into his tenure – the number of communicants had increased twentyfold, including thousands of tenement or boarding-house dwellers. In 1924, in celebration of Burleigh’s thirtieth anniversary at St. George’s, an annual Vesper Service of Negro Spirituals was initiated. Burleigh remained St. George’s baritone soloist for half a century. And he sang at Morgan’s mansion every Christmas, and at Morgan’s funeral in 1913. [xii]
Burleigh also enjoyed a salaried choral position at the nation’s wealthiest synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, beginning in 1900, and beginning in 1913 worked as an editor at the New York office of G. Ricordi and Company – which assured him ready access to publication. But the institution for which Burleigh seemed precisely intended was Jeannette Thurber’s National Conservatory. She was an educational visionary, a graduate of the Paris Conservatory, whose crowning aspiration was to foster a distinctively American school of musical composition. It was she who lured Dvorak to New York. She understood that as a cultural nationalist he would lend more than prestige to her efforts to keep gifted young American musicians in America; studying abroad, mainly in Germany, they typically adopted foreign accents.
Thurber’s school was unusual in many respects. The faculty was distinguished. The curriculum was rigorous. The Artists Course, to which Burleigh was admitted, required classes in “Singing, Solfeggio, Deportment, Opera Repertory, Fencing, Italian, Elocution, and the History of Music and Chorus.” His music history teacher, the critic Henry T. Finck, considered Burleigh his best student (a trained stenographer, he recorded Finck’s lectures verbatim). Burleigh also played timpani and double bass in the conservatory orchestra, and served as its librarian. Nothing more distinguished the school than Thurber’s eagerness to enroll African-Americans – and also women and the handicapped. In 1893, she added a department “for the instruction in music of colored pupils of merit” with free tuition for “students of exceptional talent.” The conservatory soon acquired 150 Black students (out of a student body totaling 750) – and Burleigh was one of their teachers.[xiii]
It bears stressing that Thurber’s philanthropy was equally a practical pedagogical strategy. She was hardly alone – nor was Dvorak — in sensing that the future music of America would mine the Black vernacular. Her New York City was not merely a world music capital, with an unsurpassed opera company and a singular pool of gifted orchestral musicians. In retrospect, it embodied American classical music in its most dynamic phase: an apex, vibrant with achievement and aspiration. Never again would classical music so pervade American intellectual and cultural discourse. Never again would the composer – not the celebrity conductor or instrumentalist – seem so crucial to future achievement. It was taken for granted that American orchestras and opera companies would ultimately promulgate an American canon embedded with native sources. (Instead, they would remain stubbornly Eurocentric.) [xiv]And a substantial body of opinion insisted that the most important such sources happened to be Black.
The key figure in this argument was the dean of New York’s music critics: Henry Edward Krehbiel. A prodigious autodidact, the son of German immigrants, he helped launch a cultural avalanche that swept the nation (and, as I will have occasion to observe, greatly influenced Harry Burleigh): Wagnerism. He bonded with New York’s pre-eminent classical musician: the conductor Anton Seidl, once Wagner’s surrogate son. Seidl commanded six historic German seasons at the Metropolitan Opera (1885-1891) – a period of class warfare between Wagnerites and WASP boxholders who paid the bills. When the boxholders evicted Seidl in favor of more glamourous French and Italian fare, Krehbiel declared the company artistically bankrupt. Fortuitously, it was at this moment that Dvorak appeared on the scene. His impact was more than musical; Victor Herbert (in these years a Seidl protégé, and already a prominent composer) would recall: “We all loved him, for he was so kind and affable – his great big beautiful eyes radiated warmth – and of such childlike simplicity and naturalness.” [xv]Dvorak and Seidl met daily at Fleischman’s café. And Krehbiel, an indefatigable worker, now undertook a fresh critical vocation in what would later be called ethnomusicology.
The 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago famously and influentially presented an exotic inventory of non-Western peoples and cultures. Juxtaposing an ostrich farm and animal show with living exhibits of Javanese, Samoans, and other such species along its mile-long Midway Plaisance, it was widely interpreted to argue a hierarchy of race. Like Dvorak and Burleigh and some 27 million other visitors, Krehbiel was there. But only Krehbiel, of the Midway’s countless chroniclers, found the Dahomian Village a musical epiphany. For him, its scantily clad Africans with swords and spears, dancing to drums and bells, disclosed “the most remarkable rhythmical sense and skill that ever came under my notice.” He equally admired the songs of the Kwakiutl Indians.
Dvorak’s New World Symphony was premiered in New York by Seidl the same year. Proudly introducing this work to his readers, Krehbiel wrote: “That which is most characteristic, most beautiful and most vital in our folk-song has come from the negro slaves of the South.” In a lecture the same week, he amplified this view. The truest folk music derived from “a genuine naïve disposition” and “expressed the sorrow of a people.” In the United States, these conditions were best met by the Negro. Reviewing Dvorak’s symphony itself, Krehbiel insisted that the folk music of Black Americans, which “touches the American heart,” was a crucial influence. And to Dvorak Krehbiel wrote: “I have had no greater happiness from 20 years of labor on behalf of good music than has come to me from the consciousness that I may have been to some degree instrumental in helping the public to appreciate . . . this beautiful symphony.”
