Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” Celebrates Its 75th Anniversary | IIP Digital Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” Celebrates Its 75th Anniversary Beloved, once-controversial opera showcases America’s rich musical heritage By Lauren Monsen | Staff Writer | 01 February 2010 Eric Owens and Laquita Mitchell portrayed the title characters in the San Francisco Opera’s 2009 production of Porgy and Bess. Washington — The opera Porgy and Bess is now recognized as an American masterpiece, but when it was first performed in Boston and New York in 1935, it generated both controversy and acclaim. Composed by George Gershwin — a white, Jewish New Yorker with Russian immigrant roots — Porgy and Bess is part of the international operatic repertoire. Several of its songs, particularly “Summertime,” have become classics. Yet since its premiere 75 years ago, the opera has been viewed by some critics as perpetuating racial stereotypes.

Set in a vibrant African-American community in Charleston, South Carolina, called Catfish Row, Porgy and Bess tells the story of a crippled beggar and the woman he loves. Their lives are touched by poverty, violence and, in Bess’ case, drugs. The work “was introduced as a folk opera, occupying a midway point between opera and Broadway musical,” according to John Edward Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution. At the time of its debut, the subject matter of Porgy and Bess was considered daring, Hasse said. During the era of racial segregation, U.S. audiences were unaccustomed to music that gave serious artistic expression to the lives of African Americans. Also, the principal roles were sung by black performers instead of white performers in black roles, the common practice then. Gershwin (whose brother Ira wrote the opera’s lyrics) considered Porgy his finest work. As it happened, the public enthusiastically embraced Porgy, while music critics were divided. The New York press, for the most part, disliked Gershwin’s unconventional approach, especially his incorporation of distinctly American musical elements (jazz, blues, traditional spirituals) into an operatic framework.

However, The Christian Science Monitor proclaimed Porgy and Bess “Gershwin’s most important contribution to music,” and The Boston Transcript said, “Gershwin must now be accepted as a serious composer.” MIXED FEELINGS IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY African Americans often were ambivalent about Porgy and Bess. Some felt it was demeaning and promoted racial stereotypes, but others defended it as a work of surpassing beauty and tremendous emotional power. Classically trained African-American singers have wrestled with the question of whether to accept a role in the opera, and even now, “I think there’s still some sensitivity around it,” said Hasse. Duke Ellington, the legendary jazz musician and composer, complained that Porgy and Bess lacked social commentary, “and I think he also had some issues about its authenticity,” Hasse said. Harry Belafonte declined to play Porgy in the 1959 film version, and mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry expressed reservations about singing the role of Bess.

When Gershwin decided to adapt the 1924 novel Porgy (by Southern writer DuBose Heyward) into an opera, he traveled to Charleston and spent a great deal of time absorbing and transcribing African-American music. He wanted to faithfully capture the feel of that music in Porgy and Bess, but his own background raised doubts in some quarters about his ability to convey the essence of African-American life in the Deep South. Among the opera’s admirers was the late William Warfield, an African-American bass-baritone considered one of the foremost interpreters of the role of Porgy. Warfield, who appeared in the 1952 revival of Porgy and Bess that toured internationally under the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship, told critic John Ardoin that Porgy and Bess never was intended as a social statement and should not be faulted for not being one. “To me, Porgy is mainly a beautiful and good story,” he said. “You don’t see Porgy and think ‘this is wrong’ or ‘this is right.’ You are touched by the tale of a cripple who falls in love with a wayward woman and tries to save her with his love.

I do think, however, audiences today see Porgy in a different way than they did in the 1930s,” because the social landscape has been transformed. “Americans have produced many fine things when it comes to opera — [such as] Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa,” said Warfield. “But to me, Porgy towers over all of them.” With its references to jazz, blues and spirituals, “this piece of music could only have been produced by an American,” Hasse said. “Porgy and Bess is not supposed to be a pure sampling of the music that African-Americans created” in the 1920s, “any more than [Georges Bizet’s opera] Carmen is a sampling of Spanish Gypsy music,” he said. Rather, “it’s a new creation that interprets the music of African Americans through the lens of a white, Jewish, big-city composer who is well versed in ragtime, jazz and popular song, and well trained in classical music.” Hasse said Porgy’s recognition as an operatic masterpiece was prompted by several decades of dramatic change in U.S.

society, especially the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. When the Houston Grand Opera unveiled its production in 1976, the verdict was nearly unanimous: Gershwin’s most ambitious work was a magnificent achievement that could hold its own in any opera hall. The Houston production was followed by an equally triumphant staging at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1985. If he were addressing people who are seeing Porgy and Bess for the first time, Hasse said, he would offer this advice: “Open your ears, heart and soul to the melodies — at times haunting, at times soaring, and at almost all times memorable.” Sportin’ Life (Chauncey Packer, from the San Francisco Opera’s 2009 staging of Porgy and Bess) is the gambler who leads Bess astray.

Keywords: George Gershwin Completes Porgy And Bess | World History Project Sep 2 1935 George Gershwin Completes Porgy And Bess On September 2, 1935, George Gershwin signed his name to the completed orchestral score of the opera, Porgy and Bess. The composer called the 700-page score his masterpiece and never ceased to marvel that he had created it. Many critics consider Porgy and Bess to be the first and finest American opera. In February 1934, George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward began their collaboration on a libretto, songs, and music for DuBose Heyward's novel, Porgy, about the African-American Gullah culture of South Carolina. During the summer of 1934, George Gershwin spent several weeks on Folly Island off the coast of Charleston, where the Heywards owned a beach cottage. There, they observed customs of the local people and listened to their music. Gershwin joined in their "shouting" which involved rhythms created by hands and feet as accompaniment to the spirituals.

Source: Library of Congress Added by: Aimee Lucido Porgy and Bess is an opera, first performed in 1935, with music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. It was based on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy and the play of the same name as the opera which he co-wrote with his wife Dorothy Heyward. All three works deal with African American life in the fictitious Catfish Row (based on the real-life Cabbage Row) in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s. Originally conceived by Gershwin as an "American folk opera", Porgy and Bess premiered in New York in the fall of 1935 and featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring and visionary artistic choice at the time. Gershwin chose African American Eva Jessye as the choral director for the opera. Incorporating a wealth of blues and jazz idioms into the classical art form of opera, Gershwin considered it his finest work.

