The Circumstances of Colour: The Jim Crow Translation of Jonny spielt auf

This article examines the American premiere of the German opera Jonny spielt auf as a form of what I call Jim Crow translation. As originally written and composed by Ernst Krenek, the opera centres on Jonny, a Black jazz musician, who disorders the logic of European cultural superiority. Although thoroughly modern in its original German staging, using stereophonic radios and film projectors, Krenek’s appropriation of Blackness relied on blackface baritones to play Jonny. When the opera came to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the history of minstrelsy and the legal system of Jim Crow haunted the production. While Jonny was depicted as thoroughly cosmopolitan and modern in Krenek’s conception of the opera, the American production, under the management of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, attempted to turn Jonny into a white vaudevillian in blackface, a publicity stunt that brought the opera further attention under the guise of protecting American morals against a narrative of interracial sexual desire. Though Krenek created an opera based on the value of Black modernity, Gatti-Casazza displayed American racial anxieties through the opera’s promotion. The proposed revisions to the text, through which racialist regimes demonstrated their power over cultural production, reflect the role that translation can play in reinforcing the colour line.

Song and Sign

Wagner believed that reducing vocal display and rejecting the convention that the orchestral material remain subordinate to vocal melody would involve listeners more intensively in the drama, and enhance their ability to identify with mythic or “uncanny” dramatic situations. In addition, Wagner’s new ideas about the “symphonic” potential of poetic-musical periods were complemented and challenged by occasional allusions to the simpler designs and textures of the Lied—a polarity that Richard Strauss found no less appealing. After an introductory Wagner/Strauss comparison—the music for night-watchmen in Die Meistersinger and Die Frau ohne Schatten—some relevant episodes in Wagner’s works from Rienzi to Parsifal are discussed, and then set in counterpoint with comparable passages from operas by Strauss. Finally, there is brief consideration of more recent developments in German opera that have sought to retain some aspects of the focus on reflective song that Wagner made his own.