In the 1967 American film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the actor Sidney Poitier plays a successful Black doctor who wishes to marry a white woman from a wealthy San Francisco family. When the father of Poitier’s character angrily tells him that he is making a terrible mistake, Poitier delivers one of the most poignant lines in the film: “You think of yourself as a colored man; I think of myself … as a man.” These words spoken by the character Dr. John Prentice, a famed WHO doctor, delivered marvelously by the late Bahamian-born actor, aptly capture much of the thrust of Kira Thurman’s book Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. With directness, accuracy, and sincerity, Thurman presents the stories of several Black classical musicians—conductors, instrumentalists, and singers—who left the racialized barriers they experienced at home in hope of finding an appreciative audience in German-speaking lands. Here, in the “land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,” as Thurman explains, art music was a cherished cultural commodity that reflected national identity, a rich fount of sonic transcendence that unified the Austro-German people in a collective self-awareness as the creators of a universalist language. Black performers took this claim of musical universalism and “used [it] to articulate their politics of racial uplift and social advancement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 23). And by so doing, “Black classical musicians consistently challenged their audience’s ideas of Blackness, whiteness, and German national identity. … Black performances of German music suggested that these typologies were not as fixed as listeners had been conditioned to expect” (p. 4).Like Poitier’s character in the iconic 1967 film, Black classical musicians wanted simply to be heard and received as fully formed individuals who were masters of their craft. And yet what they received from white audiences more often than not was a ready set of racialized opinions on what characterizes the sound of Black folk and the sound of white folk. Black classical musicians were forced then to navigate the “hidden racial logics” (p. 272) embedded within the reception of the Austro-German musical canon, while at the same time achieving recognition as sensitive interpreters of such a tradition. The benefits of success were often great, allowing one to garner wealth and prestige as both a practitioner and a teacher of Austro-German music. But curiously, as Thurman convincingly shows, such success was often strategically forgotten by the press, making it “possible for listeners to feel a sense of discovery and novelty each time a Black musician performed on stage, thus presenting Black performances as rare occurrences” (p. 14). She further argues that under such a regime of erasure it was far more convenient to the cultural and social hierarchy in Austria and Germany to associate “Black musicianship with jazz, popular music, and degenerate entertainment, thus presenting classical musicians as an extraordinary anomaly. Across time, a curated iconography of Black popular entertainment overlaid performances by Black classical musicians, rendering them potentially inscrutable on their own terms” (p. 15). Thurman’s book thus stands as a permanent monument to the often forgotten success of Black classical musicians in Germany and Austria from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, reminding us that “Black people have been part of German-speaking Europe’s musical history all along” (p. 280).The book is structured chronologically in three parts that intertwine the history of German-speaking Europe with that of the Black diaspora from the 1870s to the 1960s. Part 1 (“1870–1914”) explores the years of Reconstruction in the United States and the rise of imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (post-1870) and concludes with the outbreak of World War I. Part 2 (“1918–1945”) covers the interwar years and extends to the end of World War II, while part 3 (“1945–1961”) considers the denazification of Germany and the opening up of the GDR to African Americans disillusioned with Western capitalism, such as the conductor George Byrd and the singers Paul Robeson and Aubrey Pankey.In chapter 1, “How Beethoven Came to Black America,” Thurman explores “the transatlantic and transformative power that classical music, and German music in particular, brought to African American lives in the Post-Bellum and Pre-Harlem era” (p. 23). In discussing the hallowed position of the white German music teacher, who encouraged and supported promising Black music students to travel to Europe, she shows how Black musicians such as Nathaniel Dett and Hazel Harrison could “shed the skin of white supremacy [in the United States] and become the pinnacle of Black musical achievement” (p. 41).The travels and travails of Black musicians once in Germany are presented in the next chapter, “African American Intellectual and Musical Migration to the Kaiserreich.” Although African American musicians were able to navigate the musical communities they found in Leipzig, Berlin, or Vienna, white Americans would often refuse to accept their presence, complaining to their German or Austrian landlords or the conservatory administration that it was indecent to have such individuals in residence. This was also the experience of other African Americans studying in Germany, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who discovered while in Berlin that “high culture did not belong to white Americans any more than it belonged to him” (p. 54). Such a viewpoint, as Thurman rightly points out, reveals a hint of American exceptionalism, for to be a Black American in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s was to be viewed apart from other Blacks in Europe: However much those students might have expressed ambivalence about their lives in the United States, their treatment in Germany nonetheless reflected their privileged, elite status as Americans. Their Blackness was still an American Blackness, which meant … they experienced Germany quite differently from Black Africans, many of whom arrived to Germany either because of racist commercial ventures (human zoos, ethnological villages, etc.) or due to increasingly fixed colonial ties. … African Americans lived in different social worlds from Black Africans. (p. 58) In the third chapter, “The Sonic Color Line Belts the World,” Thurman introduces what is to be a recurring theme throughout the book: once in German-speaking lands and presenting concerts and private performances, Black classical musicians were continually heard as unique aberrations, whose musicianship was explained either by a supposed white racial mix or by their being that one-in-a-million Negro who confounded the stereotypes. Whether it was the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s or the Black prima donnas Sissieretta Jones and Marie Selika in the 1890s, or even Black instrumentalists such as the Afro-Cuban violinist Claudio Brindis de Salas or Hazel Harrison, the music criticism Black classical musicians received proved that “listeners heard the music of the great masters in a racial key and dictated their interpretations of Black performers accordingly” (p. 92).As the book proceeds into the early decades of the twentieth century, we read that Black musicians continued to be viewed through the same racialized lens, most especially