The German Lied and the Songs of Black Volk

African American baritone Aubrey Pankey balked at the review he had received from the Norddeutsche Zeitung in February 1961 after his Liederabend in Rostock, East Germany. Why, the critic wondered, had this African American singer devoted so much of his concert program to the music of German Lieder? Shouldn’t he have performed traditional African American spirituals instead? In a frosty letter to the Norddeutsche Zeitung, Pankey replied: “Your reporter has assigned himself the task of politically analyzing my [concert] program. His ideas regarding my political and cultural obligations towards my people are actually and effectively racist.” In the lengthy, outraged letter, Pankey accused the Norddeutsche Zeitung of misunderstanding African American history and its relationship to the German Lied.

To uncover the ways in which musical performances have participated in historical and transnational processes of identity formation, this paper will discuss how German Lied studies might engage with transnational history and ethnic studies. What might we discover when we look for historical performances of German Lieder in places we might not expect? How might our understanding of the German Lied as an object of hermeneutic study and a historical subject of inquiry change when we turn our gaze to who is singing it?  

I suggest two possible ways to consider these questions. First, scholars can find fascinating histories of local performance practices and invented cultural traditions when studying the German Lied outside of a “pure” German context. Second, performances of the Lied reveal historical moments when race has been performed, debated, negated, dismissed, and/or challenged. In discussing performances of German Lieder by non-German singers, I hope to encourage historians and musicologists to reconsider how classical music, often codified as white and Eurocentric, might have played a role in shaping global conversations on race and ethnicity.