Six years later, in 1899, he began publishing meaty New York Tribune articles, replete with musical examples and bibliographies, on the music of Hebrews, Orientals, Russians, Scandinavians, Magyars, African-Americans, and American Indians. In 1914 he produced his 155-page Afro-American Folk-Songs: A Study in Racial and National Music – the first such volume to scrutinize the specifically musical content of the sorrow songs. While Krehbiel’s writings on race are not (and could not have been) wholly immune to the contemporaneous cult of the primitive, he otherwise confounds conventional wisdom about the late Gilded Age. Racial ranking did not interest him. An egalitarian spirit buoyed and unified his inquiries. [xvi]
Because Krehbiel was a ubiquitous presence in New York’s cultural life, it is unsurprising to discover that he relied on Harry Burleigh for sixteen of the arrangements in his 1914 study, or that he regularly reviewed Burleigh’s compositions, or that he supplied the Prefatory Note for one of Burleigh’s highest creative achievements: the Songs of Laurence Hope. When Krehbiel died in 1923, Burleigh delivered a substantial eulogy at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. [xvii]
A complete picture of musical New York, ca. 1900, would equally disclose – again, contradicting stereotypes of Gilded Age snobbery — a prevalent democratic ethos concomitant with the quest for distinctive musical identity. Among Krehbiel’s colleagues (including a high percentage of Jews), James Gibbons Huneker was a self-described philo-Semite. W. J. Henderson, reviewing the New World Symphony for the Times, declaimed: “In spite of all assertions to the contrary, the plantation songs of the American negro possess a striking individuality. . . . That folk-music struck an answering note in the American heart. . . . If those song are not national, then there is no such thing as national music.”[xviii] Anton Seidl was known to his friends as an “Americamaniac.” He took American citizenship, summered in the Catskills, espoused Wagner in English, and applauded the efforts of the Seidl Society to welcome audiences from all classes with fifteen cent tickets. Laura Langford, who founded and ran the Seidl Society, was Brooklyn’s leading impresario. The guests at her Seidl Society concerts, given fourteen times weekly at Brighton Beach on Coney Island, included working women and Black orphans from the Howard School (subsequently directed by Burleigh’s second cousin, the Reverend W. F. Johnson). [xix]
A glance north at the city of Boston seals these startling New York impressions. In Brahmin New England circles, an “American” was a descendant of the Mayflower, not – as in New York – a more recent immigrant from other lands. Dvorak’s advocacy of “negro melodies” to Bostonians seemed naïve or obnoxious. Reviews of Dvorak’s music invoked “scientific” theories of racial hierarchy which classified him as a “Slav” – a rung below the Anglo-Saxons.
Boston’s leading music critic, Philip Hale (who traced his family lineage to seventeenth century Massachusetts) denounced Dvorak as a “negrophile.” Krehbiel, in return, rebuked “ungenerous and illiberal attitudes toward a body of American citizens.” [xx]
A final vignette: On January 23, 1894, Dvorak conducted a concert at New York’s elegant gold and white, 1,500-seat Madison Square Garden Concert Hall. It was sponsored by the National Conservatory for the purpose of supporting a New York Herald clothing drive responding to lingering hardships inflicted by the Panic of 1893. It equally served to publicize and promote what the Conservatory was about. The conservatory orchestra was inter-racial. The participating chorus was wholly Black. The repertoire included a set of American Plantation Dances composed and conducted by Dvorak’s African-American pupil Maurice Arnold, whom he held in high regard. The concert closed with the premiere performance of Dvorak’s new arrangement for Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” for soloists, orchestra, and chorus, the soloists being Harry Burleigh and – the most prominent African-American concert vocalist of her time – Sissieretta Jones. Jones also sang the “Inflammatus” from Rossini’s Stabat Mater. The messages once conveyed by Foster’s songs is a topic unto itself; of “Old Folks at Home,” Jones said, “Is there a soul so insensible that it cannot be stirred to the very depths by the heartbroken cry of the poor old homesick darkey?” [xxi]In short: an event unthinkable in Boston.
Burleigh’s New York of the 1890s serves to remind us that history does not move in straight lines. Beginning in 1905, a vigilante Committee of Fourteen cleaned up the many Manhattan venues where inter-racial dancing was a commonplace diversion.[xxii] Eleven years later, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race made racism and eugenics scientifically respectable for mainstream Americans in all parts of the country. In 1897, the Metropolitan Opera House had hosted a gala fund-raiser “for New York’s poor” featuring Metropolitan Opera soloists in excerpts from Rigoletto and Aida alongside the Black vaudeville stars Bert Williams and George Walker. In 1938, the company’s director, Edward Johnson, declined to mount Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (with a necessarily Black cast), spuriously claiming that it was too “intimate” for a large auditorium.[xxiii] Johnson (who was Canadian) also spurned engaging such outstanding Black singers as Lillian Evanti, who successfully appeared at major European houses beginning in 1925. Only in 1955 did a Jewish immigrant from Austria, Rudolf Bing, defy members of the Met board and break the company’s color bar, engaging the 57-year-old Marian Anderson some two decades years after the triumphant Town Hall performance that had stirred Harry Burleigh to heights of incredulous delight.
***
Burleigh’s extant creative output includes more than two hundred compositions. With the exception of a piano suite and a suite for piano, these are vocal works in two categories: spiritual arrangements for solo voice and piano, or for unaccompanied chorus; and art songs for voice and piano. He did not compose for orchestra.
Burleigh was already arranging spirituals during his student years at the National Conservatory. He began to sing his own spiritual arrangements in public in 1900, touring with Booker T. Washington to raise funds for the Tuskegee Institute. The instantaneous popularity of his solo voice versions of “Deep River” (1916-1917) marked a turning point.[4]Previously, few white vocalists had sung spirituals. Black vocalists gradually began to do so as well. Roland Hayes programed Burleigh’s spirituals as early as 1917. By 1925 Hayes was writing popular spiritual arrangements of his own, as were Lawrence Brown and J. Rosamond Johnson. White composers of spirituals most notably included William Arms Fisher, whom we have already encountered as the commissioning publisher of Coleridge-Taylor’s Negro Melodies and the creator, in 1922, of “Goin’ Home.”
