Happy Birthday, Porgy

In the 1920s and early ’30s, while turning out an unbroken string of hit songs (“Swanee,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You”) and musicals (Lady Be Good!, Oh Kay!, Funny Face, Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing), George Gershwin was charting a second course, as a composer of concert works in which he would merge popular and jazz idioms with classical techniques and forms. Rhapsody in Blue(1924) was the first, followed by the Concerto in F (from which Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G demonstrably borrows), An American in Paris, and others. But his most ambitious attempt to synthesize refined and vernacular, “high” and “low,” was the opera Porgy and Bess, which opened in New York on October 10, 1935, 71 years ago today.

Set in Catfish Row, a mythical black slum in Charleston, South Carolina, Gershwin’s opera tells the story of a crippled beggar and the woman he falls in love with. Both Gershwin, born in 1898, and his Porgy and Bess collaborator, DuBose Heyward, were deeply enamored of black culture. A Charleston businessman turned writer, Heyward wrote the novel Porgy in 1925, drawing his characters sympathetically but not without stereotyping. As for Gershwin, not only was he steeped in the white pop tunes of Tin Pan Alley and the classical music he had studied as a teenager, but before he was 20 he had sought out many of the best black musicians in New York City, men like the bandleader James Reese Europe and the pianists James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts—and listened hard. When he was still a teenager, writes his biographer Joan Peyser, his piano playing had “a drive and syncopation then unknown to white players. Gershwin appropriated this from the blacks, ingested it until it was his own, and transformed it into his songs”—and into the orchestral works he began writing in the 1920s.

While Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, were recasting Porgy into a successful 1927 Broadway play, Gershwin sought out the author and spoke of his desire to turn the work into an opera. He said he needed to further master composition and orchestration before undertaking the project, though, and he was extraordinarily busy already, so not until October 1933 did he let Heyward know that he was ready to begin work. Heyward was to write the libretto (the dialogue) and lyrics, although before long Gershwin’s brother Ira, his usual songwriting partner, would begin contributing lyrics too, especially for the jazzier songs.

By early 1934 Gershwin and Heyward were hard at work. The composer said the writer was doing a “magnificent job” with the libretto, and he hoped “I can match it musically.” In July and August 1934 the two men rented a cottage on Folly Island, a barrier island ten miles from Charleston. The neighbors, Heyward wrote, “furnished us with an inexhaustible source of folk material.” The omnivorous Gershwin sponged up sounds. “The quality in him which had produced the Rhapsody in Blue in the most sophisticated city in America,” Heyward wrote, just as readily absorbed and transmuted the sounds of black South Carolina.

The completed piano and vocal score ran to 560 pages; after Gershwin orchestrated the work—its title by now expanded to Porgy and Bess—the manuscript was 700 pages of densely notated music. Gershwin was confident enough to tell his friends that his opera would “resemble a combination of the drama and romance of Carmen with the beauty of Die Meistersinger.”

There was talk of the New York Metropolitan Opera staging the work, but that came to nothing. The Theatre Guild, a production company that had mounted the play Porgy, picked up Porgy and Bess and scheduled it for a Broadway opening after rehearsals and a tryout in Boston. Gershwin may have been disingenuous when he said, “The reason I did not submit this work to the usual sponsors of opera in America was that I hoped to have developed something in American music that would appeal to the many rather than to the cultured few.” In fact he longed for acceptance by the classical elite—while he hungered for popular success too. This was a conflict he never resolved, the admiration of the “cultured few” versus mass popularity and its financial rewards.

Choosing a cast was going to be hard. He needed classically trained singers who could handle Deep Southern black intonation. He wanted Paul Robeson for Porgy; Robeson was unavailable, so he cast Todd Duncan, a music teacher at Howard University. Initially, Duncan later recalled, “I just wasn’t very interested. I thought of Gershwin as being Tin Pan Alley and beneath me.” But the score won him over: “Those beautiful melodies in this new idiom—it was something I had never heard before.” The soprano Ann Brown played Bess, and Gershwin hired the vaudevillian John W. Bubbles to play Sporting Life, the Harlem sharpie who finds himself on Catfish Row.

At the Boston opening the audience applauded for 15 minutes, and the critics were enthusiastic. “Porgy and Bess has dramatic intensity and power,” wrote Edwin F. Melvin, of the Christian Science Monitor, “with songs, dances and racial humor that seem to spring naturally from the place and the people.”

But Gershwin’s colleagues—chiefly the director Rouben Mamoulian—insisted that at three and a half hours the show was too long. With Gershwin’s pained acquiescence, it was heavily cut for its Broadway production at the Alvin Theatre. Whether or not the substantial trimming damaged its integrity, New York’s critics refused to consider Porgy and Bess a serious piece of concert music. Olin Downes of The New York Timescomplained that “the style is at one moment of opera and at another of operetta or sheer Broadway entertainment.” Gershwin, wrote Downes, “has not completely formed his style as an operatic composer.”

The influential composer and critic Virgil Thomson, writing in Modern Music, was even harsher. “One can see, through Porgy,” Thomson wrote, “that Gershwin has not and never did have any power of sustained musical development. . . . His lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources. . . . It is clear, by now, that Gershwin hasn’t learned the business of being a serious composer.”

The opera took a drubbing, too, from most black musicians and critics. As far as Duke Ellington was concerned, Porgy and Bess was not built from authentically black idioms. “No Negro,” Ellington wrote, “could possibly be fooled by Porgy and Bess.” Ralph Matthews, a black music critic, wrote that the work had “none of the deep sonorous incantations so frequently identified with racial offerings.” Gershwin had pleased nobody, it seemed, including audiences. The show closed after only 124 performances, losing $70,000. In July 1937, less than two years after its Broadway run, Gershwin died of a brain tumor. He was just 38.

Porgy and Bess went on to have a complicated history. Many productions were mounted, with varying amounts of the deleted music restored. A 1952 revival, which triumphantly toured Europe, launched the career of the great soprano Leontyne Price. In 1955 Porgy and Bess became the first American work performed at Milan’s La Scala opera house. Meanwhile jazz and pop versions of “Summertime,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and other Porgy and Bess songs became beloved American standards.

It wasn’t until 1976, with the Houston Grand Opera’s production, that Porgy and Besswas done as Gershwin wrote it, without cuts. In 1985, a half-century after its unsuccessful debut, it was performed by the Metropolitan Opera. In 1991 the composer and author Gunther Schuller called Porgy and Bess “a work of genius. It has great songs. It has the construction of opera. I love the dramatic, transitional music, the music we are hearing today now that all the cuts have been restored. And the work is so gorgeously orchestrated . . .” It took decades, but the tide finally turned, and Porgy and Bess is now recognized as what its composer strove to write: a great American opera.