Source: Wikipedia Added by: Aimee Lucido “ Today in History - September 2 | Library of Congress Library of Congress Today in History - September 2 September 2 Listen to this page The Rock Springs Massacre On September 2, 1885, a mob of white coal miners attacked their Chinese co-workers (both groups were employed by the Union Pacific Coal Company) in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory, over a dispute on who had the right to work in a particularly lucrative area of the mine. The violence occurred after Chinese workers refused to participate in a strike for higher wages planned by the American miners. Twenty-eight Chinese were killed and fifteen were wounded; seventy-nine homes were set ablaze. The bodies of many of the dead and wounded were thrown into the flames. Several hundred Chinese workers were chased out of town and fled to the surrounding hills. Property damage was estimated at $150,000. Chinese Camp in the Mines. In “ Three Years in California[1851-54] ,” by J. D. Borthwick; Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1857. p.265.

California as I Saw It: First Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849-1900 A week later, federal troops escorted Chinese laborers back to the mines. After restoring order, the troops remained at Rock Springs until 1898. Although the federal government had refused responsibility for actions in a territory, President Grover Cleveland requested that Congress indemnify the Chinese for their loss of property and Congress complied. Chinese American child in embroidered jacket . William Henry Jackson, photographer, circa 1900. Detroit Publishing Company . Prints & Photographs Division In the mid-1800s, large numbers of Chinese came to the U.S. to build the transcontinental railroad and to work in the gold fields. With completion of the railroad, the ebb of gold prospecting, and widespread economic depression, jobs became scarce and Chinese immigrants faced increasing exclusion, racism, and violence. These factors contributed to the events at Rocks Springs. The Rock Springs Massacre was followed by a similar situation in early November in Tacoma, Washington, where Chinese immigrants were ordered to leave the city. Several hundred Chinese immigrants left before the eviction deadline but another 200 were marched out of the city by force.

Two Chinese settlements were burned down. Learn More The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 External is a multi-format collection illustrating nineteenth- and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California with images and primary source materials including original art, photographs, and cartoons; letters, diary excepts, and legal documents; and pamphlets, sheet music, and other printed matter. View by topical theme or search by keyword for a look into this society. Read the WPA interview “ A Chinese Laundry at a Bargain Sale. ” This interview with a Seattle, Washington woman offers insight into the hostility that Chinese Americans faced in nineteenth-century America. “California as I Saw It”: First Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849-1900 contains many accounts of Chinese life at the time of the California gold rush and the years that followed. Search the collection Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916 on the term Chinese to see early films of Chinatown and its residents. San Francisco Chinese Funeral records the funeral procession of Tom Kim Yung, military attaché with the Chinese legation to the United States whose suicide followed a police assault.

View Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar . This collection documents Japanese Americans interned at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California following the anti-Japanese sentiment that arose after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Porgy and Bess On September 2, 1935, George Gershwin signed his name to the completed orchestral score of the opera, Porgy and Bess. The composer called the 700-page score his masterpiece and never ceased to marvel that he had created it. Many critics consider Porgy and Bess to be the first and finest American opera. Summertime, and the livin’ is easy Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high “Summertime.” Porgy and Bess Portrait of Leontyne Price, as Bess in Porgy & Bess . Carl Van Vechten, photographer, May 19, 1953. Van Vechten Collection .

Prints & Photographs Division In February 1934, George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward began their collaboration on a libretto, songs, and music for DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel, Porgy. In 1926, the Heywards had turned the novel, which features African-American Gullah culture of South Carolina, into a play that was produced by the Theater Guild in New York in 1927. During the summer of 1934, George Gershwin spent several weeks on Folly Island off the coast of Charleston, where the Heywards owned a beach cottage. There, they observed customs of the local people and listened to their music. Gershwin joined in their “shouting” which involved rhythms created by hands and feet as accompaniment to the spirituals. Portrait of John W. Bubbles as Sporting Life in Porgy & Bess . Carl Van Vechten, photographer, December 27, 1935. Van Vechten Collection .

Prints & Photographs Division The opera opened in Boston on September 30 and premiered in New York on October 10, 1935. The cast included the Juilliard-trained singers Anne Brown as Bess and Ruby Elzy as Serena; Todd Duncan, a Howard University music professor as Porgy; and vaudevillian John W. Bubbles as Sportin’ Life. The songs that they sang, including “Summertime,” “I’ve Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “Bess, You is My Woman Now,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” have entered the American popular repertoire, but are musically subtle and difficult to render—containing jazz, blues, and folk elements. George Gershwin wrote of his composition, “I think the music is so marvelous, I don’t believe I wrote it.” Most reviewers welcomed the opera. One notable exception was composer Virgil Thomson who had collaborated with Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera with an all-black cast. Thomson called Porgy and Bess “crooked folklore and half-way opera.” In spite of these sour notes, the opera played to appreciative audiences in Boston and New York.

Actors Protest Segregation During its Washington, D.C., run, actor Todd Duncan led the cast in a strike to protest the National Theatre’s segregation policy. The actors held out against offers by the theater to permit African Americans to attend a “blacks only” performance. As spokesman for the cast, Duncan stated that he would never play in a theater that barred him from purchasing tickets to certain seats because of his race. Theater management gave in to this demand and for the first time an integrated audience attended the National Theatre External . The opera folded after its Washington, D.C., run; West Coast engagements proved a financial disaster. For many years, Porgy and Bess received more attention and acclaim in Europe and the Soviet Union than in the United States. Gershwin’s complete score was not heard on an American stage again until 1976, when the Houston Grand Opera External mounted a critically acclaimed production. In 1985, fifty years after its Broadway premiere, the “folk opera” was performed by New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company. The 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess was added to the National Film Registry in 2011.

For background on the tumultuous making of the film, read the essay, Porgy and Bess (PDF), written by film historian Foster Hirsch. Learn More Search on Gershwin or Porgy and Bess in the Van Vechten Collection for more photographs from a variety of productions of the opera. Explore Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip , an ethnographic field study completed by the Lomaxes four years after Gershwin’s trip to South Carolina. Listen to original sound recordings of spirituals sung by a chain gang in South Carolina, and see photographs and manuscripts from the Lomaxes’ journey through nine Southern states. See the Research Materials in this collection to learn more about the trip and the collection. George and Ira Gershwin bio Porgy and Bess and the Music of George and Ira Gershwin George Gershwin (1898-1937) was one of the great composers of the 20th century. He had the rare distinction of succeeding in both the classical and popular music idioms.

Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was a milestone in the history of the Broadway musical and has become one of the most beloved works in American musical theater. Porgy and Bess is often described as a “folk opera,” as distinct from a musical. Opera is usually defined as a theatrical performance in which all the dialogue is set to music or sung in some way. Most text in opera that is not part of a major song or aria is delivered in the form of “recitative,” which consists of text set to music. Porgy and Bess was originally written as an opera, but the Metropolitan Opera refused to produce the work after Gershwin insisted on using an African American cast. The work was instead produced on Broadway in 1935 and met with great success. Paradoxically, classical music critics objected to songs like “Summertime” and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” as too close to popular music to be called “opera” and drama critics objected to the extensive use of recitative. Porgy and Bess is based on the novel Porgy by Dubose Heyward, who was also the lyricist.

The work portrays an African American community in Charleston, South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century, and its plot centers on a love affair between Porgy, a physically disabled man, and Bess, a prostitute. In developing the work Gershwin visited the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina to research the music, culture, and unique language forms of the islands’ African American Gullah community. Porgy and Bess is best known for its songs, and many have become standards—songs that are an accepted part of the repertoire of American jazz or pop music. A number of Gershwin’s songs have transcended multiple idioms and are recognized as standards in jazz, blues, rock and roll, country, and even Latin music. “Summertime” is an excellent example of such a song: it is one of the most widely performed and recorded songs in American popular music, with over 1200 recordings in virtually every style by artists like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Janis Joplin, Ray Barretto, Willie Nelson, and Joni Mitchell. Listening Exercise Go on line and listen to excerpts from three different versions of “Summertime” by George Gershwin.

The first is by opera singer Audra McDonald as it was performed in the folk opera, Porgy and Bess. Next listen to an instrumental version by Miles Davis from his 1955 collaboration with jazz composer Gil Evans. How is the texture and mood of the work changed? Does this instrumental version still convey the mood and feeling of the original? Finally, listen to Joni Mitchell’s 1999 collaboration with Herbie Hancock from a tribute album by Hancock entitled Gershwin’s World. There are hundreds of recorded versions of this remarkably simple song available today. Why do you think it is still so popular? Like many other Tin Pan Alley composers of the early 20th century, Gershwin’s parents were recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had arrived in the United States just before the turn of the 20th century. Gershwin was a child prodigy on piano and received musical training at a young age. Like many of his contemporaries, he began his career as a song plugger and accompanist for Tin Pan Alley publishers.

His early songwriting was influenced by Irving Berlin, and his career was catapulted out of obscurity with the success of his first hit song “Swanee.” The song sold over a million copies of sheet music and over two million recordings, sung by Al Jolson. Gershwin had a life-long collaboration with his brother Ira, who was an outstanding lyricist. They had a string of hit musicals in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including Lady Be Good, Strike Up the Band, Girl Crazy, and the Pulitzer prize-winning, Of Thee I Sing. The shows produced hits like “Fascinating Rhythm”, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and “I Got Rhythm.” Unfortunately, few of the shows have been revived because the topical nature of their plots does not have much contemporary appeal. Gershwin would have been enormously successful on the strength of his earlier works, but there was another side to his musicianship. In 1924, with the encouragement of band leader Paul Whiteman, he composed “Rhapsody In Blue,” the first of a small number of classical orchestral works.

Gershwin’s early classical training—and his exceptional self-confidence—motivated him to compose classical music that would “bridge the gap” between orchestral and popular styles. Produced with the assistance of orchestrator and composer Ferde Grofé, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, originally a composition for jazz band and piano, successfully straddled the classical/popular divide to become one of the most popular orchestral works of the 20th century. All of Gershwin’s classical works, including Rhapsody In Blue, Concerto in F, An American In Paris, Second Rhapsody, and Porgy and Bess contain a uniquely American flavor that has often been described as “jazz-influenced.” Gershwin’s fascination with blues and jazz accompanied a period of explosive development of these genres, and he was one of the earliest European American composers to seek direct contact with African American innovators like syncopated band leader James Reese Europe and stride piano innovator James P. Johnson. As a result, Gershwin incorporated blues inflections, syncopation, and jazz harmony into his work in a way that appealed to black and white audiences alike.

In the words of Charles Hamm, There was something in the music of black Americans that stuck a responsive chord somewhere deep in Gershwin, something in their music that he grasped in an instinctive way. In turn, this same indefinable quality found its way into many of his songs, to which black Americans responded in a similarly instinctive way. . . . Almost any listing of repertories of black jazz musicians in the 1920s, ‘30s, and even ‘40s will include songs by Gershwin. 9 Gershwin died of a brain tumor at the age of 37. His popularity as a composer and song writer remain undiminished, and the impact of his work on classical music, popular song, and jazz remains unequaled in the history of popular American music. The Tumultuous Life of Porgy and Bess | Humanities The Tumultuous Life of Porgy and Bess By James Standifer | HUMANITIES, November/December 1997 | Volume 18, Number 6 Porgy and Bess reflects the odyssey of the African American in American culture.

--Lawrence Levine Porgy and Bess belongs in a museum and no self-respecting African American should want to see it, or be seen in it. --Harold Cruse While Porgy and Bess has become a cultural artifact, one of the controversies over the opera reflects the complex way the issue of race continues to be played out on the American scene. A new documentary, Porgy and Bess: An American Voice, explores the opera's place in contemporary music against the backdrop of the developing history of race over the last sixty years. The story is a simple one, set in Charleston, South Carolina, at the turn of the century in a small black enclave called Catfish Row. It tells about Porgy, a crippled beggar who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, and who falls in love with Bess, a woman of uncertain reputation who is under the domination of a stevedore named Crown. Crown kills a Catfish Row inhabitant in a craps game and flees. When he returns for Bess, he is killed in a fight with Porgy. Porgy goes to jail, and Bess is enticed to New York by a flashy gambler, Sportin' Life.

At the opera's end, Porgy is heading to New York to search for her. It has had a "triumphant saga for a half century on stage, backstage, on film and around the world," Hollis Alpert writes in The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess. It played Vienna's Volksopera and Milan's La Scala to adoring crowds. In World War II, the Danes performed it over the objections of their Nazi occupiers. In the postwar era, it became the first American theatrical venture to play in the Soviet Union. Alpert notes that "It is taken for granted now that Porgy and Bess represents an epochal event in American music." It has involved countless stars: from Todd Duncan and Anne Brown in the original cast to Leontyne Price, William Warfield, Etta Moten, Cab Calloway, Maya Angelou, Brock Peters, Robert Guillaume, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis Jr., and Pearl Bailey. Blacks themselves were not unanimously favorable to the work.

