At a key moment in the opera — when Bess is angrily trying to turn away from the cocaine being offered her by the drug dealer Sportin’ Life — she wanted to restore the original language. “It’s American music,” he said — and really, who can disagree?

Mr. O’Brien soon came to see the chorus, which had been minimized in the Breen productions, as the key to “Porgy and Bess.”, “The choral voices in ‘Porgy and Bess’ sing a greater percentage of the score than almost any other opera I can think of,” Mr. O’Brien told me. The play showed the height of white appropriation of what had previously been a black cultural form. Porgy and Bess symbolizes the end of the black musical tradition that flourished in the early part of this century. A powerful, empathetic portrayal of poor black city dwellers in the South, it was written by three white men, two of whom had spent little time in the South. It is unlikely that will ever change, for which we should be thankful. It seemed proper to eliminate certain words in the lyrics which, in racial terms, had proven offensive.”, “Porgy and Bess” has always struck me as something of a miracle. The now-tattered reputation of “Porgy and Bess” made it difficult to find a cast. Now it was white as well as black Americans who feared the portrayals depicted in “Porgy and Bess,” especially when the State Department approved a series of performances in the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. Its portrayal of the hard life of African-Americans at the turn of the last century did not incite anti-American propaganda, as many Americans had worried. “Who remembers Verdi’s first opera?” says Steven Blier, the musical historian and co-founder of the New York Festival of Song. Eventually, though, Goldman not only secured permission, but got the Gershwin family to agree to do it without the involvement of Ella Gerber. Ira Gershwin, George’s brother, who co-wrote the lyrics with DuBose Heyward, revised the line. Porgy And Bess: A Musical Evolution: Home The Opera Timeline Discography Summertime Other Music Cultural Controversy Bibliography Summertime: Structural & Harmonic Analysis. With shows like “The Jeffersons,” books by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and plays by LeRoi Jones, the “Porgy and Bess” characters were part of a richer depiction of African-American life. And, if it provided steady work for black actors and singers, it was also a trap from which they rarely escaped. Further points of musical interest are as follows.

Gershwin, said Eva Jessye, who conducted the original “Porgy and Bess” chorus, “had written in things that sounded just right, like our people.” J. Rosamond Johnson, an important black composer, called “Porgy and Bess” “a monument to the cultural aims of Negro art.”. Though black opera singers were almost unheard of, Gershwin never even considered casting white singers. It is part of America’s heritage and a source of American pride. The first stirrings of what would become the civil rights movement caused African-Americans to begin to look askance at the characters, to see them as white-inspired stereotypes, and to see the story itself — with its violence, drug use and subservience to white authority — as degrading. Gershwin began composing the song in December 1933, attempting to create his own spiritual in the style of the African American folk music of the period. From left, John Bubbles, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown in the original 1935 “Porgy and Bess.”, University of Michigan/“Great Performances”. When it first opened in the 1930s, the mere fact that it had been written was viewed as a triumph among most black writers and critics. Porgy and Bess symbolizes the end of the black musical tradition that flourished in the early part of this century. “Yet Gershwin wrote something that ranks with Puccini in terms of crafting great melodies and great theater.” Its score contains an astonishing number of songs — “Summertime,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin’ ” and at least a half-dozen more — that are at the very heart of the American popular songbook. Gershwin evades finality of the phrase by concluding each period with a deceptive cadence in the relative key of D major (mm. “Porgy and Bess” supplies a prism, Joe Nocera writes, through which African-Americans have viewed their history. “The chorus is the community. Die Oper schildert das Leben von Afroamerikanern in der Schwarzensiedlung Catfish Row in Charleston um 1870. “Jack and John kept asking us, ‘How do we feel about doing it this way?’ ‘Does this feel right to you?’ ” recalls Mr. Albert. “You could be ghettoized in ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” says John Miller, who manages opera singers. After its 1976 run in Houston, the opera played in Washington, on its way to New York. 40 - 42. After consulting with the cast and the producers, Mr. O’Brien agreed. It was widely scorned among the African-American intelligentsia, who viewed it as an example of Uncle Tomism. WHEN George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” — arguably the most important piece of American music written in the 20th century — first opened on Broadway in 1935, the opera’s libretto was littered with a word now shunned as an antiblack slur. A large part of the reason African-Americans began to embrace “Porgy and Bess” again in the mid-1970s was simply the passage of time. “It is a vehicle of shame, sorrow and disgust,” editorialized The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper. Stephen Sondheim described them as “the most beautiful and powerful in our musical theater history.”. Above, excerpts from the New York City Opera’s version, produced by Sherwin M. Goldman. Die Liedtexte stammen von DuBose Heyward und Gershwins Bruder Ira. Forty years earlier, Mr. Duncan had refused to sing “Porgy and Bess” in Washington unless the theater where it was being performed was desegregated. 45 - 46). At the intermission, we got to talking and I asked them if they remembered when “Porgy and Bess” was viewed as Uncle Tomism. 7, 23, 25). For another thing, the music — African-American music — was not being used for a vaudeville show, but was employed in the highest of musical arts: opera. A seven measure transition from "Jasbo Brown Blues" serves as the introduction to the opening aria "Summertime," whose overall structure is that of a double period in b minor. Porgy and Bess, dubbed a folk-opera by it's composer, George Gershwin, is a dramatic musical work that has impacted and influenced the worlds of opera, theater, concert music, jazz, and modern popular music, all while raising questions (and criticisms) about racial stereotypes present within the … The one Southerner, Heyward, was a Charleston insurance salesman turned poet who had written a novel, “Porgy,” the inspiration for which had come from a news story about a crippled beggar he used to see around town. It had never been done before.

