The origins
In 1926, George Gershwin, seeking diversion while writing the score of Oh, Kay!, idly picked up a current best-selling novel. He was so moved that he read it straight through to the end, and he immediately wrote the author of his wish to base an opera on it. At the time, he didn't have the technical skills for an opera, but the ambition stayed with him, and in 1935 he completed Porgy and Bess. The novel, of course, was Porgy, by DuBose Heyward.
Heyward was a South Carolina insurance man turned poet and novelist. Although the Heywards were Southern aristocracy, they were poor. DuBose's father was a laborer in a rice mill, where he was killed in an accident. Heyward passed through the black community of Cabbage Row every day on the short walk from his home to his office, and Cabbage Row became the model for the Catfish Row of the novel. He had known the local African Americans from his childhood and he had worked on the docks with the stevedores. Once he had seen a policeman kill an unarmed black man, and he realized that his sympathy was not with the white officer. Some of his poems had African American themes, and the subject of his first novel was everyday life in and around Cabbage Row seen from the perspective of a crippled beggar. The model for Porgy was a real person, Samuel Smalls, who went about Charleston in a goat cart. Perhaps the choice was partly influenced by Heyward's own infirmity-- polio had cost him the use of one arm.
The people of Porgy speak Gullah, a distinct language based on African syntax and a vocabulary of English and thousands of words drawn from West African languages. (On stage, the vocabulary was simplified to make it intelligible for general audiences.) Gullah is almost certainly a survival of the language widely spoken among slaves throughout the country. The word "Gullah" may refer to origins in Angola, where the word "niggah" was probably derived from the Portuguese "negro". The arrival of Europeans in Africa required new words to distinguish the races, and the Gullah word for whites, "buckrah" later became the American "buckaroo". (In the opera, Porgy announces his arrival singing, "I got a pocket full of the Buckra money...") The language owes its preservation in Charleston and the Sea Islands to geography and economics. Ante-bellum South Carolina was little more than rice and indigo plantations. Charleston was established in 1670 and became a major port for crop exports and slave imports. In 1775, there were 25,000 whites and 75,000 slaves in South Carolina, but when the indigo and then the rice plantations failed in the nineteenth century because of cheaper sources elsewhere, the whites lost their wealth and the blacks lost their jobs. Many migrated to the North, but those who stayed found homes near the port and on the nearby islands, supporting themselves mainly by commercial fishing and work on the docks. Segregated from the whites of South Carolina and geographically isolated from the national African American culture, their language survived as a unique remnant of one of our founding peoples.
Immediately after its publication in 1925, Porgy, became a best seller and was something of a cultural innovation. There had been African American novelists in the nineteenth century, and blacks had been treated sensitively before in widely read American fiction-- Huckleberry Finn, for example-- but Porgy may have been the first best-seller in which African Americans were virtually the only characters and the perspective was that of the title character. It is a gentle portrait of life in Charleston, life that centered on family, hard work, and religion. Important elements in Porgy and Bess-- the gamblers' fight, the killings, the storm, and the drug dealer Sporting Life-- take up only a few of the book's pages. When Heyward and his wife, playwright Dorothy Heyward, adapted the novel into the Pulitzer Prize winning play, for dramatic purposes they shrank the tender elements and expanded the sensational ones. These are thrown into even sharper relief in the libretto of the opera, since the music displaces all but the skeleton of the plot. It was the novel that inspired Gershwin, though, and songs like Summertime are faithful to the novel's themes.
There had been talk of making the play into a musical starring Al Jolson, possibly with a score by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. Gershwin was absolutely committed to an opera and absolutely opposed to white singers in black face, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward agreed to wait.
Gershwin had written the score for his 1924 Rhapsody
in Blue for two pianos, which was then orchestrated by Paul Whiteman's
arranger, Ferdé Grofé. After writing his own orchestrations
for An American in Paris and the Concerto in F, Gershwin
had the confidence that he was ready for his opera, and he and Heyward
began work on Porgy and Bess in 1933, seven years after Gershwin's
initial proposal. Gershwin had never lost sight of his ambition to be a
"serious" composer of opera, and to use Porgy as the basis of an
American opera.
The music
From the beginning of his musical career, George Gershwin had been influenced by black music-- he had studied piano with Luckey Roberts, the master of Harlem stride, and orchestration with classical composers William Grant Still and Will Vodery. During his teens, his family lived in still-integrated Harlem. Later, word got around in Harlem that there was "a white kid downtown who plays like us." The older music of the South had not yet been documented, though, and in the summer of 1934, Gershwin moved to Folly Island, off Charleston, to study Sea Island music at its source. He found much of the music in churches and became comfortable in joining the services. He also played piano for his hosts. One of his greatest compliments came during one such long recital: "I don't know who that boy is, but he sure can play piano!"