African American social historian Harold Cruse, in dismissing it as a museum piece, says: "It portrays the seamiest side of Negro life -- presumably the image of black people that white audiences want to see." He warned that Porgy and Bess traveled the same tortured path on which African American culture too often gets to the public: via whites and third parties who give it their own interpretation. In the case of Porgy and Bess, the third party was a triad of talents: composer George Gershwin, his lyricist brother Ira, and playwright DuBose Heyward. Gershwin had long wanted to write a new kind of opera that would fuse classical and jazz idioms. In 1926, he thought he had found the vehicle: a new novel by Heyward titled Porgy. Gershwin said he had tried to read himself to sleep with the book; instead, he "read himself wide awake" and by four in the morning was writing to Heyward to see if he might be interested in a collaboration. Heyward, a South Carolinian, was part of the primitivism movement that had begun in Paris around 1906 and spread to America.

Through the works of Rousseau, Montaigne, Diderot, the movement saw non-Westernized man, the "noble savage," enjoying an innocence that civilized man, despite technological superiority, could not match. Heyward wrote: "I saw the primitive Negro as the inheritor of a source of delight that I would give much to possess." He chose a setting and a group of characters new to Southern fiction --the Negro underworld of a traditionally Southern city. Their ancestors came from the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and their community retained much of its African heritage. Even in 1925, the novel evoked an aura of strangeness, of the exotic. Heyward biographer Frank Durham writes: "Catfish Row, a slum courtyard almost touching the life-giving and death-dealing ocean, is a microcosm, a Negro world only rarely invaded by the white man, and its cast of characters, dominated by the "secret law," emerge as a vivid collection of individuals." Heyward stresses his theme of primitivism in modified use of the Gullah dialect and in the use of spirituals.

His Porgy is not subhuman or a buffoon, but a human being whose problems are no better or worse than those of whites, merely different. Heyward was already at work on a stage version. It opened on Broadway in 1927 and ran for 367 performances. A New York Times critic termed it "ruder, franker, coarser than it is between book covers," and attributed this to the African American acting, which "expressed those qualities of human nature." Although the performance was segregated, people in Harlem celebrated the event. Everybody seemed to know someone in the cast. Evelyn Ellis played Bess; Frank Wilson, Porgy; Jack Carter, Crown; and Percy Verwayne, Sportin' Life. By the time Paul Robeson briefly replaced Jack Carter as Crown, many Harlemites knew the characters' lines as well as the understudies did. In 1930 Gershwin received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera to write a grand opera, one distinctly American. He was free to select the libretto.

While Gershwin was impressed with the Met's offer, he knew that the venue would present some formidable problems: He wanted to do Porgy and it would require an all-Negro cast. The Met's doors were closed to Negro performers; not one was on its roster. For three years, Gershwin delayed the decision while he searched for another story. Nothing suited his needs like the Porgy story, and neither he nor Heyward wanted it done in blackface, as was the practice of that time. The composers of Show Boat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, made an attractive offer to Heyward for the musical rights--the famous Al Jolson was to play Porgy. Kern, Hammerstein, and Jolson plannned to turn the book into a musical comedy using a cast in blackface. The pressure forced both Gershwin and Heyward, who intuitively knew the potential of Porgy, to announce in October of 1933 the composition of a folk opera based on the Heyward book to be performed on Broadway with an all-Negro cast. It would be produced by the Theater Guild, which had produced Heyward's highly successful stage play.

Neither Heyward nor Gershwin could imagine fully the challenges and exhilaration the task would provide. Heyward converted his stage version of Porgy into a libretto in late 1933 and early 1934, sending the typescript to Gershwin scene by scene. According to Joseph Swain, Gershwin spent eleven months composing the music, from February 1934 to January 1935, and nine more months orchestrating it. The collaboration between Heyward and George Gershwin (and later Gershwin's brother Ira) was a harmonious one. Heyward provided plot, dialogue, and even some lyrics: "Summertime," "My Man's Gone Now," and "A Woman is a Sometime Thing" have sources in the play text and are copyrighted solely to Heyward. When Heyward eventually had trouble coming up with lyrics that satisfied George, Ira Gershwin became the versifier and polisher. The several musical styles evident in Porgy and Bess derive from this two- and three-sided collaboration.

Porgy came at a time of upheaval for African Americans as they moved from south to north for jobs in the "Great Migration." As new northerners, they were adapting themselves and their rural culture to urban ways while endeavoring to keep pieces of their old society's structure. Radio and movies were moving Americans toward a common culture, although anomalies remained. The Eva Jessye Choir and her Dixie Jubilee Singers pioneered on the Major Bowles radio show and drew huge audiences. At the same time, with his face blacked with cork, Al Jolson debuted in The Jazz Singer. "The Negro had arrived in talking pictures -- as a blackface comedian!" commented film historian Peter Noble. "This may be considered ironically significant since the Negro actor's film career for a number of years followed in the same tradition: white men in blackface, or coloured men in inane black masks -- on the screen it amounted to the same thing." The American cultural scene was infatuated with the new. By the twenties there were the New Poetry, the New Drama, the New Art, the New Music, and the New Negro.

Poets and novelists like James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes attracted the attention of avant-garde literary circles. From the high-stepping of the black-produced Shuffle Along to hot spots like the Cotton Club and the Savoy, the excitement of African American music throbbed through the twenties. The blues provided rich opportunities for musicians like Gershwin, interested in an authentic American musical voice. Porgy and Bess represents Gershwin's most effective mixture of musical elements: folk (blues, spirituals, gospel), popular (blues, jazz, Tin Pan Alley), and classical (the recitatives, the use of the academic fugue and canonic techniques, the aria, the leitmotif). However, since its first appearance, the problem of classifying has remained. Is it an opera, a folk opera, or a musical? What does it owe to black music, to popular music, to European tradition, to Gershwin alone? Gershwin and his French contemporaries, Darius Milhaud and Maurice Ravel, had strong interests in fusing classical music with American jazz.

In 1923, Gershwin accompanied Milhaud to Harlem to hear what Gershwin described to him as "real jazz." In 1928, he took Ravel. One of the performers they heard was a friend of Gershwin's, African American musician and composer James P. Johnson, who wrote musicals, orchestral works, and even an opera. Gershwin's life paralleled Johnson's; both plugged songs and made piano rolls for Aeolian, and both studied classical music while working as entertainers. Gershwin based rhythms of the first movement of his Concerto in F on Johnson's Charleston. In a 1992 New York Times article, David Schiff wrote: "Gershwin, like many stylish New Yorkers of the period, would visit Harlem at night. The next day he could turn uptown straw into Broadway gold. Johnson worked and lived in Harlem, and his music came out of the traditions of that community." An early attempt at an opera, Blue Monday, with music by Gershwin, libretto by Buddy De Sylvia, and orchestration by Will Vodery, a Negro arranger and good friend of Gershwin, was an embarrassing failure.

