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George Gershwin miraculously melded classical music, popular song, jazz, blues
and spirituals in this quintessentially American masterpiece that tells the poignant
story of a crippled beggar, the headstrong woman he loves, and the community
that sustains them both. General Director David Gockley, whose association with
Porgy and Bess has restored it to a mainstay of the operatic repertoire, presents
director Francesca Zambello's critically acclaimed production. Alan Rich of LA
Weekly calls her staging "by some distance, the finest and most enjoyable of the
couple of dozen productions I have attended of Porgy and Bess." George Gershwin miraculously melded classical music, popular song, jazz, blues
and spirituals in this quintessentially American masterpiece that tells the poignant
story of a crippled beggar, the headstrong woman he loves, and the community
that sustains them both. General Director David Gockley, whose association with
Porgy and Bess has restored it to a mainstay of the operatic repertoire, presents
director Francesca Zambello's critically acclaimed production. Alan Rich of LA
Weekly calls her staging "by some distance, the finest and most enjoyable of the
couple of dozen productions I have attended of Porgy and Bess." PART ONE
In the courtyard of Catfish Row, Clara sings a lullaby to her child while her husband, Jake, and some of the other men are playing craps. The beggar Porgy comes in to join the game; he defends Crown’s woman, Bess, whom the others are gossiping about. When Jake accuses him of being soft on her, Porgy says that he isn’t soft on any woman; God made him a cripple and meant him to be lonely. Crown arrives with Bess. He is drunk, and when he loses at craps, he provokes a fight and kills Robbins with a cotton hook. Crown runs to hide but tells Bess he will be back. Sportin’ Life, the local pimp and drug dealer, offers to take Bess to New York with him, but she refuses. No one will give her shelter before the police arrive except Porgy. Later, Porgy and Bess show up at Robbins’s funeral, where his widow, Serena, is leading the mourners. The police enter and arrest Peter as a “material witness.” Serena convinces the undertaker to bury Robbins for less than his usual fee. As the scene ends, Bess leads the mourners in a spiritual as they reluctantly allow her a place in their community. A few weeks later, Jake and the fishermen are working on their nets as Porgy compares his life to theirs. Maria, the matriarch of Catfish Row, dispatches Sportin’ Life when he tries to sell his “happy dust.” Lawyer Frazier arrives and sells Bess a divorce for a dollar; when he learns that she and Crown were never married, he raises his fee to a dollar and a half. Sportin’ Life asks Bess again to come to New York with him and tries to give her more dope, which she refuses. Porgy chases him away, and he and Bess sing about their newfound happiness. All except Porgy leave for the church picnic on Kittiwah Island. At the picnic, Sportin’ Life sings about his own brand of religion. All are getting ready to leave when Crown, hidden in the bushes, calls out to Bess. She tells him that she is Porgy’s woman now, but he forces her to stay with him
PART TWO
Back at Catfish Row, some time later, the fishermen are getting ready to go to sea as Bess raves, still delirious after escaping from Crown. Peter wants to send her to the hospital, but Serena would rather pray over her. The street fills with people. Bess eventually emerges and explains to Porgy that she wants to stay with him but that when Crown comes she will be forced to go with him. Porgy tells her that she does not have to go with him. The hurricane bell sounds. Everyone gathers in Serena’s room and prays for shelter from the hurricane. There is a knock at the door. Crown enters and tries to take Bess away. He laughs at the frightened townspeople and sings a bawdy song to mock their prayers. Clara sees Jake’s capsized boat and runs out to find him. Bess calls for a man to go after her. Crown goes, after taunting Porgy and asking him why he won’t go. After the storm, the women are crying for their men; Sportin’ Life teases them and Bess. Crown enters looking for Bess; he and Porgy fight, and Porgy kills him. The police and the coroner come to Catfish Row the next morning; they want to take Porgy down to identify Crown’s body. Telling Bess that Porgy will be locked up indefinitely, Sportin’ Life forces some dope on her and leaves more outside her door as he leaves. She emerges, ready to accompany Sportin’ Life to New York. Porgy returns one week later. While he tries to distribute the gifts he bought with the money he made playing craps in jail, he discovers Bess is gone. He learns that she has gone off with Sportin’ Life to New York, and he decides to leave Catfish Row forever and find her.
