When you’re young, or not so young, and strongly drawn to a genre of music, a certain composer, a particular piece, it’s often hard to explain why, even to yourself. This may be especially true of music unfamiliar to you. Music works powerfully on a subliminal level. Sometimes we prefer to keep it that way and not try to account for how it speaks to us.Article continues after advertisement
So it was with Marian Anderson’s lifelong love of Schubert’s songs. She was never very clear about what gripped her, starting from the epiphany she had as a young teenager when she heard Roland Hayes sing Schubert songs in a recital at her church; though she understood not a word of the German texts, she was transfixed. Some fifteen years later, her determination to study Schubert lieder with expert teachers was in large part what impelled her to go to Europe.
During the prime years of her career, while widely acknowledged as an exceptional Schubert singer with impeccable German diction, Anderson still avoided expounding on the music. When selecting songs for a recital program, she later explained, she always looked first to Schubert, “the composer I love best,” who wrote “hundreds of them,” each “more beautiful than the last.” But she left it at that and seldom said more. Schubert’s songs, she noted, “were rewarding for pianist and singer.” How so?
