ABSTRACT

On 27 March 1943, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess premiered at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre and was staged a further 22 times during the German Occupation. The most remarkable fact about this information is not that it was eventually removed from the opera’s roster of performances in April 1944, but that officialdom, either in the form of the Nazi occupiers or the Danish government, failed to proscribe the work in the first place. Indeed, what was in fact the European première of an opera written by an American Jew on African-American characters using jazz and spirituals as musical inspiration must have been anathema to the Nazis who would have regarded such a work as being the quintessential Cultural-Bolshevist opera. This chapter establishes how the decision to stage the opera evolved, how this highly sensitive matter was negotiated in discussions between the Danish theatre censorship board and government offices, and how the work eventually was cleared with the German plenipotentiary so that the occupying authorities could no longer prevent the production. Critical reception of Porgy and Bess as reflected in Danish newspapers of the period demonstrates that the jazz elements in Gershwin’s music were regarded as a mark of resistance, a position confirmed by the fact that in May 1945 the production was immediately revived as part of the programme celebrating the end of the Occupation.