One critic called the opera "the most dismal, stupid and incredible black-faced sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated." Another critic, identifying himself using only the initials W.S., said it was a genuine human plot of American life and foreshadowed things to come from Gershwin. However, the reaction to Porgy and Bess at its premiere in 1935, was decidedly mixed. The New York Times had three critics and three views. Music critic Olin Downes wrote: "The style is at one moment of opera, and another of operetta or sheer Broadway entertainment. . . . "When it came to sheer acting last night, certain operatic functionaries should have been present.

If the Metropolitan chorus could even put one half the action into the riot scene in the second act of Meistersinger that the Negro cast put into the fitht that followed the crap game it would be not merely refreshing but miraculous." Drama critic Brooks Atkinson commented: "Turning Porgy into opera has resulted in a deluge of casual remarks that have to be thoughtfully intoned and that annoyingly impede the action." Chief music critic Joseph Swain observed that "the drama critics objected to recitative per se and the music critics to 'Summertime,' 'I Got Plenty o' Nuttin' and other tunes which seemed 'too popular' for opera." Musicologist Charles Hamm notes that opera has "continuous music, dialogue, and recitative whereas, in musical comedy, the plot is advanced by spoken dialogue." One can see clear aspects of a Broadway song style in "Summertime," "Oh, I Can't Sit Down" and "It Ain't Necessarily So," Porgy's "Banjo Song" and "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin." Rodney Milnes, author of a review in Opera, argued that Porgy must be seen as an opera -- both as an inheritor of a long tradition, and as an

 inspiration for much that followed.

"Its influence on Peter Grimes grows more obvious as time goes by, and there was never any doubt of its influence on Street Scene. In the case of both works, the 'folk opera' or 'Broadway opera' labels were the result of managerial nervousness about potential customers being put off." Gershwin himself said in the New York Times in 1935: Because Porgy and Bess deals with Negro Life in America it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in the opera and I have adapted my method to utilize the drama, the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor, the dancing and the irrepressible high spirits of the race. If doing this, I have created a new form, which combines opera with theater, this new form has come quite naturally out of the material. Lehman Engel in The American Musical Theater suggests that the debate over whether Porgy is an opera or a musical reflects on the division of high art and popular art: "It has always seemed to me that this annoyance with Porgy is far more than the product of semantics than of anything Gershwin put into his score.

lt is as if just calling Porgy by the name 'Opera' serves to assail the sensibilities of those who believe that such a classification is a slur on the dignity of Wagner, Verdi, and Mozart." Wayne Shirley sees Porgy and Bess as an opera of a people. It is like Die Meistersinger of Wagner, he says, where "There's not just a chorus of mastersingers. Each one of them has a name, a character and all emerge as real people." Porgy and Bess is "the American opera" he asserts, just as Boris Godunov is the Russian opera and Tristan is the German opera, and Carmen the French or Spanish opera." Gershwin found casting difficult. The Porgy and Bess score required trained voices that could handle operatic content and jazz rhythms and tones. He invited Todd Duncan to his apartment to audition for the role of Porgy. After Duncan sang exactly twelve bars of lungi dal caro bene, Gershwin asked him "Will you be my Porgy?" At a later meeting with Duncan, George and Ira Gershwin went through almost the entire score.

Duncan remembers, "I knew it would cause controversy among my people because of its representation of black life and music. But, Gershwin had sold me on it right then and there!" The premiere performance at the Colonial Theatre in Boston drew a fifteen-minute ovation. The critics were virtually unanimous in their praise. Edwin F. Melvin said, "Porgy and Bess has dramatic intensity and power, with songs, dances and racial humor that seem to spring naturally from the place and the people. . . . " As author Robert Rushmore points out: "To the eternal credit of the city of Boston, the audience and critics were not confused by this strange new kind of folk opera and recognized its greatness." But, at three and a half hours, the opera was too long. After several cuts, the new version moved to New York. It opened in New York October 10, 1935, at the Alvin Theatre, to mixed reviews. Todd Duncan and Anne Brown were in the leading roles. It played 124 times on Broadway and toured for three months to various large cities around the country, but was a failure commercially.

Brown remembers the last stop, in Washington, D.C., in March of 1936: As expected we were told that the National Theater would be a segregated house. Todd and I refused to perform and were threatened by the Theater Guild who said we had to sing or there would be reprisals. We cared less. We were adamant. With help from other cast members and political figures like Mary McLeod Bethune and Ralph Bunche, we succeeded and the National Theater admitted African Americans to a desegregated house. But after our performance, it returned to its original policy of segregation. The Washington performance was the last production Gershwin was to see; by the time it was mounted on the West Coast in 1938, Gershwin had died of a brain tumor. That run, like New York, was brief. It wasn't until World War II that Porgy found financial success in a production by Cheryl Crawford, who brought back Brown and Duncan.

Successful as Crawford's version was, some members of the Gershwin family called it "the bargain basement production." Crawford had made drastic changes: The orchestra was cut to twenty-seven musicians, the size of the cast was cut by half, and some recitatives were eliminated in favor of spoken dialogue. Surprisingly no one, including Ira Gershwin, seemed to object to the streamlining, which brought the production nearer to a Broadway musical than the opera George Gershwin originally conceived. Virgil Thomson and Olin Downes, who had been critical of the 1935 production, changed their views. Downes decided that "in his own way Gershwin has taken a substantial step and advanced the cause of native opera." Thomson attributed much of his change of heart to the diminished instrumentation and the elimination of the recitatives. In June 1942, Anne Brown left the cast and Etta Moten became Bess. The talented young actress balked at using the word "nigger" as given in the libretto. Eva Jessye recalls: The word "nigger" occurred many times in the first scripts. Members did not like this but were afraid to object, that being the tenor of the times.