The apparent transparency of Burleigh’s spiritual arrangements is both crucial and misleading As a frequent performer of these songs, I marvel at their subtleties. In “Steal Away,” chromatic progressions are deployed to create a sensation of inwardness. It is in fact Wagner’s Innerlichkeit transplanted to the cottonfield. And yet by maintaining thin textures and restrained harmonic rhythms, Burleigh achieves profundity without turning “Wagnerian.” In “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the keyboard accompaniment is shrewdly gauged to build momentum and weight via intensified harmonies applied to a simple but insistent counter-melody. The trajectory of this three-minute song becomes epic.
The degree to which the authorship of such arrangements remains “hidden” is clarified in juxtaposition with Burleigh’s art songs. Typically, these are not obviously “Black.” His first success, “Jean” (1903), is a parlor morsel. But by the time Burleigh hit stride as an arranger of spirituals, he was composing concert songs clearly intended to stand alongside German-language Lieder – repertoire he knew both as a singer and a student of composition. A peak achievement is the Songs of Laurence Hope (1915), in which Burleigh’s composer’s voice is wholly unconcealed. “Laurence Hope” was a pseudonym for Adele Florence Nicolson Corey, whose “exotic Orientalist” love lyrics enjoyed an early twentieth century vogue. The fifth and last of the poems Burleigh set – “Till I Wake” (“from ‘India’s Love Lyrics’”) – reads:
When I am dying, lean over me tenderly, softly
Stoop, as the yellow roses droop in the wind from the South
So I may, when I wake, if there be an awakening,
Keep, what lulled me to sleep, the touch of your lips on my mouth.
From these four unexceptional lines Burleigh fashioned a four-minute song that, when premiered by John McCormack to a packed house at Carnegie Hall, had to be sung a second time. [xxiv]Unquestionably, it proved a bewitching vehicle for McCormack’s sweet tenor. “Till I Wake” shares with the idiom of Burleigh’s spirituals a concentrated structure. The piano part, as in the spirituals, is animated by a streak of independence – which here, however, empowers an impassioned and sonorous keyboard climax. The density of texture and eventful harmonic play are traits that set this song apart from the spiritual settings. And, not so incidentally, it discloses an easy melodic gift.
An interesting question is whether “Till I Wake” sounds at all “Black.” The baritone Sidney Outlaw, a supreme present-day exponent of The Songs of Laurence Hope, hears an African-American inflection. In any event, what anchors this setting is what anchors Burleigh’s “Deep River” or “Steal Away”: an act of faith. Of the spirituals he set, Burleigh wrote: “the cadences of sorrow invariably turn to joy, and the message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man – every man – will be free.”[xxv] And so it is that Burleigh’s “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” quite surprisingly ends in the major. In “Till I Wake,” the quiet turn to the major in the closing eight measures is inevitable, a divine shaft clinching a phased transition from darkness to light. The poem asks: “if there be an awakening.” The song answers with a stirring affirmation of a love inextinguishable.
Two Burleigh art songs explicitly Black in subject matter are among his most distinctive. “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (1915), setting Walt Whitman, is a seven-minute narrative remembering enslavement. “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One,” setting a Langston Hughes poem, may be (as I will suggest below) Burleigh’s valedictory. Composed in 1935, it is also his final concert song. His final publication, five years later, was the choral hymn “In Christ There Is No East or West.” If the first of his choral compositions, “Deep River” (1916), was a signature achievement, “In Christ There Is No East or West,” suggests Jean Snyder, was a “last will and testament of faith.” [xxvi]
***
Burleigh’s concerts were highly varied in format and repertoire. Like such earlier Black concert vocalists as Sissieretta Jones, he might appear alongside instrumentalists and other singers in a mixed bill. From 1900 to 1915 he gave lecture-recitals to raise money for Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. His solo recitals included German lieder, French and Italian opera arias, American art songs, spirituals (which he would himself accompany at the piano), and such Black musical theater songs as “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd?” by Will Marion Cook. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor called Burleigh “my true friend and greatest singer of my songs.”[xxvii] Regrettably, Burleigh left only one commercial recording: “Go Down Moses,” in 1919 when he was already fifty-three years old — a strikingly formal reading, with rolled r’s. It is not unlikely that the recording studio made him self-conscious.
Both as a composer and performer, Burleigh’s career describes an arc peaking well before 1930. He does not smoothly fit into the world of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro. Alain Locke worried about “a dangerous tendency toward sophisticated over-elaboration” in the creation of concert spirituals, and criticized the “somewhat hybrid treatment” of the sorrow songs by Burleigh and others in “the older school of musicians.” Langston Hughes keyed on the dialect and structure of the blues. He heard in jazz “the eternal tom-tom beating of the Negro soul.” He deplored an “urge toward whiteness” in the uses of Black music. Zora Neale Hurston chastised a “flight from Blackness.” She heard concert spirituals “squeezing all of the rich Black juice out of the songs.” Harlem’s loudest white cheerleader, Carl Van Vechten, was especially intolerant of musical refinements – igniting a furious rebuttal from W. E. B. De Bois, who discerned a decadent voyeur in love with Black exoticism.[xxviii] Burleigh’s response was more modulated. He travelled to rural Georgia (but not to Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, where racial prejudice was even more virulent) to transcribe spirituals sung by former slaves; but the resulting publication was little noticed. And he pushed back against a perceived dilution of artistic standards. He was increasingly positioned – by himself and others — as an outlier.
