ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development and the astonishing performance- and reception-history of an opera that Alan Rich once called "beyond doubt, the most famous unknown opera”. A single work by Ernst Krenek, an opera of the 1920s is a mirror of sociopolitical and cultural developments in a time of radical political and cultural changes. It also mirrors European images of American jazz and some relations and non-relations between Austria, Germany, and America in the so-called "Golden Twenties." A new perspective was introduced by the so-called "invasion" of American jazz into modern European music, and Krenek began sketching ideas for an opera or operetta with jazz elements in it. The story of the opera revolves around the escapades of an African-American jazz bandleader, Jonny, an antihero, who exists beyond the rules of society. The European fascination with jazz was part of a larger obsession with America and things American.