Porgy and Bess: Gershwin Sets American Opera on Its Way
by Thomas May
“I believe that American music should be based on American material.” So declared Gershwin shortly after Porgy and Bess opened in October 1935, in an editorial for the New York Times he titled “Rhapsody in Catfish Row.”
The issue of identity had framed his career—and would go on to frame much of the debate about the “validity” of his new opera. Indeed, when Gershwin made his popular breakthrough as a serious composer with Rhapsody in Blue in 1924—stunning listeners who hadn’t imagined his talent extending beyond the three-minute format of Tin Pan Alley hits—it was in the context of a concert programmed around the question “What is American music?”
Gershwin had already begun pursuing this theme in his first attempt at something more ambitious than the standard musical-revue fare with a (now obscure) one-act jazz opera called Blue Monday. Produced in 1922 as part of a popular Broadway extravaganza (George White’s Scandals), it involves an over-the-top melodrama of African-American life in Harlem in which a gambler is shot to death by his girlfriend, who realizes too late she has acted out of mistaken jealousy. Gershwin steeped the operatic devices he borrowed in a thoroughly homegrown American vernacular: Pagliacci with a blues accent.
The opera was an important stepping-stone for the young Gershwin, even though it got quickly dropped from the overlong Scandals lineup. For one thing, Blue Monday caught the attention of Paul Whiteman, the jazzman/conductor who subsequently commissioned Rhapsody in Blue. But much more significant was the yearning revealed in Gershwin’s experiment to find the right combination of subject matter and musical idiom. “Whatever its merits and demerits,” observes John Dizikes in his comprehensive cultural history, American Opera, “it shows how deeply rooted was Gershwin’s intuition that an African-American subject should one day be the subject of an opera.”
Just a year after Rhapsody electrified its first audience, DuBose Heyward (1885–1940), a real estate salesman turned poet, published his debut novel. Porgy was his brief but character-rich story loosely inspired by the real-life figure of a crippled beggar named Samuel Smalls, from an impoverished black tenement near the waterfront of his native Charleston. Ironically, in view of the charge that his narrative trades in nothing but stereotypes, what first caught Heyward’s attention was a news clipping about the beggar being driven to violence in an act of passion—the image, in other words, of a person transgressing the stereotypical role of a crippled outcast who might be assumed to endure his fate in meek, silent suffering.
It proved to be one of the year’s literary sensations. Gershwin chanced on a copy soon after, which he read in a single sitting, staying up through the night. Porgy transfixed him to the core. The composer noted that it had exactly the ingredients he was searching for in the story he needed for his American opera: “100 percent dramatic intensity in addition to humor.” As to the latter quality, he elaborated, “an American opera without humor could not possibly run the gamut of American expression. In Porgy and Bess there are ample opportunities for humorous songs and dances. This humor is natural humor—not ‘gags’ superimposed upon the story but humor flowing from the story itself.”
Gershwin immediately made contact with Heyward, and the two reached an understanding that they would collaborate on a Porgy opera in the future. Not only was Gershwin’s plate overfull with the Broadway shows he was writing throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s—he also sensed the need to build his confidence in larger classical forms, turning his focus first to instrumental works such as An American in Paris and the Cuban Overture.
Porgy, meanwhile, continued to develop on several different tracks. Heyward’s wife, née Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, was herself a playwright, and she convinced her initially skeptical husband that his novel could be effectively translated from page to stage. They collaborated as a team on the final script—also called Porgy. It was Dorothy who thought up the familiar ending in which Porgy determines to leave Catfish Row and head north to find Bess (the novel’s ending is bleaker, with Porgy simply resigned to accepting what has happened). The play opened at the progressively oriented Theatre Guild in New York in 1927 and in fact went on to claim an important role in its own right in the history of American theater. Porgy was a surprising smash both in New York and on a subsequent tour. Its director, Rouben Mamoulian, would eventually direct the opera as well.