Crucially, Burleigh vehemently objected to jazz. For him, art embodied uplift. To singers of his spirituals, he cautioned: “It is a serious misconception of their meaning and value to treat them as ‘minstrel’ songs, or to try to make them funny by a too literal attempt to imitate the manner of the negro in singing them, by swaying the body [or] clapping the hands.” [xxix]Unlike Henry Krehbiel, Paul Laurence Dunbar, or Roland Hayes, Burleigh would not discern in the slave songs of the American South a kinship to African song and dance. If spirituals were “at all African,” he wrote, they “resemble more the exalted beauty of the songs of the Israelites than the barbaric yells and rhythms of the Negroes of Africa.” But Burleigh was at one with Krehbiel in finding ragtime “the old plantation melody caricatured and debased” Concomitantly, he was uncomfortable with pugnacious assertions of racial pride. Burdened by a failed marriage and a troubled son, he receded from prominence. “He was a very private person,” one acquaintance testified. “He bottled up his personal life.” The net outcome was a stereotype fortified by prior alliances with J. P. Morgan and Booker T. Washington. He seemed to some hopelessly old-fashioned. [xxx]
Jean Snyder, in her Burleigh biography, resourcefully challenges this view. She stresses that Burleigh’s milieu, beginning in Erie, was Black as well as white. He was member of New York’s Black church community and of its elite Black social clubs. Nothing more challenges the imagery of Burleigh as a stuffed shirt than his personal ties to Bert Williams, Bob Cole, and other Black theater stars with whom he played a poker game called “smut”; the loser of each hand would have to smear soot on his face. For St. George’s church, he produced a series of Blackface minstrel shows for the Men’s Club. He also pitched in as conductor of Bert Williams and George Walker’s Senegambian Carnival — and, a reviewer opined, “led the rag-time music with great success.” Of Burleigh’s politics, Snyder writes that though he was “mainly apolitical,” his “later public statements suggest that in time he consciously chose a different means of bringing social change than participating in civil rights demonstrations. . . . Those who thought he ‘wanted to disclaim his heritage’ were very much mistaken, but that sentiment seems to have emerged in the late Harlem Renaissance.” And Snyder adds that “he consistently refused to participate in movements he considered separatist or chauvinistic.” Burleigh himself believed that artists, not politicians, would most effect progressive change. “They are the true physicians who heal with meld the ills of mankind. . . . They are the trailblazers. They find new worlds.” A pertinent 1950 encomium by the composer William Grant Still reads: “Dr. Burleigh was a generous man as concerned other aspiring musicians, even other composers. Not everyone, for he was impatient with mediocrity. . . . We need more like him today – not to encourage tawdry work just because it is by one of our own group, but to hold standards high, so that all will aim for the best and bring honor to the group.” [xxxi]
It bears stressing, finally, that the imagery of two camps – of the accommodationist legacy of Booker T. Washington versus the activism of W. E. B. Du Bois — is easily overdrawn. Burleigh many times collaborated with Du Bois and Langston Hughes (who embraced Burleigh’s setting of his “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One”). He maintained a long friendship with Alain Locke. Burleigh’s most telling alliance, in this regard, was with the composer most his antipode: his lifelong friend Will Marion Cook, who pioneered Black Broadway – and who wrote: “I know of no Negro . . during the last 50 years so respected, so loved – and who has done so much to lift his and my God forsaken Race out of the mire as has this grand old man – Harry T. Burleigh.” [xxxii]
***
In 1993, as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, I curated a centenary celebration of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As part of that exercise, the tenor Thomas Young, an extraordinary Black artist, sang a Burleigh set. We next heard from a leading Black music historian, extolling Will Marion Cook – and using Cook as a club to beat down Burleigh as an Uncle Tom. In response, Thomas Young delivered one of the most stirring extemporaneous speeches I have ever heard. Its keynote was: it is not for us to judge Harry Burleigh. He was a man of his time. Burleigh was also, paradoxically, a harbinger, even a prophet – of twin Black classical music lineages.
Carl Van Vechten acknowledged Burleigh’s “indefatigable efforts” to bring spirituals into the concert hall, but in 1925 wrote: “I cannot look upon all of Mr. Burleigh’s arrangements with favor, principally because they have been instrumental in bringing these songs to the attention of white singers and I do not rethink white singers can sing spirituals. . . . Women, with few exceptions, should not attempt to sing them at all.[5] Van Vechten favored Paul Robeson. Though Robeson coached with Burleigh, and sometimes sang Burleigh’s arrangements, his renditions of spirituals were closer to the oral tradition he knew. And Burleigh’s urgings that Robeson sing Lieder proved impractical. As Robeson himself said, the classical concert repertoire did not suit his “culture, voice, or musical preferences.” [xxxiii]
And so in the lineage of African-American concert singers, Robeson is a magnificent outlier – with Burleigh the progenitor. A typical Robeson recital might include sorrow songs and other folk songs of many lands, work songs, and musical theater songs. He might do a sung monologue (in Russian) from Boris Godunov or – being a prominent actor – a reading from Othello. If his binding faith was political, Burleigh’s was religious – and so it was with Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson, who followed in Burleigh’s wake one generation later. The Burleigh recital template, with its mixture of art songs and spirituals, would be theirs as well. A deeper affinity, of personality and purpose, of dignity and self-possession, was grounded in the Black church.
