Marian anderson music study center
My play tries to fill in the details, of the conversations that took place that night.”Ībout the genesis of My Lord, What a Night, Brevoort explains that in 2015 “There was a Premiere Stages Liberty Live commission (from Liberty Hall Museum), to write a 45-minute play about an event that took place in New Jersey. So he was at the Princeton concert, and all we know is that he invited her to stay at his house. In Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007) Walter Isaacson describes the physicist’s invitation as a “deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture.” Isaacson adds that whenever Anderson returned to Princeton, “she stayed with Einstein, her last visit coming just two months before he died.”įelicia Curry as Marian Anderson and Christopher Bloch as Albert Einstein in the Ford’s Theatre October 2021 production of Deborah Brevoort’s “My Lord, What a Night.” (Photo by Scott Suchman)īrevoort observes, “There are pictures of Einstein hanging around backstage at Carnegie Hall at Anderson’s various concerts he loved her singing. “When Albert Einstein heard about the insult, he invited Anderson to stay with his daughter and him in their house on Mercer Street.” “Anderson’s vocal technique is unsurpassed in variety of color contrast of range and marvelous effects in dynamics.”īut although the McCarter audience welcomed Anderson, the Nassau Inn “refused her a room,” Watterson writes. “Seldom is a voice like this combined with such a perfect intellectual and emotional understanding of the music,” Cone writes. Cone ecstatically praised the concert in a review whose headline declared the performance “superlative.” Cone was in awe of Anderson’s “complete artistic mastery of a magnificent voice.” In I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton (Princeton University Press, 2017) Kathryn Watterson writes that the duo performed for a “standing-room only audience.” Kosti Vehanen was Anderson’s accompanist for the recital, which included selections by Handel and Schubert. In Einstein on Race and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2005), Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor note, “Princeton Group Arts, an organization that provided African American youngsters with art instruction not available in their segregated Princeton school, sponsored Marian Anderson’s performance.”
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The McCarter recital that occasioned the meeting with Einstein took place on April 16, 1937. The playwright was particularly fascinated by the story of Einstein opening his home to Anderson, an act that “launched this lifelong friendship.” When the singer was on a list of subjects for a commission, Brevoort eagerly welcomed the idea of writing about her, in part because the research process would provide an opportunity to reread the volume. “I remember loving that autobiography,” she says. When Brevoort was 7, her mother gave her a copy of Anderson’s book. The play’s title is derived from Anderson’s 1956 autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning.Īnderson’s autobiography, in turn, takes its title from a spiritual whose text includes the line, “To wake the nations underground.” Given the singer’s eventual impact on the civil rights movement, the line is striking. Written by Deborah Brevoort, the play recently was presented by Ford’s Theatre.
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The meeting of Anderson and Einstein is the subject of a play, My Lord, What a Night. In response, Albert Einstein invited her to stay at his home - an invitation he had extended to Paul Robeson two years earlier. “Everyone has a gift for something,” contralto Marian Anderson is quoted as saying, “even if it is the gift of being a good friend.” In 1937 a unique friendship was formed after Anderson (1897-1993) gave a recital at McCarter Theatre.īecause of segregation, Anderson as an African American was denied lodging at a hotel in Princeton. (Marian Anderson Collection of Photographs, 1898-1992, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania) Marian Anderson, center, with Albert Einstein.