As in European opera, Gershwin employed repeating motifs for the characters in Porgy and Bess. Porgy's theme-- BBEGE-- is frequently heard in Russ Garcia's orchestrations for this recording, and there are variations of this motif for Bess's other suitors, Sporting Life and Crown. The individual songs, however, display considerable stylistic independence.
The lullaby Summertime, perhaps coincidentally, shares the melodic and harmonic qualities of Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang only religious music, but Studs Terkel persuaded her to record Summertime.In that, her only recording of a secular song, she interpolated Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. And both songs have commonalities with a Sea Island lullaby, She Is Gone.
We don't know what specific music Gershwin heard in his stay in South Carolina, but field recordings from the region suggest several parallels like that of She Is Gone. The singing commercials of the Crab Man, Strawberry Woman, and Honey Man are directly derived from Charleston street peddlers. A recording of an extended Gullah variation of the Lord's Prayer is virtually interchangeable with Doctor Jesus. The distinctive Sea Island rhythmic religious "shouts" may have suggested Gershwin's treatment of Overflow, overflow... and Oh the train is at the station... Regional work songs may have partially influenced Crown's songs and Oh I'm agoin' out to the Blackfish banks...
I Got Plenty o' Nuttin' is a "banjo song." In our century, the banjo has been replaced by the more versatile guitar in black music and is mostly played by whites in bluegrass bands, but it is an authentic African instrument, brought here by slaves. The banjo song, a regular feature of minstrel shows, is probably older than the blues, but it virtually disappeared by the recording era. The Kern-Hammerstein Ol' Man River is also a variation on the banjo song.
There is a striking resemblance between Porgy's final song, Oh Lawd, I'm on My Way and a gospel song, I'm on My Way, performed by the Carolina-based Golden Gate Quartet. Perhaps both have a common source in the Sea Islands.
A Red Headed Woman has a generic blues quality, and Sporting Life's songs were apparently inspired by the singing of the New York Cotton Club's Cab Calloway. (Calloway himself played Sporting Life in the 1952 touring revival.)
Bess, You Is My Woman Now, I Loves You Porgy, and
some of the other Porgy and Bess songs are primarily extensions
of Gershwin's own jazz-influenced Broadway style.
The words
Most of the dialogue in Porgy and Bess is taken
directly from the Heywards' play, and many of the song lyrics are extensions
of phrases in that text. The initial thought was that poet Heyward would
supply all of the lyrics-- Summertime, My Man's Gone Now, and A
Woman Is a Sometime Thing have Heyward's words. As work progressed,
however, the geographic separation of the New York and Charleston collaborators
raised problems, and Ira Gershwin was recruited to help with the lyrics.
Another reason for Ira's participation was probably the brothers' unique
approach to songwriting, in which each would respond to the other's suggestions
as a song was formed. Ira and George wrote many of the songs without Heyward,
among them It Ain't Necessarily So, There's a Boat Dat's Leaving Soon
for New York, and A Red Headed Woman. Ira adapted Heyward's
lyrics for I Loves You Porgy and I Got Plenty of Nuttin', and
he used some of the play's text in writing Bess, You Is My Woman Now.
Thus,
DuBose Heyward is credited with the libretto of Porgy and Bess, while
he shares credit for the lyrics with Ira Gershwin.
The story
As we have observed, Porgy and Bess follows the melodramatic stage version of Porgy rather than the more balanced novel, and most of the dialogue comes directly from the Heywards' play. Both play and opera depart importantly from the original novel, in which Porgy is the primary focus.
The opera opens with a crap game in Catfish Row. In a fight, the stevedore Crown kills Robbins and flees. Crown's common-law wife Bess seeks to hide before the police arrive, but only the beggar Porgy offers her shelter. Bess and Porgy fall in love, and Bess obtains a divorce from Crown and begins domestic life with Porgy. While at a picnic on nearby Kittiwah Island with the Catfish Row community-- without Porgy-- Bess becomes separated from the others and is seduced by Crown, who has been hiding on the island. After she returns to Catfish Row, she tells Porgy that she has agreed to leave with Crown but that she would rather stay with him. When Crown does return for Bess, Porgy strangles him. Porgy is detained by the police merely to identify the body, but Bess, believing he has been arrested for the murder, accepts Sporting Life's offer to take her to New York. When Porgy returns and learns of this, he sets off for New York to find her.