Hayes (1887-1987) came to spirituals through a rural Georgia church – Curryville’s Mt. Zion Baptist – founded by his mother. Galvanized by the recordings of Enrico Caruso, he early aspired to become a concert tenor. In 1914, at the age of twenty-seven, he was invited to sing duets with Burleigh on tour with Booker T. Washington. They subsequently appeared together as soloists in Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Philadelphia and in Boston (where the participating contralto was the high school sophomore Marian Anderson). Behind the scenes, Burleigh served as an advisor and advocate. Beginning in the 1920s, Hayes was internationally celebrated. In 1923, he became the first African-American soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, singing a Mozart aria, an excerpt from Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ, and two spirituals.[6] His slender tenor was unsuited to opera, at least in big American opera houses where Black singers were in any case unwelcome. His annual earnings were said to exceed $100,000.
It was Marian Anderson (1897-1993) who finally broke the color bar at the Metropolitan Opera – in 1955, when she was past her vocal prime. Like Hayes, unlike Burleigh, she extensively trained abroad and was widely known in Europe. Hayes was her most important early mentor. Burleigh, who knew her mother and sister, was at all times a close friend and advisor. When the Black soprano Caterina Jarboro sang Aida at New York’s Hippodrome in 1933, Burleigh urged Anderson to explore operatic roles. She apparently did not – and her Met debut twenty-two years later was wholly initiated by others. But when Sol Hurok planned a pivotal American tour for Anderson in 1935-36, Burleigh’s counsel was decisive. Hurok wanted her to use her superb European accompanist, the Finnish piano Kosti Vehanen. Anderson was pressured to instead engage her usual American accompanist – William (Billy) King, who was Black. There was “no-one whose opinion I value as yours,” she wrote to Burleigh. Burleigh replied: “I never felt that King was a good accompanist. He lacked poetry and imagination and technique too; and now, since you have such an extended repertoire he would be quite impossible.” [xxxiv]Vehanen toured the US with Anderson. Burleigh and Anderson memorably appeared together in 1939 when Eleanor Roosevelt awarded her the NAACP’s Spingarn medal (of which Burleigh and Hayes were previous recipients); at Anderson’s request, Burleigh led the audience in singing “We are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”
If Burleigh’s role in the annals of African-American vocal recitalists is self-evident and secure, his pivotal place in a second musical lineage is hidden. When Dvorak and Du Bois prophesied a Black classical music to come, they doubtless envisioned a full range of genres infused with the African-American vernacular, including symphony, opera, and oratorio. As we have seen, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor once seemed the Great Black Hope – and yet was not. Coming after him were interwar Black composers working in the larger forms, of whom the most prominent were Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), Florence Price (1887-1953),William Grant Still (1895-1978), and William Levi Dawson (1899-1990). Though Still became widely known as the “dean” of Black composers, none of this music was much noticed or performed. Only now has a sudden revival of Black classical music freshly focused on Price in particular. Awaiting adequate recognition are a pair of works that may well represent the peak interwar achievements in Black symphonic music: Dett’s oratorio The Ordering of Moses (1932) and Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (also 1932) – in both of which Black vernacular roots fuse magnificently with European templates.
The neglect of interwar Black classical music is attributable to two factors – one obvious, one not. The obvious impediment was racial bias. American orchestras and opera companies were segregated. Black opera companies singing Italian, Black orchestras playing Beethoven were New World curiosities. After World War II, the first internationally prominent African-American symphonic conductor, Dean Dixon, left the US to pursue a distinguished career abroad. The first internationally prominent African-American instrumental soloist, the pianist Andre Watts, was introduced to a national television audience much later: in 1963. Meanwhile, a seventy-one-year history of segregated musicians’ unions within the American Federation of Musicians lasted until 1974. As pertinent, but less immediately apparent, was an aesthetic bias: modernism. America’s modernist composers rejected the roots-in-the-soil Romantic nationalism of Dvorak and his American progeny. Nathaniel Dett came to classical music partly via Dvorak’s American String Quartet, in which he heard “the frail voice of my long departed grandmother calling across the years.” William Levi Dawson acknowledged Dvorak’s New World Symphony as a lodestar. But the leading interwar American composers lionized Igor Stravinsky. They had no use for Dvorak (Virgil Thomson called the New World Symphony “hackneyed”). They kept the vernacular at arm’s length, or fractured folk sources to render them “composed.” [7]
The fate of Harry Burleigh’s art songs here becomes a case in point. Because he began composing earlier than Dett or Dawson, because his compositions achieved genuine popularity before 1920, their subsequent neglect confirms an insuperable aesthetic barrier. Burleigh was not the first widely appreciated Black classical composer – that would be Scott Joplin, whose piano rags (composed, not improvised) caught fire in the 1890s. But Joplin’s dance idiom (notwithstanding affinities to Schubert) would lead in the direction of Cook and jazz. And so it was that Burleigh’s successful art songs and spirituals made him the grand old man in a Black concert lineage that afterward moved underground. And if his own music eventually suffered neglect, it was not because of new racial impediments. Rather, his Romantic idiom quite suddenly proved irremediably anachronistic.