But they could not bring themselves to speak it right out, so agreed to drown it out where ever and whenever it occurred in performance, thenceforth, disregarding all score markings or conductor's directions. The total ensemble would bombard the word with an avalanche of sounds, groans, screams . . . fit to raise the dead, to the puzzlement of the helpless conductor. Moten refused to sing it, and the word was eliminated with the full support of Ira Gershwin, who rewrote parts of the libretto. A year after the Crawford revival, the opera made its first appearance overseas. The Danish Royal Opera premiered it in Copenhagen in Danish on March 23, 1943, with an all-white cast. The opera was a great success, so much so that the Nazi occupiers warned the opera managers that an American work of any kind was not to their liking and that this one must be immediately withdrawn. Nevertheless, the opera was performed twenty-one more times to sold-out houses and with the theater surrounded by a cordon of Danish police. Finally, the Gestapo lost patience and said that if Porgy and Bess were shown one more time, the opera house would be blown up.

The opera's managers ended the run. When the war was over, Porgy and Bess was reinstalled in the repertory, occasionally with Todd Duncan and Anne Brown recreating their roles. Porgy was seen sporadically on film. Warner Brothers' 1945 Rhapsody in Blue included a portion featuring Anne Brown in her original stage role. Another sequence, originally conceived for black dancers, was performed by whites in blackface. The street attitude toward Porgy changed as attitudes toward civil rights changed in America. What Roosevelt began, President Truman furthered: He created a committee on civil rights, which called for an end to lynch laws, voter testing, Jim Crow laws, and discrimination in the armed forces. Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. It was in this growing era of awareness that a new Porgy and Bess was undertaken. In 1952, Blevins Davis and Robert Breen began auditions for a European tour. Cheryl Crawford recommended William Warfield for the role of Porgy. To play Bess, the directors selected twenty-four-year-old Leontyne Price, who was singing the role of Mistress Ford in Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts.

This revival restored a great deal of the original music that characterized it as opera and added music never before heard. In mid-February, Breen talked to the Metropolitan Opera about playing the house before leaving for Europe. The Metropolitan's Board of Directors was enthusiastic; they changed their minds, however, on the grounds that the Met had a long-standing policy to allow only its own productions to play in its house. After Breen contended race was the issue, the board once again reversed itself, but by that time the production was booked for a brief U.S. tour and then Europe under the aegis of the State Department. With Warfield, Price, and Cab Calloway as Sportin' Life, Porgy and Bess was a theatrical triumph in Vienna, Berlin, and London. It returned to New York's Ziegfeld Theater, where it was also a hit. The black press launched a furious attack.

James Hicks, a reporter with the Baltimore Afro-American, reviled the opera as "the most insulting, the most libelous, the most degrading act that could possibly be perpetrated against colored Americans of modern times." William Warfield noted: "In 1952 the black community wasn't listening to anything about plenty of nothing being good enough for me. Blacks began talking about being black and proud." A second, longer tour began in the fall of 1954 to Latin American, the Middle East, and Europe. In February 1955 Porgy and Bess went to Milan's La Scala, the first time an American work and company had been invited there, and played for a a full week. La Scala asked for a second week but had to be turned down. Maya Angelou, who played Ruby, recalls: This was something unique: famous white American performers had appeared at La Scala, but never blacks, especially not a huge cast of blacks such as Porgy provided. Both audience and company were tense. Every member of the cast was coiled tight like a spring, wound taut for a shattering release.

The moment the curtain opened, the singers pulled the elegant first-night audience into the harshness of black Southern life. The love story unfolded with such tenderness that the singers wept visible tears. Time and again, the audience came to their feet, yelling and applauding. We had performed Porgy and Bess as never before, and if the La Scala patrons loved us, it was only fitting because we certainly performed as if we were in love with one another. In December of that same year, the opera company became the first American theater group to perform in Russia since the Bolshevik revolution. The U.S. State Department refused to pay for the tour, so the Soviets did. Novelist Truman Capote joined the company and wrote about it in The Muses are Heard. Capote, along with many blacks, including some in the cast, were concerned that the struggling, God-fearing, addicted residents of Catfish Row might be taken from the Communist viewpoint as a picture of racial exploitation by southern whites. They were "gratefully" proven wrong. The director in a pre-curtain speech assured the audience that Porgy and Bess was set in the past and no more reflected the present than it did life under czarist rule.

That wasn't an issue: the entranced audiences in Leningrad and throughout Europe were there to hear black singers singing opera. At home the battle was far from won. In 1954, the opera had been scheduled for four performances in Charleston, the play's first performance in the Deep South. Then, trouble arose. South Carolina's law forbade the "mixing of the two races in places of amusement" for what was called "historic reasons of incompatibility." While the Dock Street Theater management and the Stagecrafters, a local African American theater organization, had come to a compromise -- seating whites on one side of the auditorium, African Americans on the other -- local and national pressure for integrated seating led to the theater's decision to cancel. Through the fifties, Porgy fell into eclipse, as the Civil Rights movement grew, with the Montgomery bus boycott and school desegregation. There was a quickly forgotten film version with Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sammy Davis Jr. The sixties passed Porgy by as well as the decade moved from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X.

Nat King Cole became one of the first black TV hosts, and Diahann Carrol the star of her own series, Julia. Porgy was still there, but strangely out of step, out of tune. In 1960, Negroes began quietly asking for their rights; but by 1969 even the racial identification had changed: Blacks were demanding them. They were more outspoken and image conscious, and social conflicts broke out between blacks and whites. When Porgy and Bess was revived, Harold Cruse was outraged, calling it "the most incongruous, contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World." Scholar John Hope Franklin saw more to it. In his introduction to Three Negro Classics, he wrote: "Sportin' Life clowns but not for white audiences. Porgy's clowning is a deliberate frustration of white power. Porgy also plays Uncle Tom, but he is never servile and lives for no white master." By 1970, the year of Charleston's tricentennial, Porgy and Bess had become a period piece. The opera finally opened in the city that was its home.

It was the only amateur production of Porgy and Bess the Gershwin family had ever permitted in the United States. In 1976, Porgy was revived again, this time by the Houston Grand Opera. While generally well received, it drew a review from Harold C. Schonberg, music critic of the New York Times -- and white -- which curiously echoed black critics of the past. "The libretto is fake," he wrote, "and the music is fake. The libretto invents a never-never land with crap-shooting, watermelon-toting black stereotypes who in moments of stress fall on their knees and start shouting spirituals.

It is true that by now Porgy and Bess can be regarded as a period piece; still, there is something distasteful about the condescension of librettist and composerþtwo white men slumming in Charleston." Schonberg notwithstanding, fifty years after its premiere Porgy and Bess made it to the Met in what conductor James Levine saw as an appropriate rounding out of piece and place -- "a great American opera should be in the repertory of the great American opera house." The decades between had seen a number of African American singers perform at the Met, including Simon Estes and Grace Bumbry. Bumbry, however, had to be coaxed to play Bess. "I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there." The versions over the years -- in one Porgy trades his goat cart for crutches -- demonstrate the story's resilience.