All this attention invited renewed interest in the story from other quarters, including for a possible film version that fell through. And Porgy in fact did almost become a musical at one point: Al Jolson obtained rights from Heyward for a musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. Jolson, who helped make Gershwin’s early song “Swanee”—interestingly, a parody of Southern sentimentality—into the biggest hit of the composer’s career, would perform the role of Porgy in blackface. Gershwin bided his time, unworried by the threatened competition. Tellingly, he wrote to Heyward that “the sort of thing I have in mind is a much more serious thing than Jolson can ever do.” Gershwin had already determined that, like the play, his opera would need to be performed by an all-black cast
Close Collaboration
As it happened, Jolson’s musical failed to get beyond the talking stage, and Gershwin was at last ready to plunge into the opera in 1933. The title was changed to Porgy and Bess in part to distinguish it from the novel and the play, which were known simply as Porgy. Initially the plan was for a one-on-one partnership, with Heyward supplying a libretto that would have to reduce the play script by nearly half. Both the novel and the play had incorporated numerous moments for singing traditional spirituals and the like, and here and in other places Gershwin needed completely fresh lyrics for the new music he planned to write.
Gershwin’s brother Ira actually came on board relatively late to collaborate on the lyrics, when it was clear that Heyward’s poetic instinct was a bit too lofty for the readily singable wordplay needed for every situation. Heyward did, however, contribute several songs (he wrote the lyrics for “Summertime,” for example, which was the first bit of music Gershwin composed), while in some cases he and Ira joined efforts. Heyward’s biographer Frank Durham also points out that he made significant suggestions about musical texture, several of which Gershwin took up. For example, he advised the composer to approach the words he supplied for Jake’s fishing song (“It Take a Long Pull to Get There”) by imagining himself “at an oar” and writing music “to conform to that rhythm.”
Any lingering suspicions that Gershwin simply wanted to string yet another series of hits together for an easy success fly in the face of all the evidence. At the height of his powers—including his earning potential—he cordoned off nearly two years to devote to this labor of love. Gershwin helped insulate for the loss of his accustomed income by playing on a weekly radio show sponsored by a laxative gum called “Feen-a-Mint.” The composer cheerfully reported that “the end justified the means,” while “they also served who only sat and waited.”
In fact, for a time Gershwin gave up the luxuries of his Manhattan penthouse apartment to live in a spartan beach house on Folly Island, near Charleston, so as to immerse himself in the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands that informs the world of Porgy and Bess. He reportedly took in the population’s musical life with enormous enthusiasm. According to Howard Pollack—author of an excellent and exhaustive biography of the composer—Gershwin proudly informed Anne Brown (the original Bess, who died only a few months ago) that he had been congratulated for his “shouting” at a revival by an elder, who said, “By God, you can sure beat out them rhythms, boy. I’m over seventy years old and I ain’t never seen no po’ little white man take off and fly like you. You could be my own son!”
Yet Gershwin steeped himself in folk music sources to absorb their ambience rather than to “colonize” and incorporate actual spirituals or blues into Porgy and Bess. While he does introduce a few musical elements such as the street vendor cries (the Strawberry Woman and the Crab Man), his approach is not literal. “I decided against the use of original folk material,” Gershwin wrote, “because I wanted the music to be all of one piece.”
Putting It All Together
That vision of unity is key, since Porgy and Bess dares much by bringing so many disparate elements together in a grand synthesis. Gershwin placed tremendously high artistic stakes on the opera, drawing on everything he had learned and experienced. The basic materials cull from a quintessentially American vernacular of blues, spirituals, swing, jazzy syncopations, honky-tonk, and, yes, Broadway show-biz (you can even detect a premonition of rap in the speech-song setting of the matriarchal Maria’s clever denunciation of Sportin’ Life in “I Hates Yo’ Struttin’ Style”). But Gershwin makes liberal use of the operatic larder as well, freely referencing Puccini’s lyricism, Mozart’s elegant directness, the heightened emotions of Carmen, and the choral textures of Die Meistersinger and Boris Godunov.
Gershwin had sought to supplement an unconventional (largely self-taught) musical education after the success of Rhapsody by studying with European composers and training in complex harmony and counterpoint. Now he possessed the confidence and technique to stitch this many-tongued fabric together through classical devices, such as fugal textures or leitmotifs that give the score its sinewy connections (you can’t miss the five-note blues motif for Porgy or the deliriously slithery figure in the woodwinds suggesting Happy Dust). Gershwin’s pride in orchestrating the entire work himself (a task he left to arrangers in, for example, Rhapsody) is apparent from the very opening, with its Rhapsody-like gesture of a scale excitedly rising—only now in a colorful ensemble flourish.