What clinches this perspective is “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One,” Burleigh’s 1935 setting of a Langston Hughes poem. It may be his supreme compositional achievement. It also happens to be his final concert song. If Burleigh quit at the peak of his creative powers, his truncated odyssey bears comparison to other, more famous victims of modernism: Charles Ives, Edward Elgar, Manuel de Falla, and Jean Sibelius, all of whom stopped composing when they discovered themselves aesthetically marginalized after World War I.[8]
Re-encountered today, “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One” seems a valedictory. Only two minutes long, it is — even for Burleigh – a superb exercise in concentration: of mood and expression, of melody, of mobile harmonic activity. It achieves a compositional voice as personal as the spiritual arrangements are elemental. The piano part, virtually symphonic, is co-equal with the voice, with which it eloquently interacts.[9] The mediation between Black (bluesy harmonies) and white celebrates the duality of Burleigh the man and artist. (Nowhere is Burleigh closer to Wagner; he virtually quotes the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde — an opera he attended sixty-six times at the Met[xxxv], doubtless encountering such supreme Wagner interpreters as the singers Olive Fremstad, Kirsten Flagstad, Jean de Reszke, and Lauritz Melchior, and the conductors Anton Seidl, Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, and Artur Bodanzky.) [10]But the most distinguishing feature of this exceptional song is that Burleigh has re-interpreted Hughes’ poem, which reads:
Lovely, dark, and lonely one,
Bare your bosom to the sun.
Do not be afraid of light,
You who are a child of night.
Open wide your arms to life,
Whirl in the wind of pain and strife,
Face the wall with the dark closed gate,
Beat with bare, brown fists–
And wait.
Processing this expression of impatience, Burleigh turns the poem upside down. “Child of night” becomes “child of light.” “Bare brown fists” turn into “tireless hands.” Crucially, he first scores the closing word, “wait,” as a fortissimo exclamation crowning the vocal line – and then twice reconsiders it, softening and caressing it so that the meaning turns serene: an expression of forbearance and faith. He then reprises the poem’s first two lines, so that the final pianissimo ascent to the tonic consecrates youth and sunlight. In this 12-bar sequence, it is the intervening piano that becalms the singer, claiming a lasting philosophic repose. Not for Burleigh is the agitation of a Du Bois, Hughes, Cook, or Robeson. Estrangement from the present moment is superseded by values more eternal. Nor is there the merest hint of modernist dissonance. We do not have to agree with him in order to admire the eloquence with which Burleigh here sustains his credo that “deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come and man – every man – will be free.”
It remains to be observed that Burleigh intended “Lovely, Dark and Lonely One” for Marian Anderson, that Anderson was likewise anchored by faith in a better future, and that she nonetheless chose not to sing it. It is in fact a song personal to Harry Burleigh, a testimonial as unfashionable politically as musically.
***
When Burleigh wrote in 1917 that “the voice is not nearly so important as the spirit” in performing his spiritual arrangements[xxxvi], he was in fact at the height of his vocal powers. When he retired as soloist at St. George’s Church in 1946, age eighty, his effectiveness in concert had reportedly much diminished.
George Shirley, still singing at the age of [ninety], is the contemporary artist who most proves Burleigh’s claim. In 1961, Shirley became the first Black tenor to sing leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera. He subsequently pursued a notable international career. Today, he continues to sing in concert – and it is my privilege to sometimes accompany him. The Shirley tenor remains strong and true. If its firmness and luster are compromised, in their place is a different kind of steadiness: to stand still and peer deep. Shirley says of Marian Anderson: “She was attuned in such a manner that the spirit sang through her.” And so it does when George Shirley sings Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River.”
Of his path to the Met, Shirley says: “I never intended to be an opera singer. I was following a script written by the intelligence that created me. When doors were opened, they were opened by people on the inside.” When Shirley became the first Black member of the United States Army Chorus, its director, Samuel Loboda, took an exceptional initiative: he phoned the Pentagon while Shirley waited outside his office. When Shirley sang Romantic leads opposite the Met’s glamorous white sopranos, he accepted an invitation proferred by the company’s general manager, Rudolf Bing, who ignored resistance among his affluent board members. “I didn’t plan that,” Shirley says. “I had chosen to become a public school music teacher in Detroit. It was all in place.”
George Shirley was more than a passive instrument of change. When the Met visited Atlanta, he decided to have his hair cut and happened to choose a barber shop that had never before served Black customers – of which he became the first. When a leading New York music critic, Irving Kolodin, wrote that he “did not look like a French nobleman” singing the Chevalier Des Grieux in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Shirley wrote Kolodin a letter inquiring what, exactly, a French nobleman looked like.[xxxvii] And, crucially, doorkeepers invited Shirley inside in response to his evident gifts and character. I have no doubt that the same was true of Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson – and of Harry Burleigh.
Burleigh’s spirit lives. The present article draws extensively from Jean Snyder’s invaluable biography Harry T.Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance (2016), from my many explorations of Burleigh’s New York, and from my personal experience as a vocal accompanist and concert producer. I have gratefully collaborated on the music of Burleigh for more than two decades with Terry Cook, Kevin Deas, Anthony Mills, and George Shirley. The first of many “Dvorak and America” festivals I curated, typically including Burleigh, was a 1994 centenary celebration of the New World Symphony during my tenure as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. I have chronicled the cultural mores of Burleigh’s New York, including Henry Krehbiel’s seminal writings on race and music, in Classical Music in America: A History ofIts Rise and Fall (2005), Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (2022), and, most especially, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle (2012). My young readers book Dvorak and America (2003) is couched as historical
[1] Burleigh met Coleridge-Taylor in London in 1903. Du Bois and Dunbar had earlier met Coleridge-Taylor in the same city. Though we cannot eavesdrop on these conversations, one may reasonably assume that the topic of African-American music was significantly broached. According to Coleridge-Taylor, it was Frederick Loudin of the Fisk Jubilee Singers – a group well-known in England — who first fostered his appreciation of African-American song.