The tight-knit African-American community of Catfish Row is shocked when Crown, Bess’ brutal, violent lover, murders Robbins during a craps game. Todd Duncan, Gershwin’s original Porgy, saw it there. Heyward spent years pushing Gershwin to collaborate on an opera; once Gershwin agreed, Heyward mailed him lyrics — the only ones he ever wrote in his life — that are some of the most sublime ever written. 15 - 16 and 33 - 34) which he then reverses in mm. Ray Albert (as Porgy) and Wilhelmenia Fernandez (as Bess) during a 1978 Houston Opera production at the Palais des Congrès de la Porte Maillot in Paris. Porgy is alerted to Crown's entering and intercepts him. Still, at the matinee performance I saw recently, I sat near several African-American women who were enjoying it immensely. A seven measure transition from "Jasbo Brown Blues" serves as the introduction to the opening aria "Summertime," whose overall structure is that of a double period in b minor. Once the singers were assembled, the young director, Jack O’Brien, and the opera company’s musical director, John DeMain, did something no white director had ever done before: they consulted with the cast on how “Porgy and Bess” should be played. When he went backstage to shake the latest Porgy’s hand, he could only marvel at what he had seen. But in time, a group of young opera singers enlisted, including Donnie Ray Albert as Porgy and Clamma Dale as Bess, both of whom have gone on to have long, distinguished careers in opera.

By the 1960s, “Porgy and Bess” had become, at best, a mixed blessing for black singers. 20 - 22 and 38 -40), a temporary tonicization which he further prolongs in mm.

Porgy and Bess tells the story of the unshakeable love between Porgy, a crippled beggar, and Bess, a beautiful woman haunted by the demons of her past. All the creative talent backstage was white. The life it depicted — in which black men called white men “boss” and white men called black men “boy”— began to recede as African-Americans asserted their rightful place in American society, as the black middle class began to grow, and as black accomplishment became an ordinary part of American life rather than something unique. This is further cemented with the usage of said scale in mm. In the early 1940s, however, during a “Porgy and Bess” revival — which turned the opera into a more commercially viable musical, not unlike the current Broadway revival starring Audra McDonald — a singer named Etta Moten, hired to play Bess, refused to utter the word. By 1951, according to Howard Pollack, the author of “George Gershwin: His Life and Work,” Ira Gershwin had “totally eliminated the word from the text, replacing it with such terms as tin horns, dummy, low-life, suckers, buzzard, and baby.” That year, the producer Goddard Lieberson, who had just recorded “Porgy and Bess” for Columbia Records, said, “Sometimes, happily, times change, and with the times, ethical values. On the contrary, it was performed constantly. “It’s so black!” he told Mr. Albert. Singing in “Porgy and Bess” put food on the table, but it had become a distasteful experience.

By then, too, Ms. Gerber had taken over the production from Breen — indeed, the Gershwin estate would not allow a new production to go forward without her participation — and the production had become outdated, with touches of minstrel show that its cast members found humiliating. As the two men fight, Porgy delivers a fatal blow and Crown falls to the floor dead. The African-American residents of Catfish Row, the only slightly imaginary block in Charleston, S.C., where the opera is set, used it liberally, and so of course did the white characters during their occasional menacing visits. The producer, Sherwin Goldman, met resistance from the Gershwin estate, and from Ira Gershwin himself. But a second reason was that “Porgy and Bess” itself changed. By the mid-1950s, a producer named Robert Breen, along with an associate, Ella Gerber, had largely taken control of “Porgy and Bess.” Mr. Breen’s original idea was to bring it to Europe, where he was sure it would be a hit; to that end he created a touring company, whose original cast members included Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway and which was backed by the State Department.