Louis Gruenberg’s Emperor Jones: The Long Journey into the Heart of the Other Race

Abstract

On January 7, 1933, two years before Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, The Emperor Jones, composed by Louis Gruenberg in 1931, had its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Although Gruenberg’s opera looks like a mere musical adaptation of O’Neill’s acclaimed play, first performed in 1920, some alterations made by the composer allow to question its ambivalent reception by the audience and the critics. Apart from the singular choice of O’Neill’s play and Gruenberg’s special interest in African American music and vocal traditions, this paper analyses the influence of the Harlem Renaissance period and the fantasmatics of race, present in both the play and the opera, albeit exacerbated in the latter through the scopic enjoyment of the body of the black Other.