[2] Tibbett specialized in singing in dialect. His signature number was “De Glory Road.” He left unsurpassed recordings of Porgy’s songs from Gershwin’s opera. His triumphs at the Metropolitan Opera included the title role in Louis Grunberg’s The Emperor Jones, adapting Eugene O’Neill’s play about a Black pullman porter who becomes a tyrannical West Indian “emperor.” Burleigh wrote Tibbett an enthusiastic letter of appreciation for his portrayal (in black make-up) of Brutus Jones. Tibbett replied, “I believe that of all the letters of praise I received, yours means most to me. you who stand so high in the esteem of the Colored race, as well as in the esteem of my own race. You saw the inner significance of the work, and that was lacking in most everyone else’s analysis. . . Believe me, your appreciation for the philosophic as well as the dramatic significance of the work itself and my part in it, makes me very happy indeed.” (Jean Snyder, Harry T. Burleigh, pp. 321-322)
[3] In W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a young Black man is evicted from a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at a New York City opera house. No date is suggested. Du Bois was a Wagnerite accustomed to attending opera in Germany. Burleigh readily – and frequently — attended the Metropolitan Opera. An anecdote: he was there in 1899 for an Anton Seidl memorial concert, along with Will Marion Cook and his fifteen-year-old wife, the soprano Abbie Mitchell. Mitchell later recalled: “The thrill of that night has lived with me through the years. Several times during different acts my enthusiasm overwhelmed me – I jumped up – remained standing until either Mr. Cook pulled my hands with the whispered Sit down Abbie or Mr. Burleigh would take my hand and pull me down most quietly. He knew I didn’t know the etiquette of behavior at the opera” (quoted in Jean Snyder, Harry T. Burleigh, p. 164). The repertoire that evening included act one of Lohengrin with Jean de Reszke in the title role. Mitchell wound up studying with de Reszke in Paris. In 1935 she sang Clara as an original cast member of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
[4] Though Burleigh is often called the first composer to arrange spirituals as art songs, Arthur Farwell published solo arrangements of “De rocks a-Renderin’” and “Moanin,” via his Wa-Wan Press in 1905. Around the same time, Farwell became the leading figure in the Indianists movement in American music. His Indianist output included songs for solo voice or a cappella chorus, and a remarkable string quartet: The Hako (1922). Farwell called himself “the first composer to take up Dvorak’s challenge” – referencing Dvorak’s advocacy of Indian music and lore alongside “Negro melodies” as source material for an American school of composition. A considered exploration of Dvorak’s American legacy remains to be written.
[5] Any just consideration of Van Vechten’s views on Black music should also consider his reviews as a classical-music critic (his initial calling), which disclose a blowhard dilettante (my Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, p. 23).
[6] The conductor of those performances, Pierre Monteux, thirty-two years later received an eightieth birthday greeting from Hayes (April 4, 1955) reading in part: “At the risk of painful controversy, you rose superior to prevailing prejudice when you insisted that I, a worthy artist, merited an appearance with the first symphony orchestra of our nation – the difference of race to be no barrier. As a result of your valiant stand I appeared, the first of my race in The United States of America, under your conductorship . . . On that occasion every stroke of your inspired baton resounded a benefit to me and all mankind that encircled the whole world – the overtones of which have echoed sonorously from that time until this day.” Hayes’ six subsequent performances with the Boston Symphony (1925 to 1944) were conducted by Serge Koussevitzky; the repertoire included Lenski’s aria from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. (My thanks to Boston Symphony archivist Bridget Carr for alerting me to the letter.)
[7] This is a central thread in my Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (2022), in which, for instance, I write of Aaron Copland (America’s most influential musical modernist and with Virgil Thomson the musician most responsible for framing a modernist standard narrative of American classical music):
Dvorak had famously and influentially extolled “negro melodies” as “pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold merry, gay, or what you will . . . music that suits itself to any mood or any purpose.” How much more circumscribed was Copland’s endorsement of jazz half a century later. It had, he wrote in 1941, “only two expressions: the well-known ‘blues’ mood, and the wild, abandoned, almost hysterical and grotesque mood so dear to the youth of all ages. . . . Any serious composer who attempted to work within those two moods sooner or later became aware of their severe limitations.” (Try applying this reductionist generalization to the compositions of Duke Ellington.) Rhythm, Copland added, was an aspect of jazz that had made a “real contribution” to the composer’s art. And he expressed admiration for jazz experiments in timbre and instrumental virtuosity. At the same time, he was capable of inferring among African-Americans “a conception of rhythm not as mental exercise but as something basic to the body’s rhythmic impulse.” He compared “interest in jazz” with “interest . . . in the primitive arts and crafts of aboriginal peoples.” Listening to jazz as a stunted art music, Copland was more Eurocentric than such Europeans as Stravinsky, Bartok, Weill, Ravel, or Milhaud.
While this kind of racial analysis is merely symptomatic of another time, it remains ponderable that
Copland’s take on Black musical roots, compromising his quest for a usable musical past, is more cartoonish than any I have encountered in Dvorak’s New York. And it is pertinent that Copland the man – unlike Dvorak . . . – did not mingle easily with “common men.” In the thirties, to be sure, he was a fellow traveler on the far left; he acquired a communal ethos that buoys his opera The Tender Land and also Appalachian Spring with its Shaker hymn. He vacationed in Minnesota and addressed Communist farmers at a picnic. His letters reveal the pleasure he took in this new activity – and also the incongruity of it all: “If they were a strange sight to me, I was no less of a one to them. . . . I was being gradually drawn, you see, into the political struggle with the peasantry!” Dvorak swigging his beer with inebriated Iowa farmers; Dvorak absorbing Burleigh’s sorrow songs in his bird-infested Lower East Side apartment, his children underfoot . . . paint a different New World picture.
