“A voice like that is heard only once in a hundred years,” Arturo Toscanini is reported to have said, and even through a desktop-computer speaker, that voice can make the hairs on the back of the neck stand up and salute. It belongs to the late Marian Anderson, Hon’58, and through the sorcery of the Internet, one simply has to point and click a few times to hear and see her singing — for example — “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in 1939 at the Lincoln Memorial, where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had arranged for her to sing after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow an African American to perform at Constitution Hall.
On February 27, which would have been Anderson’s 100th birthday (she died in 1993), the University launched a multimedia Website devoted to her life and work.
There
she can be heard singing Jean Sibelius’s “Var det en drom?” which was
recorded in Paris in 1936 but never commercially released; Schubert’s
“Liebesbotschaft”; and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Click
again for photographs of Anderson visiting her old neighborhood in South
Philadelphia, to hear Anderson discussing her Metropolitan Opera debut
in 1955, and a good deal more.
“We
hope that the Anderson on-line exhibition will be of use to teachers,
as well as be of interest to the general public,” said Dr. Paul Mosher,
Penn’s vice provost and director of libraries, who notes that the
multimedia portions require either a high-speed connection or a “lot of
patience under present Internet conditions.”
The
library also announced that it was constructing a Marian Anderson Music
Study Center and Exhibition Gallery on the fourth floor of Van
Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. That project, scheduled to open in
December, will, in the words of Mosher, “preserve the history of a great
musical figure; it will help to keep her art alive; and it will nurture
future generations of composers, performing artists, and scholars.”
Before
she died in 1993, Anderson had placed her papers with the library,
where they are housed in the Department of Special Collections. One of
the papers is a previously unknown handwritten manuscript by Sibelius,
who rewrote “Den Judiska Flickans” (“The Jewish Girl”) especially for
Anderson. The Marian Anderson Archive is the primary source for
scholarship on her life and career; its materials date from 1898 to 1991
and include correspondence, audiotaped interviews, recordings,
annotated musical scores, clippings, programs, photographs, memorabilia
— and more than 240 test recordings now being transferred to tape for
preservation. “We do not know what is on many of these records,” says
Marjorie Hassen, head of the music library. “It is certainly possible
that we will find songs that were never commercially released.”
The center will have a large seminar facility dedicated to music study and research; a glass-walled classroom, designed for student needs; computer, multimedia, and microform workstations; working space for the head librarian of the music library; and a memorial exhibition area. In addition to fundraising efforts led by Anderson’s nephew and heir, James Anderson DePreist, W’58, ASC’61, Hon’76, the library received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a $50,000 gift from the Class of 1967.