In the novel, Porgy does not initiate his relationship with Bess. The book's Bess is in early middle age, a heavy drinker and occasional drug user, and apparently used to casual sexual liaisons. She does not appear immediately after the gambler's fight, but later-- hungry, disheveled, and with a hangover. When told that Porgy is the successful beggar with the goat-- and therefore having money, she goes to his room.
Simon Frasier is presented in the novel as a lawyer who sells divorces in Charleston's black community. Divorce was illegal for everybody in South Carolina but, reasoned Frasier, it was sometimes necessary. Although his appearance in the novel is incidental, in the play and opera the character is used to formalize Bess's separation from Crown and affiliation with Porgy. The dialogue resembles the "here comes the judge" vaudeville routine written and performed by blacks for black audiences, and it seems unsuited to the characters of either Porgy or Bess or to the rest of the opera. The musicologist J. Rosamond Johnson-- co-composer of Lift Every Voice and Sing-- played the lawyer in the original production, apparently with pleasure
In 1911, there was a hurricane in Charleston, and it is used as an important element in both the book and the opera.
The novel's Sporting Life is a minor character who divides his time between Charleston and New York, dealing drugs. Although the respectable people of Catfish Row exclude him, in one passage he sells heroin to Bess. He does not appear in the picnic episode.
In the novel, Porgy attends the picnic. When Bess reappears after her meeting with Crown, Porgy senses the truth and confronts Bess with it. She simply admits that she will leave with Crown when he returns.
Sporting Life's reappearance to take Bess to New York is not in the novel. When Porgy is taken by the police to identify Crown's body, Bess leaves Charleston for Savannah with the crew of a river boat.
Porgy is initially described as an old man, made youthful by his interlude with Bess, but he is old again at the novel's end, and he makes no attempt to follow her.
Many continue to object that the plot and characters of
Porgy
and Bess as presented on the stage are sensational and stereotypical.
In their defense, one might observe that Aida is not really about
Egyptians and Carmen isn't really Spanish. Grand opera has always
treated passion as larger than life.
The first production
There are two explanations for the change from Porgy to Porgy and Bess as the opera's title. Ann Brown observed that when she successfully auditioned for the role of Bess, Gershwin was so impressed that he decided to add songs for the character and to call the opera Porgy and Bess. Elsewhere, DuBose Heyward took credit for the change, intending to suggest a parallel with Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde.
When a silent movie of the novel was under consideration, Paul Robeson was selected to play Porgy. Plans fell through, but Gershwin hoped to use Robeson in the opera. By 1935, however, Robeson had film commitments and Gershwin auditioned Todd Duncan for the role. Todd Duncan was a classical bass-baritone and the head of the music department at Howard University. He had doubts about performing in a Gershwin show, and his audition consisted of lieder. But when the Gershwin brothers played the score for him, he was moved and committed. When rehearsals began, the scholarly Duncan had trouble with the Gullah speech, so Gershwin took him to South Carolina to study in the field, as he had done. The hotel would not accept Duncan, and Duncan lived with a black physician's family-- who would not accept Gershwin. The two became strong friends, and the academic Duncan concluded that he was the Jew of the pair and that the New York piano player was the black member of the team.
The director of Porgy and Bess was Rouben Mamoulian, whose first Broadway credit was as the director of Porgy. In between, he had directed several films, including the innovative Rodgers and Hart musical. Love Me Tonight. Both Porgy and Porgy and Bess were produced by the Theatre Guild, and later Mamoulian would direct the Guild's Oklahoma!
Porgy and Bess opened in New York on October 10,
1935, at the Alvin. Gershwin preferred a Broadway theater to an opera house
because it would permit a longer run, and Porgy and Bess ran for
124 performances-- a record for an opera. Reviews by both theater and music
critics were friendly but equivocal. The post-New York tour played Philadelphia,
Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington. This first production of Porgy
and Bess lost money, and the Gershwin brothers went to Hollywood for
the financial security of writing for film musicals.
On record
Apart from a few passages on a private recording of a rehearsal, there was no 1935 original cast recording, although there were many recordings of the songs, including some by Paul Robeson, Lawrence Tibbett, and Helen Jepson. In 1940, Decca recorded fourteen of the songs with Todd Duncan and Ann Brown of the original cast, released in a pair of 78 r.p.m. albums and now available on compact disc. In 1951, just three years after the introduction of long play vinyl made extended recordings practical, the first complete recording of the opera was produced by Goddard Lieberson in the Columbia Records studios, and it has also been reissued on compact disc.
