A new 15-disc Marian Anderson boxed set traces her astonishing artistry over a lifetime

Understanding Marian Anderson — the voice, the gravitas, the activism — means starting at the end of the new Sony Classical 15-disc box set Beyond the Music, Her Complete RCA Victor Recordings.

Nobody could’ve envisioned what the Philadelphia-born contralto (1897-1993) was to become when she stepped into a 1923 recording session across the river in Camden to sing a handful of spirituals, the first songs on the set’s first disc.

But, more than four decades later, on disc 14, the culmination of her vocal artistry is heard in the 1966 Schubert & Brahms Lieder album, followed by The Lady from Philadelphia on disc 15, an aural documentary of Anderson’s Asian tour. That one encapsulates Anderson the civil rights icon. The German song disc reveals the inner Anderson singing with a freedom of someone who no longer had anything to prove.

One was not possible without the other. And the starting point was the great contralto’s voice, with its rich, deep lower range, and high notes that put her almost in the soprano zone.

In between, vocal connoisseurs have long marveled at the smooth shifts from one part of the voice to the other, or, in the Brahms Op. 91 songs, also part of the boxed set, how deftly she shaded her voice to match the accompanying viola. When her voice began to age, the centered, deeply religious person behind it had such a strong communicative imperative that one hears the message more than the messenger.

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From her famous 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial (after being barred from an indoor venue) to her 1955 Metropolitan Opera debut to her “Star Spangled Banner” at presidential inaugurations through John F. Kennedy, she was a symbol of what was possible against seemingly impossible odds in Jim Crow-era America, leading more by example than by rhetoric. It’s all here on this compilation, available only on CD right now (with an accompanying 227-page book) and priced about $80 to $100, depending where you buy it.

“I have no bitterness,” she said in one interview. “There is a divine pattern and no one person can stop it.”

Spirituals were a portal into Anderson’s traditional religious values; the depth of her commitment to them perhaps has no equal.

When singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” she dares you to think of yourself as deserving boundless hope — and to meet that hope halfway. Other spirituals such as “Go Down Moses” and “Deep River” surface on the boxed set in multiple recordings through the decades, showing how each stanza took on an increasingly specific vocal tint plus increasingly penetrating treatment of the words.

The amplitude she summoned made “Ave Maria” mesmerizing, even when — in previously unreleased tracks from her 1964 farewell recital — her vocal gas tank was running on empty.

This singularly gifted vocalist became a master storyteller. In art songs here like Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig,” about a child whose soul is abducted, Anderson weaves a tale full of chillingly well-differentiated voices. Her Metropolitan Opera Un Ballo in Maschera excerpts show that however dignified her concert manner, she had the killer instinct for Verdi.

But none of this happened by itself — which is revealed in the Sony Classical box set biographical note, and should be further illustrated by the West Chester-based Marston label, which issues this fall Anderson’s live performances and non-RCA recordings she made in Europe.

During her 1930s European sojourn, Anderson was soaking up acclaim from the likes of composer Jean Sibelius before the 1933 rise of Nazism made performing in Germany — home to so many important composers — impossible for Black artists. The Sony book that comes with the lavish box set shows concert programs of Anderson singing with pianist Michael Raucheisen, one of the great artists of his time but soon to become a Nazi collaborator.

Safely in Paris in 1935, she met Ukrainian impresario Sol Hurok, who saw possibilities for a career unlike any other and proved it back home in America: He was instrumental in mounting the famous 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert that drew 75,000 people. No wonder Anderson often discussed herself as “we” rather than “I” in generous recognition of all who helped her.

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Thereafter, Anderson the institution at times obscured Anderson the artist. You wonder what she was thinking when recording “Jingle Bells” on one of her painfully dated Christmas albums included on the new boxed set. Conversely, even the slick pop-album production values in her final disc of spirituals, Jus’ Keep on Singin’, can’t undercut the most emotionally unfiltered performances of the entire set.

But judging from Anderson’s interviews just prior to her retirement, her patience with celebrity life wore thin.

It’s hard to know what her performing career might have been in a better world. The opera repertoire was much smaller in the 1950s; there wasn’t really much for this deepest of female voices. Wagner opera roles such as Erda and Fricka would have been frustratingly brief for her admirers.

Same thing for the great cameo appearances offered by now-popular Mahler symphonies. Even with the alto roles expanded by the current baroque operas revival, contralto Nathalie Stutzmann has turned to conducting and regularly leads the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The forthcoming set from Marston is sure to show some of her roads less traveled: In live Bell Telephone Hour radio appearances that will be part of that set, she sang great soprano arias (yes, soprano) such as “Casta Diva” and “Pace pace, mio dio” (though transposed down a whole tone).

Might larger soprano roles have been in her reach? This repertoire almost amounts to a double life.