Along with the ironies and contradictions and even the stereotypes, Porgy carries with it universal themes of community and belonging. As critic Rodney Milnes wrote: "If ever a twentieth century opera aspires to make the world a better place, as the Magic Flute did in the eighteenth century and perhaps similarly without knowing it, it is Porgy and Bess." About the Author James Standifer is professor of music at the University of Michigan and director of the Standifer Video Archive of Oral Histories. Funding Information Porgy and Bess: An American Voice, which airs in February, received $911,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as substantial support from the Ford Foundation and the National Black Programming Consortium. Keywords Journeying through South America, Alexander von Humboldt sought nothing less than "the unity of nature." By Anna Maria Gillis Famed translators Pevear and Volokhonsky reach another milestone. By Kevin Mahnken Frankness and plain speaking made Carl Sandburg a celebrity. By Danny Heitman In studying the sea, we are returning to our beginnings. By John R. Gillis What accounts for Emerson's endurance as a writer?

By Danny Heitman The Charleston Museum | News and Events » Charleston’s Porgy and Bess News and Events > General News > Charleston’s Porgy and Bess Charleston’s Porgy and Bess Published in 1925, Porgy, the woeful tale of an African American beggar and his relationships with Bess and others who lived in the “Row” come directly from the observations and experiences Du Bose Heyward encountered while growing up in the economically depressed Charleston of the early 1900s. Frequently ill as a child, Heyward spent much of his time bedridden. Influenced in a large part by his mother, he used this time to study literature and honed his writing skills by composing poetry and short essays. Photograph of Du Bose Heyward sitting next to Mary P. Means as they ride the Folly Beach ferry, c.1920 Although, descended from one of Charleston’s aristocratic families, Heyward did not grow up in a luxurious setting. He was just two years old when his father, Edwin, died forcing his mother, Janie, to work odd jobs which she supplemented by writing poetry to meet expenses.

The young Du Bose sold newspapers until he dropped out of school at age fourteen to work in a hardware store. He later worked among the black stevedores as a steamship checker and by twenty-three was an insurance agent at R.M. Marshall & Brothers on Broad Street. Heyward soon after partnered with childhood friend, Harry J. O’Neill, and together they created the Heyward & O’Neill insurance company. At last financially independent, Heyward moved into a house at 76 Church Street (now the Du Bose Heyward House) and in 1922 won a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire for writers, poets, playwrights, artists and composers. There he met his wife, Dorothy, a playwright, and moved back to Charleston. Photograph of a young passenger in his goat cart in the early 1900s taken by Helen Walker Tucker Two days later, Porgy drove his chariot out through the wide entrance into a land of romance and adventure. He was seated with the utmost gravity in an inverted packing-case that proclaimed with unconscious irony the virtues of a well-known toilet soap. Beneath the box two solid lop-sided wheels turned heavily.

Before him, between a pair of improvised shafts, a patriarchal goat tugged with the dogged persistence of age which has been placed upon its mettle, and flaunted an intolerable stench in the face of the complaisant and virtuous soap box. The character “Porgy” in Du Bose Heyward’s novel of the same name was inspired from a man known in Charleston as Samuel “Goat Cart Sam” Smalls, a crippled black man who sold peanuts and used a goat-drawn cart as his mode of transportation. Unlike Heyward’s Porgy, however, Samuel Smalls was known as a rather cruel and unkind man with a propensity for drink according to acquaintances who interacted with him in the African American community. He apparently was somewhat of a ladies’ man and heavy gambler who could be found often at a popular gambling spot called the Bull Pen on Charleston’s Neck where his goat would wait patiently outside. One particular News and Courier crime report details an incident in which Smalls attempted to escape the police in his goat cart after he shot at a woman named Maggie Barnes.

Heyward read about the mad dash for freedom and was apparently impressed enough with Smalls’s daring that he recreated the scene for Porgy in a more heroic light. Photograph of Cabbage Row in 1928 taken by John Bennett Catfish Row, in which Porgy lived, was not a row at all, but a great brick structure that lifted its three stories about the three sides of a court. The fourth side was partly closed by a high wall, surmounted by jagged edges of broken glass set firmly in old lime plaster, and pierced in its center by a wide entrance-way. The famous Catfish Row that Heyward immortalized in his novel is known more commonly as Cabbage Row in Charleston. Located at 89-91 Church Street, the “Row” is actually a pair of three-story buildings connected by a central arcade that leads to an inner courtyard. During the time that Du Bose and Dorothy lived in their Church Street home, African Americans inhabited these decaying structures, residing on the top two floors while using the ground floor to sell cabbage and a variety of other vegetables from the front windows.

It is no wonder then why Heyward chose this setting as the focal point for his characters to live and gather after a long day’s work of loading cotton and cleaning mansions. Passing the tenements everyday on the way to his office on Broad Street, Heyward would have no doubt witnessed the lively interactions between the people living in the “Row’s court.” Porgy and Bess, Act 1 Scene 1 performed at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, September 1935 The end came quickly, and with startling suddenness. Crown broke his adversary’s weakening hold, and held him the length of one mighty arm. The other swung the cotton-hook downward. Then he dropped his victim, and swaggered drunkenly toward the street. Even to the most inexperienced the result would have been obvious. Robbins was dead: horribly dead. Though Heyward’s Porgy was well received after its publication, Porgy, Bess, Maria, Crown and Sportin’ Life did not gain legendary fame until George Gershwin read the entire novel one sleepless night. Immediately writing to Heyward, he proposed turning his story into an opera.

Dorothy had begun to transform the book into a play, however, and recalled later that Gershwin seemed not to mind postponing his plans. She wrote, “it was a great moment when George said there was plenty of room for both play and opera. And plenty of time. He wanted to spend years in study before composing his opera.” Gershwin would go on to write three satirical operettas while Dorothy and Du Bose finished their play. Premiering on October 10, 1927 as Porgy: A Play in Four Acts at the Guild Theatre in New York City, it featured an all African American cast and ran until August of 1928. Finally in 1933, Gershwin and Heyward began work on Porgy and Bess. Du Bose with the help of Ira Gershwin converted the novel into an opera libretto while George composed its music. Spending some time on Folly Beach and attending more than one “Negro spiritual,” Gershwin composed the music over an eleven month span and then took another nine months to orchestrate it.