This 1956 Bethlehem studio production was the second complete recording of the score and the first to substitute jazz performers for opera singers. After its 1935 premiere, Duke Ellington said of Porgy and Bess: "It's grand music and a swell play, but the two didn't go together. It does not use the Negro musical idiom." As an opera, the stirring music can seem a bit like American music trapped in a European form, and the African American qualities always present in the score come to the fore in the jazz treatment. Although Mel Tormé has never sounded like an old man, his swinging Porgy captures the jazz in the songs, and Frances Faye has a rough quality perfectly suited to a Bess who has been around. Johnny Hartman smoothly displays the easy amorality of Crown.
Although Gershwin insisted that Porgy and Bess could be staged only as an opera-- a condition honored by the Gershwin estate-- jazz performers continue to extend the inherent qualities of the music, notably in recordings by Miles Davis and Gil Evans, by Dick Hyman and Jim Cullum, by Ray Charles and Cleo Laine, and by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald in settings by Russ Garcia, who had created the fine orchestrations for this Bethlehem set.
Since the 'fifties, there have been many Porgy and Bess
albums. One of the best complete operatic versions is the 1986 Glyndebourne
Opera production conducted by Simon Rattle, and there is a fine one-disc
presentation of the principal songs by William Warfield and Leontyne Price,
the stars of the 1952 international tour.
On film
In 1959, producer Samuel Goldwyn released his film version of Porgy and Bess. Perhaps the biggest reason for the film's aesthetic shortcomings was the firing of Rouben Mamoulian as director and his replacement by Otto Preminger, who was not known for his ability to direct musicals. Casting young Sidney Poitier as Porgy and glamorous Dorothy Dandridge as Bess did not help. The Heyward libretto was rewritten by N. Richard Nash, and Gershwin's orchestrations were replaced by André Previn's. The movie has not reappeared since its original release, thanks perhaps to the wisdom of the Gershwin estate.
Fortunately, the excellent 1986 Glyndebourne production
was filmed for British television, and this staging of the complete opera
is commercially available on videotape.
To the present
J. Rosamond Johnson called George Gershwin the Abraham Lincoln of music, for bringing black music into the cultural mainstream. This seems excessive-- Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington had already accomplished that-- and before Porgy and Bess, Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson had performed and recorded spirituals along with the standard concert repertoire. James Reese Europe and W.C. Handy had each had Carnegie Hall concerts. But Porgy and Bess was a major step forward. Before Porgy, the play, blacks had appeared on Broadway almost always as musical or comedy entertainers. There were several African American theater companies, some specializing in Shakespeare, but they mostly performed for black audiences. And while black performers of classical music were not rare-- Roland Hayes sang lieder in Carnegie Hall in 1923-- Marian Anderson didn't break the color bar at the Metropolitan Opera until 1955. In Porgy and Bess, the general public was forced to notice that African American actors are no less capable of serious drama and operatic singing than their white colleagues. There were other lessons as well. When the 1936 tour of the original production played Washington, the National Theater was for whites only. The cast insisted on full integration, and got it. The manager was surprised to find that not one white patron asked for his money back.
In 1942, after Gershwin's death, Porgy and Bess was revived on Broadway, again starring Todd Duncan and Ann Brown. This time, the critics had nothing but praise, and the show ran for almost three hundred performances and toured for another eighteen months. Another revival in 1952, toured the world-- including Moscow and Leningrad-- and played the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. William Warfield was the new Porgy, and a twenty-four year old discovery, Leontyne Price sang Bess. Over the years, Porgy and Bess has been a showcase leading dozens of African American singers into permanent membership in opera companies around the world. It was Gershwin's wish to raise his music to classical status. Although he didn't live to see it, Porgy and Bess has been performed at Glyndebourne, La Scala, the Vienna Volksoper, and is now in the permanent repertory of the New York Metropolitan.
What of the real Catfish Row, the Cabbage Row of South Carolina? In colonial times, the four buildings surrounding a gated courtyard probably served as rooming-houses for sailors. By the time Porgy and Bess opened it had been abandoned and was in disrepair. But it's still there, restored to its colonial configuration, gentrified, and divided into condominiums. Air-conditioning and tourism have returned Charleston to the mainstream-- Gucci and Saks have moved into the neighborhood. Television and public education have faded the Gullah language. There are remnants of the culture still, on some of the islands, but they are shared with golf courses and condominiums. Kittiwah Island, shown on the maps as Kiawah Island, was converted to an upscale resort with time-sharing apartments-- by the royal family of Kuwait.
-- Art Hilgart
Art Hilgart produces the weekly program Broadway Revisited, heard nationally on public radio.