Black Activism and the Limits of Desegregation at the Metropolitan Opera

• In Event: Gendered Sounds: Women Sing Off-Key

Abstract

In the popular imagination, the state of opera in the United States has long been a state of aesthetic conservatism and overwhelming whiteness - with a few notable exceptions. One of those exceptions has to do with the mid-twentieth-century desegregation of the Metropolitan Opera, the nation's most iconic opera house. Conventional wisdom credits Met general manager Rudolf Bing with the institution's desegregation, characterizing him as a benevolent liberal whose racially tolerant attitudes prompted the long-overdue hiring of African American performers, including dancer Janet Collins in 1951 and contralto Marian Anderson in 1955. In this paper, I argue that this narrative is misleading: it obscures the pivotal role of black activists who fought to desegregate the Met, overstates Bing's investment in racial justice, and, ultimately, reinscribes the art form's longstanding aesthetic and institutional commitments to racial essentialism and white supremacy.

Archival evidence, particularly that which appears in the black press, reveals that the desegregation of the Met emerged by way of sustained, well-organized efforts by black activists, especially black women. Beginning in the 1940s, the singer Muriel Rahn spearheaded what she called a "campaign" to break the color line at the Met. Rahn was joined by an array of African American performers and journalists who persuasively connected this effort to other antiracist struggles amid the ferment of the Cold War and the long civil rights movement, but her race and gender hampered her ability to be taken seriously by the opera house's white male administrators. I also demonstrate, via a close reading of Bing's public and private statements regarding desegregation, that his liberal commitment to racial tolerance was diluted by white supremacist ideas about the nature of opera. Just days before Anderson's debut, Bing made clear that he still considered racialized casting a nonnegotiable precondition for black singers, and he failed to consider structural changes beyond the hiring of exceptionally talented individuals.

These revisions to the dominant historical narrative about the desegregation of the nation's most iconic opera house raise still-urgent questions. What are the limits of a desegregationist paradigm with respect to opera? Can that paradigm hasten the emergence of racial equity within the art form? I argue that a singular focus on desegregation, while well-intentioned and seemingly progressive, actually relies upon a continued capitulation to the art form's existing racial logics. In doing so, it narrows the critical discourse around the look and sound of racial justice, foreclosing opportunities for truly transformative change.

Author

• Lucy Caplan, Yale University