Colored Christians

Sixty-one years ago in Cincinnati eleven Negroes who called themselves the "Colored Christian Singers" shambled onto the platform of the old Vine Street Congregational Church. All eleven had been slaves, eaten hominy and bacon breakfasts in rude, smoky cabins, worked all day in cottonfields, sung spirituals in the light of the moon around their cabin doors. But they sang no spirituals that night in Cincinnati. Spirituals were slave songs. Accordingly they sang orthodox hymns and temperance pieces which made less impression on the audience than the rusty, ill-fitting suits the men wore and the women's dresses so ludicrously assorted that Jennie Jackson, 19, was taken to be the mother of Eliza Walker, 15.

In Cincinnati one afternoon last week 60 Negro singers supplied a sequel to that long-ago concert. Wearing neat-looking vestments which Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller had given them, they appeared in Emery Auditorium, stirred a fashionable audience with their singing of difficult church music and of spirituals. Like the eleven Christians of long ago, they had come from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.* The first Fisk Singers made $50 from their concert in the Vine Street Church. They turned it over to refugees from the Chicago fire which broke out next day, and set out on a tour which paved a glory-road for all Fisk Singers to come. Known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers they arrived in New York, reluctantly put spirituals on their programs and went to sing in Henry Ward Beecher's Church in Brooklyn. The first time he heard them Preacher Beecher, as ardent an abolitionist as his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, sat down and addressed a letter to his parishioners: "Avail yourselves of a rare opportunity to hear a style of music rapidly passing away, music . . . sung as only they can sing it who know how to keep time to a master's whip."

Dr. Beecher started Northerners talking about spirituals and about Fisk--the School for freedmen which a Union General, Clinton Bowen Fisk, a Union Chaplain, Erastus Milo Cravath, and a Union schoolteacher, one John Ogden, established after the War in the Union Barracks at Nashville. Erastus Cravath, its first president and father of famed Lawyer Paul Drennan Cravath, the Metropolitan Opera's Board Chairman, took the Jubilee Singers abroad after their New York success, to Stockholm where they gave 52 concerts in a single season, to England where Queen Victoria was a disappointment to them because she received them in a plain black dress and widow's cap, to Germany where the Crown Prince, father of the Kaiser of Doom, gave a glittering court reception more to their liking.

On their early tours the Jubilee Singers earned $150,000 with which Jubilee Hall was built to replace the Union barracks. As the singers went on advertising the University, Fisk equipment grew until the first stack of spelling books and New Testaments, bought by selling for old iron the rusty handcuffs from Nashville's slavepens, became a legend. Now there are 25 well-equipped campus buildings at Fisk (not counting the nearby grocery store where students go to eat fried fish). Academically it has Class A rating.

The Jubilee Singers, on last appearance a sextet of Fisk graduates, disbanded recently. Because the University must raise $145,000 each year to keep going, Lawyer Cravath who as trustee chairman is carrying on his father's work, decided that the student choir should venture forth.

Cleveland's Change

A mighty, declamatory E flat chord which 90 musicians sounded in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall this week heralded a vital change for three U. S. orchestras. With Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, Conductor Nikolai Sokoloff was beginning his first concert with the New York Orchestra, a cooperative group of players who gave inexpensive concerts last summer in George Washington Stadium. Conductor Sokoloff's contract with the Cleveland Orchestra expires this spring. Several weeks ago it was announced that next season he would take over the cooperative players, tour with them to the small eastern cities which the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia and Boston Symphonies no longer feel financially able to visit, again strive to prove, as he did in Cleveland, his genius for building up an orchestra.

Coincidentally with the trial concert Sokoloff gave this week in Manhattan came word that Polish Artur Rodzinski would succeed him in Cleveland, word that was seriously foreboding for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In December Conductor Rodzinski made two appearances in Cleveland which were particularly pleasing to wealthy Dudley Stuart Blossom. But Conductor Rodzinski's contract had another year to run in Los Angeles where he is extremely popular. The fact that he was released to go to Cleveland seemed to confirm the rumor that William Andrews Clark Jr., for 13 years sole patron of the Philharmonic, is through spending on music the remains of the copper fortune left him by his father, the late Senator from Montana.

Wagner Recast

Critics who have let wistful memories of pre-War casts dominate their reviews of Manhattan's recent Wagnerian performances heard a Tristan and Isolde this week which sent them scurrying to their offices to set down extravagant superlatives. Soprano Frida Leider and Contralto Maria Olszewska, pick of the disbanded Chicago Civic Opera artists, had made debuts as Isolde and Brangaene. The Tristan was Lauritz Melchior who sings at the Metropolitan just often enough to remind people that there still is a great Wagnerian tenor. Conductor Artur Bodanzky had led the orchestra through the maze of Wagner's love music as if he too was aware that here was a performance long to be remembered.

Frida Leider, whose fame in Germany, London and Chicago preceded her, was the Isolde for whom the critics had been waiting. She sang the music easily, with magnificent, full tones, molding each phrase with hands as expressive as her voice. Her care for detail, her flawless results, made the story that she had spent four years perfecting a single phrase easy to believe. Germans who know her say that each of her Isoldes is smoothly, precisely the same, like the Isolde of great Lilli Lehmann who used to say that she had sung the role 300 and more times, had never seen reason to vary it. But when the curtain went down on Frida Leider's debut performance this week 20 recalls kept the cleaning women late for their midnight jobs.

*From Cincinnati the Fisk Choir's tour takes it to Cleveland, Pittsfield, Mass., Hartford, Providence, New Haven, Boston, Worcester, Manhattan, Syracuse, Akron.

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