Copland was no snob. He explored jazz as an eager and appreciative interloper, intent on artfully appropriating ingredients of a neighbor art-form. His youthful enthusiasm for such exercises, manifest in his Music for the Theater (1925) and Piano Concerto (1926), afterward diminished – perhaps under the influence of such friends and colleagues as Roy Harris, who in 1926 counselled: “A word of warning to you – dear brother Aaron—the Jazz idiom is too easily assumed and projected . . . as a serious expression it has nearly burned out already I believe . . . . Don’t disappoint us with jazz.” In fact, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring notwithstanding, Copland remained an outsider to the quotidian; he was no surrogate cowboy or Shaker. (Dvorak’s Prophecy, pp. 103-105)
[8] Though he lived until 1954, Ives virtually stopped composing by 1920. Sibelius’s last major work was Tapiola (1926); he died in 1957. Elgar’s last major work was his Cello Concerto (1919); he died in 1934. Falla’s last major work was his Harpsichord Concerto (1926) he died in 1946. There are numerous examples of lesser composers terminating their output for the same reason: an inability or unwillingness to assimilate the rarified modernism of a Stravinsky or Schoenberg.
[9] “Lovely, Dark and Lonely One” asks for a truly proactive accompanist. The example of Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder is not irrelevant. Wagner and Felix Mottl orchestrated those piano accompaniments – and had Burleigh been an orchestrator (he not not), one can readily imagine him having rendered the orchestral textures and timbres he here held in his ear. An orchestrated accompaniment of “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One” awaits a creative initiative.
[10] The topic of Burleigh and Wagner deserves further exploration. New York City was thick with Wagner and Wagnerism during Burleigh’s formative years at the National Conservatory. His teacher of Music History (a course in which he excelled) was the critic Henry Finck, a passionate Wagnerite who enjoyed a close personal relationship to the high priest of American Wagnerism: Anton Seidl. Dvorak, too, was galvanized by Wagner during his New York years, as evidenced, e.g., by the programmatic content of his New WorldSymphony (much of which was directly inspired by Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha) and his subsequent series of tone poems composed in Prague. The Wagner influence notably stirred prominent African-Americans (see, e.g., Alex Ross’s Wagnerism [2020), pp. 266-276). W. E. B. Du Bois, also a Wagnerite, was (like Theodore Herzl) inspired by Wagner’s marginality and identity quest. Burleigh toured for a time with Du Bois. In Burleigh’s song “Exile” (1905), the citations of Tristan are so explicit that (as with George Chadwick’s once popular Melpomene Overture [1891]) we are intended to hear them – and therefore recognize that the loneliness of the singer is existential. This Burleigh song, in other words, directly connects to the philosophic Wagnerism of Du Bois and the “exile” of Black Americans. The larger topic here, referenced by Ross, is “Afro-Wagnerism.”
[ii] Jean Snyder, Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance (2016), p 171.
[iii] Snyder, p. 110.
[iv] W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Sorrow Songs,” The Souls of Black Folk (1903).
[v] Snyder, p. 124.
[vi] Wayne Shirley, “The Coming of ‘Deep River,’” American Music, Winter (vol. 15, no. 4) 1997.
[vii] Harry Rowe Shelley, “Dvorak as I Knew Him,” Etude, Nov., 1914, p. 699.
[viii] Snyder, p. 42.
[ix] Snyder, p. 25.
[x] Snyder, p. 62.
[xi] Snyder, p. 127.
[xii] Snyder, pp. 214-219.
[xiii] Snyder, ch. 4.
[xiv] Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005).
[xv] Henry T. Fink, My Adventures in the Golden Age of Music (1926), p. 278.
[xvi] For a fuller treatment of Krehbiel and race: Joseph Horowitz, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de–Siecle (2012), ch. 2.
[xvii] Snyder, p. 301.
[xviii] Horowitz, Classical Music in America, p. 6.
[xix] On Seidl, Langford, and Brighton Beach: Horowitz, Classical Music in America; Horowitz, Moral Fire, ch. 3; Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (1994).
[xx] Horowitz, Classical Music in America, pp. 7-10.
[xxi] New York Age, Dec. 24, 1908, p 4 [an article authored by Jones herself]
[xxii] Dale Cockrell, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (2019).
[xxiii] Metropolitan Opera Archives. (Johnson letter to Edward B. Benjamin, Feb. 12, 1938).
[xxiv] Snyder, p. 28.
[xxv] From Burleigh’s preface to singers of his spirituals.
[xxvi] Snyder, p. 297.
[xxvii] Snyder, p. 154.
[xxviii] Joseph Horowitz, Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (2022), pp. 22-23.
[xxix] From Burleigh’s preface to singers of his spirituals.
[xxx] Snyder, pp. 317, 323, 238.
[xxxi] Snyder, pp. 188, 119, 183, 340, 348, 183.
[xxxii] Snyder, p. 352.
[xxxiii] Snyder, p. 176.
[xxxiv] Snyder, pp. 170-171.
[xxxv] Rob Key Simpson, Hard Trials: The Life and Music of Harry Burleigh (1990), p. 40.
[xxxvi] From Burleigh’s preface to singers of his spirituals.
[xxxvii] George Shirley in conversation with the author, 2022. Most of these anecdotes and observations may be found in the author’s January 16, 2023, NPR documentary “George Shirley: A Life in Music’’ – https://the1a.org/segments/george-shirley-a-life-in-music/
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