“I feel that for the first time, I have met the South,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote in the winter of 1932, at the end of a monthslong, multistate reading tour designed to cultivate black audiences.

To that end, Hughes had also created a small poetry collection called “‘The Negro Mother’ and Other Dramatic Recitations.” The six poems within sketch incisive portraits of black life in the Jim Crow era. Hughes wrote the poems to be spoken rather than read — performed, with music, in the schools, churches and halls of black America.

He might have been surprised to see Lincoln Center added to that list.

The composer Michael Schachter and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines have adapted the most striking of the poems, “The Black Clown,” into a music-theater piece that will have its New York premiere at the Mostly Mozart Festival on Wednesday. Mixing jazz, oratorio, Broadway, gospel and other musical traditions, the show traces its clown protagonist’s journey through the terror of slavery and the shackled freedom of Jim Crow toward a self-proclaimed humanity.