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Even if his performances of Shakespeare-or, for that matter, his daughter’s singing of Wagner-momentarily caused white people to rethink their ideas about the inferiority of other races, the epiphany didn’t stick. Admittedly, Aldridge’s success did little to change the fundamental dynamics of racial hatred. Du Bois inducted him into the Talented Tenth-that company of exceptional individuals who were to lead the black population to salvation. Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson celebrated Ira W. The leaders of the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century took pride in the fact that a black performer had breached the citadels of European culture. Lindfors calls Aldridge “the most visible black man in a white world in the middle of the nineteenth century.” Three of his children were musicians music must have seemed the next world for the Aldridge clan to conquer. In recent years, the scholar Bernth Lindfors has published a two-volume biography of the actor and compiled a book of essays about him, revealing the paradoxes of a man who falsified his biography, toyed with audiences, and undermined the racial assumptions of his age. He is now much more obscure, although a dramatization of his life, by Lolita Chakrabarti, won notice in London last year, and will come to St. Ira Aldridge, a New Yorker who moved to England when he was in his teens, achieved immense fame in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, mesmerizing kings, emperors, and, it would seem, Richard Wagner with his renditions of Shakespeare. I soon realized that I could not understand Luranah without understanding her remarkable father. I delved into archives, piecing together fragments of a forgotten life. Not long ago, I stumbled upon the passage quoted above, and decided that the apparition of a mixed-race singer at Bayreuth six decades before Grace Bumbry officially broke the color barrier, in 1961, was a mystery worth exploring. A few reference works mention her otherwise, she has vanished from the historical record. Despite encouragement from Cosima Wagner, the composer’s widow, Aldridge faded from view. The singer fell sick during rehearsals and did not perform that summer. Photographs by Billy Rose Theatre Division / The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Mccormick Library of Special Collections / Northwestern University Library Aldridge, circa 1865, and his daughter Luranah, a singer, in an undated image.