Especially fascinating is how Gershwin enriches his natural gift for melody. Even when extracted, these “tunes” exhibit an extraordinary complexity beneath the surface. Take “Summertime,” perhaps the opera’s signature, which is built on a deeply ambiguous harmonic foundation. On one level, it’s even a parody of the Tristan chord, and Gershwin had no hesitation to embed modernist harmony in various pivotal moments of his score. (He had become especially attracted to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck after he saw its American premiere in Philadelphia in 1931.) Yet back in its operatic context, “Summertime” itself serves as a complex leitmotif. Its recurrences are hardly the traditional Broadway “reprise.” Clara’s lullaby represents the hopes for a new generation and is soon counterbalanced by the knowingly sour cynicism of her husband Jake in “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” During the hurricane, Clara sings her lullaby as an act of denial, and finally—both parents gone—it falls to Bess to soothe the baby with her rendition of “Summertime.”
With his newfound musical prowess, Gershwin develops these characters in all their complexity. Bess is a study in ambiguity: a fiercely strong-willed individual, she remains dependent on the men around her, and we hear how she takes musical shape from their cues. Soprano Laquita Mitchell, who sings her first Bess in this production, observes that there’s a further tension in performing her, since “I have to try to be as real and honest as the music is asking me to be in this very physical role, and at the same time be able to sing beautifully.”
As for Porgy, Gershwin clearly delineates his many facets, from his acceptance of the pattern of his loneliness when we first meet him to the wry optimism of “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and the transforming love of “Bess, You Is My Woman.” Yet he is as capable of violence as Crown, as we hear in music that in fact exactly imitates the fight-murder of the first scene. Eric Owens points to the unusual choice of the bass-baritone range (rather than the standard tenor), with its deeper hue, for this lead: “In a way, it represents the darkness of Porgy’s life, which the high soprano lightens. You usually think of this voice type in terms of spiritual or fatherly love, but not romantic love. Maybe it’s a foreshadowing that this love isn’t going to work out!”
Similarly, the hammering chords of Crown’s brutality aren’t any less frightening if we see him as capable of momentary altruism in rushing out for Clara in the hurricane, while Gershwin was intent on portraying Sportin’ Life as more than a “sinister dope-peddler,” but a villain “who is likable and believable and at the same time evil”—and also able to fill his need for a humorous aspect to the opera. Serena, too, for all her religious rigidity, is given one of the score’s most powerful moments with “My Man’s Gone Now”—in the midst of the de facto Requiem that is the second scene.
Indeed, Catfish Row—in whose close quarters the entire opera unfolds, with the exception of the excursion to Kittiwah Island—is far from a static, “picturesque” background for the personal tragedies to play against. Gershwin’s score is a tour de force in its integration of choral textures to depict the vibrant life of this community, across the spectrum. We also see how this microcosm copes with the institutional racism of the whites (who are literally separated from their musicality and confined to speech) as well as the double-edged reality of nature, which comes close to destroying them in the hurricane’s aftermath. The more closely we tune in to Gershwin’s painstakingly wrought details, the harder it becomes to reduce this thriving complexity to a matter of stereotypes.
There will always be critics who repeat the patronizing charges that were hurled at Porgy and Bess from the start: that Gershwin is a songwriter who shouldn’t be meddling in ambitious forms (similar charges were launched against Duke Ellington’s classical efforts), or that his mixture of styles somehow involves a cheapening of them. Yet Gershwin was ahead of his time, anticipating the breakdown of rigid distinctions. We’ve come to admire the possibilities opened up by imaginative musical cross-pollination. The magnificently unresolved chords that end Porgy and Bess seem not only to suggest the unknown future ahead for Porgy but a brashly rhapsodic hope for the new path Gershwin had discovered. In his creative imagination, he still held an unrealized plan for an opera about New York City as he knew it: “an opera of the melting pot,” for which he could write “many kinds of music, black and white, Eastern and Western”—an opera which “would call for a style that should achieve, out of this diversity, an artistic and an aesthetic unity.”
A SHORT PORGY AND BESS CHRONOLOGY
By Thomas May
[Note: this is not an exhaustive list but singles out some particularly significant productions]
February 12, 1924
Premiere of Rhapsody in Blue.
September 1925
DuBose Heyward publishes first novel, Porgy.
1925
Term "Harlem Renaissance" is coined.