at the time of the “Black Horror on the Rhine” campaign (as discussed in chapter 4), when between 1920 and 1921 over eighty thousand Black French colonial troops from North and West Africa were stationed in the Rhine region, stoking white German fears of “Black men raping white women” (p. 97). As a result of propaganda intended to heighten the hostility toward Black bodies on German soil, Black musicians were faced with further complications arising from the growing resentment against them. This was particularly problematic for Black male musicians, such as the lyric tenor Roland Hayes, who, in the face of vocal opposition to his appearance at the Berlin Konzerthaus in May 1924, quietly sang the Schubert lullaby “Du bist die Ruh,” “[winning] over the audience,” such that, “according to multiple reports, the crowd’s roar quieted to a still silence” (p. 98). The most notable Black musician to navigate these difficulties was Marian Anderson, who is depicted on the book’s cover. In opposition to the jazz performances of Josephine Baker, Anderson “frequently tied her identity as an African American woman to her religious identity as a pious Christian” (p. 129): “[Anderson’s] rise to the status of celebrity indicated the social and economic possibilities afforded to Black classical musicians. … What they could no longer be, however, was ignored. … Black classical musicians had finally broken through into a greater transatlantic world to prove that Black people could also claim the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms” (p. 133).Thurman’s analysis of the reception of Hayes and Anderson continues in chapter 5, “Singing Lieder, Hearing Race,” where she “examine[s] the singers’ attempts to master the German lied, a process they undertook because of its influential position and multivalent function in German concert life” (p. 135). Here, she presents an analysis of “the most German of genres” (p. 136) and why it became such a target for racialized critique when performed by Black musicians in the 1920s and 1930s. No matter how musically accurate, linguistically competent, or emotionally nuanced the performances by Anderson or Hayes were, their Blackness became a continual point of reference in the daily press, where German music critics “revisited their definitions of Blackness and whiteness in response to Black performers’ musical erasures of the Black-white binary that dominated transatlantic discourses of race, nation, and culture in the twentieth century” (p. 158). The racialized language found in these reviews reveals that the Germany that had warmly received Black classical musicians in the nineteenth century was a different country after World War I, when Black bodies became ever more present and hence more dangerous for the future of white German identity.In the final chapter of this section, “‘A Negro Who Sings German Lieder Jeopardizes German Culture,’” Thurman describes in detail the backlash Black musicians faced in the late 1920s and the 1930s, when far-right political groups were on the rise in Germany, such as the German People’s Party (the DVP), who would stage rallies and continually disrupt performances. With chapter subheadings such as “From Protest to Riot,” “The Black Exodus from Central Europe,” and “Black Departures and White Reckonings,” a bleak image emerges: “Anything ‘negroid’ needed to be expunged from German musical culture, ranging from Baker to Schoenberg to Anderson. Black performers and their musicianship had come to stand for racial miscegenation, commercialism, and sexual deviance. … The Nazi state would work hard to ensure that Black cultures and people would be eradicated in Europe” (p. 180). And yet, as Thurman points out, the white supporters of Anderson and Hayes who fled Nazi Europe came to the United States to train “a new generation of Black students in classical music, and this generation would later return to Central Europe after the demise of the Nazi racial state” (p. 181). Those same Black musicians are the focus of the book’s final section on post-war Germany.Part 3 opens with a discussion of the reception of several Black classical musicians in Germany during denazification and the US State Department’s approach to Black musicians, who were seen as “the best assets in the reorientation of Germans” (p. 196). Be it Afro-Caribbean conductor W. Rudolph Dunbar’s direction of the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony in 1945 or the vocal performances of Leontyne Price and William Warfield in the State Department–sponsored tour of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1952, Thurman emphasizes “how drastically and quickly a new context can produce new cultural meanings while nonetheless producing or reproducing the logic of race” (p. 214).Thurman also discusses the racial politics surrounding the appearance of Black singers (mostly female) on the stages of West German and Austrian opera houses, who would often cast African Americans in order to distance themselves from the legacy of National Socialism. And yet Black singers were continually subject to the very same racially charged politics that were perpetuated under Nazism, being accused of highly sexualized behavior and seen as a threat to the status quo and abhorrent to the social order. African American singers such as Camilla Williams, Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, and George Shirley found opportunities to sing on the stages of Europe in this postwar period, but they were invariably racially typecast, further problematizing their success and their ability to be judged on the basis of their craft rather than their skin color. We see this same critique occurring even in the GDR, where an antiracist stance supposedly allowed “Black classical musicians [to be] fully able to perform the music they loved dearly for an audience who appreciated their worth” (p. 251).Standing as a rich historical survey of cultural perspectives on Blackness, Germanness, and whiteness as evidenced by critical reviews, interviews, diaries, and the correspondence of Black classical musicians from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Thurman’s book presents a sobering account of the many challenges faced by Black musicians who mastered the Austro-German canon. The “universalism” of classical music is what is really questioned here, for in spite of their ability to travel, perform, and find success in Europe, Black classical musicians were continually seen as outsiders to the sound and look of the high art tradition so prized by white Europeans. In the face of the current political environment, in which many performing arts venues in the United States have posted statements of solidarity against the institutional racism faced by Blacks in society, Thurman’s book provides evidence that having more Black bodies on classical music stages is not enough to achieve equity and inclusion. It occurs only when the audience itself changes its assumptions about and perspectives on who owns and controls the music they hear. The book is a reminder that music is a cultural force like no other, one that Blacks have continually used in order to carve out their own identity in a white world that often seeks to rob them of it. When the music performed is coded “artful,” “intellectual,” or even simply “white,” Black classical musicians “code switch” such meanings, showing audiences what the universal sound of classical music truly “looks” like.