Third Reich
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Nazis, Napoleon and the Saxophone, pt. 2, how Nazis weaponized gender to change the image of the saxophone
In a previous post on the opera Napoleon by Edmund von Borck, I made the argument that this opera works as a piece of wartime propaganda. The only piece of the opera that doesn’t fulfill the propaganda use is the style of the music and the use the saxophone in the orchestration. Wasn’t the saxophone…
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Part 3: How Jonny Spielt Auf became the face of Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) in the Third Reich
In Part 2, I covered how Jonny Spielt Auf is directly related to the American Minstrelsy and blackface traditions. But before we can get into the details of Nazi’s reaction to this opera, we have to cover the plot. From the poster and all material, it seems like the opera is centered on Jonny, the…
the Operatic Saxophone 