Summer 1926
George Gershwin first reads the novel Porgy and immediately writes to DuBose Heyward, expressing interest in an operatic collaboration.
October 10, 1927
Porgy, the play by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, opens in New York in a production by the Theatre Guild.
1929
Gershwin is commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to write an opera based on The Dybbuk, but plans fall through; Al Jolson expresses interest in a talking-picture version of Porgy that never materializes.
1932
Gershwin expresses renewed interest in collaborating with Heyward; Jolson signs for rights to a musical version of Porgy, to be written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, which also fails to materialize.
January 1934
Gershwin announces to the press that he is writing a new opera based on Porgy.
End of 1933 through January 1935
Gershwin composes the piano score.
June 1934
Gershwin heads to Folly Island, South Carolina to live for the summer and do research for the opera. Collaboration with Heyward and Ira Gershwin in full swing.
January 1935
Begins orchestration, completing the full score of what is now titled Porgy and Bess on September 2 (less than one month before world premiere).
September 30, 1935
Porgy and Bess is given its out-of-town opening at Boston's Colonial Theater in complete, uncut version and plays for a week to highly enthusiastic audiences.
October 10, 1935
Official opening at New York City's Alvin Theatre, with significant cuts made by Gershwin since Boston opening. Plays for 124 performances on Broadway but fails to recoup investment.
January 21, 1936
Philadelphia Orchestra premieres the concert suite Gershwin prepared from his opera, later titled Catfish Row by Ira Gershwin.
July 11, 1937
Gershwin dies of a brain tumor in Los Angeles at age 38.
January 22,1942
Porgy and Bess revived on Broadway as a musical in a heavily cut version prepared by Cheryl Crawford.
1942
Robert Russell Bennett's orchestral suite of the music (with his own reorchestrations) is introduced and becomes the best-known version of concert extracts from Porgy and Bess.
March 27, 1943
European premiere at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen (during the Nazi occupation of Denmark).
June 1952
The Belvins Davis-Robert Breen production, restoring some of the music cut in the musical staging, opens at the Dallas State Fair after negotiations for a Metropolitan Opera run fall through. It plays elsewhere in the U.S. before going on a European tour, with a cast including William Warfield, Leontyne Price, and Cab Calloway.
1956
Truman Capote travels with The Everyman Opera Company to the Soviet Union for a tour of Porgy and Bess, in the company of Ira Gershwin's wife Lenore. Capote publishes his account in The New Yorker and subsequently in the book The Muses Are Heard.
1958
Gil Evans's landmark arrangement Porgy and Bess, with Miles Davis on trumpet and flugelhorn, is released.
1959
Columbia Pictures releases film version of Porgy and Bess starring Sydney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sammy Davis, Jr, and directed by Otto Preminger.
September 25, 1976
Houston Grand Opera stages a landmark revival restoring the original score. Produced by Sherwin M. Goldman and conducted by John DeMain, it goes on to tour across the country and reawakens interest in the operatic Porgy and Bess and wins both Tony and Grammy Awards.
August 17, 1983
Ira Gershwin dies in Beverly Hills, aged 86.
February 6 ,1985
Porgy and Bess appears for the first time at the Metropolitan Opera.
October 10, 1985
On the opera's precise 50th anniversary, Porgy and Bess is produced for the first time in the city where it is set, Charleston, South Carolina.
July 1986
Trevor Nunn stages a highly acclaimed production with conductor Simon Rattle at the Glyndebourne Festival, using the complete score. Subsequently released in a video version.
October 29, 2005
Francesca Zambello's new production of Porgy and Bess premieres at Washington National Opera and is later staged in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Francesca Zambello on Porgy and Bess
by Cori Ellison
There seems to be this perpetual debate about Porgy and Bess: Is it an opera, or is it a musical? Where do you weigh in on that question?
FRANCESCA ZAMBELLO: I don’t think it matters. What matters is that it’s a revolutionary piece, one that transcends narrow classifications. It’s also revolutionary in that it deals with deep, uniquely American issues, ones which are still very much with us. There are few American music theatre pieces that confront crucial issues like race and class in the same way that Mozart and Verdi did in their time.
