Music: Robeson’s Return

A big, bronze-colored man, magnificently built, scrupulously dressed, walked on the stage in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall last week and waited quietly for his audience to settle. Then he began in a voice the color of his skin to sing “I Got a Home on a Rock, Don’ You See.” The singer was not Roland Hayes, although for years Hayes has been the only Negro to sell out a hall of Carnegie’s size. Hayes is slight, frail-appearing. He sings spirituals artfully, in a high voice that is often reedy. The Negro who sang last week in Manhattan was as tall as Basso Feodor Chaliapin and brawnier. His voice was big and mellow. He sang simply. He was Paul Robeson, athlete-actor-baritone. Last week’s was his first U. S. appearance after a three-year absence in Europe.

Paul Robeson is distinctly a Northern Negro. The youngest son of a school-teaching mother and a Methodist minister who had worked his way through Lincoln University, he was educated first in the public schools of Princeton, N. J. His school record won him a scholarship at nearby Rutgers College (New Brunswick, N. J.). At Rutgers an average of over 90% in all his studies won him a Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year. He was considered Rutgers’ best debater. He won his R in four sports (football, baseball, basketball, track). The late Walter Camp called him “the greatest defensive end that ever trod the gridiron.”

Paul Robeson meant to be a lawyer. He took a two-year course at Columbia University, earned his degree. During that period, however, he performed in a Y. M. C. A. play which Playwright Eugene Gladstone O’Neill happened to attend. So enthusiastic was O’Neill that he went backstage and begged Robeson to act in Emperor Jones. His law course finished, Robeson consented, and made a name as a big actor in Emperor Jones, All God’s Chillun, Black Boy.

Singing came into line naturally then; Robeson’s voice had always been splendidly full and smooth, contributing immeasurably to the power of his speaking performances. In 1925, with Negro Pianist Lawrence Brown, he gave his first recital of spirituals—another success. Soon after he went abroad.

During the past three years much Robeson news has drifted back to the U. S. Paris. Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest all hailed his concerts. Famed were his performances in Show Boat at the Drury Lane Theatre in London. Because he was a Negro, he was asked not to enter the Hotel Savoy dining-room. He handled the situation with grace and dignity. London, where dark-skinned East Indians get every obeisance, buzzed with sympathy.

A less intelligent man than Robeson might well have come home in a conquering-hero frame of mind, might immediately have flaunted on his programs the classics he has been studying. A singing-actor of the first order, he might even have attempted to go into opera, although no Negro ever has.*

Instead. Robeson’s returning recital was a modest repetition of spirituals he had sung before. As in 1925, critics complained that such a program tends to monotony, that Robeson’s range is too limited to offset it. But the lay audience, including such famed white Negrophiles as Novelists Fannie Hurst and Carl Van Vechten, received him ecstatically, applauded tremendously after ”Water Boy,” “I’m Goin’ to Tell God all my Troubles” and “Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho.” Robeson will remain in the U. S. for two months, will sing at Rutgers College. New Brunswick, N. J.; at Toronto. Pittsburgh. Detroit, Chicago, Madison, Wis., Columbus, Ohio. In January he returns to London to play the Moor in Shakespeare’s Othello. If successful, he may return with it to the U. S. Certainly next year he will take a concert tour as far west at California.

In Chicago

Bits of news about last fortnight’s Chicago opera opening had post-mortem discussion last week, concerned the following:

Samuel Instill. On the opening night he arrived, pearls in vest, gardenia in buttonhole, an hour before curtain time to receive congratulations on his new opera house.

Mrs. Ernest Robert Graham, wife of the head of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, architects of the new opera house (TIME, Nov. 4), wore for the first time a diamond necklace which Emperor Napoleon gave to Marie Louise on the birth of their son. Napoleon II, “King of Rome.”

Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s diamond necklace which hung to her waist once belonged among the Russian crown jewels.

Soprano Claudia Muzio (Mrs. Renato Liberti) wore diamonds in the ballroom scene of La Traviata. The same afternoon a writ of attachment had been filed on all her gowns and jewels by the Phillip Barnett Co., jewelers, who complained that she owed them $9,284.

Soprano Hallie Stiles, who was to have made her Chicago debut in the season’s first Romeo et Juliet, was ill, postponed her appearance until Nov. 16.

Soprano Mary McCormic, native of Amarillo, Tex., protegee of Mary Garden, sang Juliet sketchily. A few days previously she had announced her engagement to Prince Serge Mdivani, the about-to-be-divorced husband of Cinemactress Pola Negri. Said she: “When I met the Prince I knew I was headed toward Heaven.”

Emil Cooper, famed Russian conductor who has introduced much Slavic music to Western Europe, made his U. S. debut. While laymen in the audience concentrated on the amateurish antics of Singer McCormic, critics marked Conductor Cooper’s bright tempo, his fine sense of balance.

Soprano Edith Mason failed, despite expert singing, to save Pietro Mascagni’s Iris from dulldom.

*Even in Ernst Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf, presented last year at the Metropolitan Opera House (TIME, Jan. 28) and before that in many a European capital, there was much discussion because Hero Jonny is supposed to be a black-face comedian. The Metropolitan authorities worried about letting Basso Michael Bohnen wear full, realistic black-face makeup, thought perhaps his neck should show white to reassure prejudiced observers. At the dress rehearsal the neck was white. It looked so absurd that at the performance it was blackened like the face.