Two years later, on September 20, 1935, Porgy and Bess premiered at the Colonial Theatre in Boston before making its New York debut at the Alvin Theatre on October 10, 1935. Incredibly, after two attempts to desegregate the Dock Street Theatre, the opera would not be performed in Charleston until 1970. The first attempt was in 1935 when the all black cast refused to perform in front of a segregated audience. The second attempt in 1954 gained a little more attention with four shows scheduled, but only after a compromise had been reached to seat blacks on one side of the auditorium and whites on the other. Unfortunately, after receiving both local and national pressure concerning the integrated seating, the theatre shut down the production with several rehearsals as the only evidence the show was ever in Charleston.

Upcoming Events Haunting, Soaring, Controversial Porgy and Bess | IIP Digital Haunting, Soaring, Controversial Porgy and Bess 02 April 2010 The opera Porgy and Bess is now recognized as an American masterpiece, but when it was first performed in Boston and New York in 1935, it generated both controversy and acclaim. Composed by George Gershwin — a white, Jewish New Yorker with Russian immigrant roots — Porgy and Bess is part of the international operatic repertoire. Several of its songs, particularly “Summertime,” have become classics. Yet since its premiere 75 years ago, the opera has been viewed by some critics as perpetuating racial stereotypes. With its references to jazz, blues and spirituals, “this piece of music could only have been produced by an American,” says John Edward Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution.

If he were addressing people who were seeing Porgy and Bess for the first time, Hass says, he would offer this advice: “Open your ears, heart and soul to the melodies — at times haunting, at times soaring, and at almost all times memorable.” Above, Eric Owens and Laquita Mitchell in the San Francisco Opera’s 2009 production of Porgy and Bess The Full Story Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” Celebrates Its 75th Anniversary Beloved, once-controversial opera showcases America’s rich musical heritage By Lauren Monsen Staff Writer Washington — The opera Porgy and Bess is now recognized as an American masterpiece, but when it was first performed in Boston and New York in 1935, it generated both controversy and acclaim. Composed by George Gershwin — a white, Jewish New Yorker with Russian immigrant roots — Porgy and Bess is part of the international operatic repertoire. Several of its songs, particularly “Summertime,” have become classics. Yet since its premiere 75 years ago, the opera has been viewed by some critics as perpetuating racial stereotypes.

Set in a vibrant African-American community in Charleston, South Carolina, called Catfish Row, Porgy and Bess tells the story of a crippled beggar and the woman he loves. Their lives are touched by poverty, violence and, in Bess’ case, drugs. The work “was introduced as a folk opera, occupying a midway point between opera and Broadway musical,” according to John Edward Hasse, curator of American music at the Smithsonian Institution. At the time of its debut, the subject matter of Porgy and Bess was considered daring, Hasse said. During the era of racial segregation, U.S. audiences were unaccustomed to music that gave serious artistic expression to the lives of African Americans. Also, the principal roles were sung by black performers instead of white performers in black roles, the common practice then. Gershwin (whose brother Ira wrote the opera’s lyrics) considered Porgy his finest work. As it happened, the public enthusiastically embraced Porgy, while music critics were divided. The New York press, for the most part, disliked Gershwin’s unconventional approach, especially his incorporation of distinctly American musical elements (jazz, blues, traditional spirituals) into an operatic framework.

However, The Christian Science Monitor proclaimed Porgy and Bess “Gershwin’s most important contribution to music,” and The Boston Transcript said, “Gershwin must now be accepted as a serious composer.” MIXED FEELINGS IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY African Americans often were ambivalent about Porgy and Bess. Some felt it was demeaning and promoted racial stereotypes, but others defended it as a work of surpassing beauty and tremendous emotional power. Classically trained African-American singers have wrestled with the question of whether to accept a role in the opera, and even now, “I think there’s still some sensitivity around it,” said Hasse. Duke Ellington, the legendary jazz musician and composer, complained that Porgy and Bess lacked social commentary, “and I think he also had some issues about its authenticity,” Hasse said. Harry Belafonte declined to play Porgy in the 1959 film version, and mezzo-soprano Grace Bumbry expressed reservations about singing the role of Bess.

When Gershwin decided to adapt the 1924 novel Porgy (by Southern writer DuBose Heyward) into an opera, he traveled to Charleston and spent a great deal of time absorbing and transcribing African-American music. He wanted to faithfully capture the feel of that music in Porgy and Bess, but his own background raised doubts in some quarters about his ability to convey the essence of African-American life in the Deep South. Among the opera’s admirers was the late William Warfield, an African-American bass-baritone considered one of the foremost interpreters of the role of Porgy. Warfield, who appeared in the 1952 revival of Porgy and Bess that toured internationally under the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship, told critic John Ardoin that Porgy and Bess never was intended as a social statement and should not be faulted for not being one. “To me, Porgy is mainly a beautiful and good story,” he said. “You don’t see Porgy and think ‘this is wrong’ or ‘this is right.’ You are touched by the tale of a cripple who falls in love with a wayward woman and tries to save her with his love.

I do think, however, audiences today see Porgy in a different way than they did in the 1930s,” because the social landscape has been transformed. “Americans have produced many fine things when it comes to opera — [such as] Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa,” said Warfield. “But to me, Porgy towers over all of them.” With its references to jazz, blues and spirituals, “this piece of music could only have been produced by an American,” Hasse said. “Porgy and Bess is not supposed to be a pure sampling of the music that African-Americans created” in the 1920s, “any more than [Georges Bizet’s opera] Carmen is a sampling of Spanish Gypsy music,” he said. Rather, “it’s a new creation that interprets the music of African Americans through the lens of a white, Jewish, big-city composer who is well versed in ragtime, jazz and popular song, and well trained in classical music.” Hasse said Porgy’s recognition as an operatic masterpiece was prompted by several decades of dramatic change in U.S.

society, especially the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. When the Houston Grand Opera unveiled its production in 1976, the verdict was nearly unanimous: Gershwin’s most ambitious work was a magnificent achievement that could hold its own in any opera hall. The Houston production was followed by an equally triumphant staging at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1985. If he were addressing people who are seeing Porgy and Bess for the first time, Hasse said, he would offer this advice: “Open your ears, heart and soul to the melodies — at times haunting, at times soaring, and at almost all times memorable.” (This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: Keywords:

Question: Who composed the music for the opera Porgy and Bess, about 1920s African American life in Charleston, South Carolina?
Answer: George Gershwin