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

Abstract

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.