And it’s particularly moving to me that a white, northern, Jewish composer—Gershwin—was drawn to tell this story. DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy hit him so hard when he read it in 1926 that he became obsessed with getting the rights to it, and that alone took seven years. Gershwin recognized that Porgy had that “something” that so many great operas have—a deeply personal story, but one set in the context of a larger society. The setting of Porgy, Catfish Row, is a microcosm, but it’s also a metaphor for a whole society. It’s about class, race, economic disadvantage, all these things that separate people from one another and prevent us from having a harmonious society. Many people see Porgy as this great love story, but I feel it’s really more about unrequited love, jealousy, passion, abandonment—all those great operatic themes. For one brief moment, there’s some kind of happiness between Porgy and Bess. But Bess’s drug addiction is unfortunately stronger than her love, which is why she leaves for New York with Sportin’ Life.
The piece often gets sugar-coated, but it’s dark—it’s about drugs, abuse, crime, violence, and all these things that continue to plague our culture because of poverty and prejudice. Everyone in Catfish Row is in some way imprisoned by this situation. But Porgy, by leaving for New York at the end, tries to break that cycle. He may never find Bess, but he’ll break out of that situation. That’s the one ray of hope I’m trying to follow in this piece.
Porgy has often been perceived as non-operatic because, for many decades, it was presented in a compromised form. When Gershwin chose to premiere it on Broadway in 1935, he made a lot of compromises. He reduced the orchestration, replaced the recitatives with dialogue, and cut a good deal of music. We didn’t get to experience it in its full operatic glory until the 1970s, when it was presented in its original form by Houston Grand Opera. Then we could see what Gershwin was talking about when he named Carmen and Meistersinger as his models.
FZ: And it truly does rise to those operatic heights. It’s true American verismo, with characters of humble social station voicing emotions that transcend their realm. It does what a great opera, like a Verdi opera, does. It uses the same tools—arias, recits, ensembles, and motifs. And also, as in Traviata or Rigoletto, Gershwin unfolds social issues through an intensely personal story, so we really care about it.
It also reminds me of the great Russian operas in that it’s about a community. The chorus really is the protagonist, and they must be individuals, each with his or her own place in Catfish Row.
And Gershwin was of Russian-Jewish heritage, so I guess that was in his DNA, even if he didn’t realize it. But what wasn’t in his DNA was the African-American experience, so it really was audacious for him to delve into this story. Do you feel any sense of that yourself as you approach Porgy?
FZ: Of course I’ve thought a lot about that. What can I bring to the piece? And I’ve been very upfront with the cast about it, because as a white person addressing it, I can’t go from inside out, I have to go from outside in. But I guess you have to think that about any piece—none of us are gypsies from Seville or Teutonic goddesses, either. But I don’t take on an assignment if I don’t think I have something to say about it. And Porgy has been, for me, a dream show. I’ve wanted to stage it for over twenty years, since I was first introduced to it by my friend Olive Warfield, who sang in its European premiere. So when I found out that Washington National Opera was considering doing it, I begged Plácido to let me direct it. Because I’ll bring to it the respect that the piece and its characters deserve, and present them in, I hope, a truly noble and universal fashion. I’ve been working very hard with the designers Peter Davison [sets], Paul Tazewell [costumes], and Mark McCullough [lights] to create a visual metaphor for the piece that opens it up for today’s audiences.
Can you give us an idea how you’ll go about that?
FZ: Well, Catfish Row is a ghetto, a kind of prison, so Peter has designed a set that heightens that claustrophobic feeling. The space feels small for such a large community. The people are packed in, just like the fish they catch and put in cans for a living, so when there’s a drama, everybody knows about it, because everyone’s living on top of each other. It’s a unit set, one structure, based on a fish cannery, that with slight changes becomes all the different locations. It’s an encasement that nobody can get out of. Not until Porgy leaves do we start to see some air, some sky. It’s sort of an abstracted tenement. The music soars to such incredible emotional and spiritual heights that I don’t think the piece should look too absolutely realistic.
Also, Paul has given the clothes a contemporary look. Instead of the original 1920s, we’re setting it in the 1950s, when racial tensions were just getting ready to boil over into the upheavals of the 1960s. Porgy, in its original period, can seem too soft, too idealized, and I wanted it to keep its edge. I want to lift it out of Never-Never-Land, to go back to the strength of the incredible music and lyrics, and really let it sing out for today.
--Cori Ellison is dramaturg at New York City Opera
Francesca Zambello on Porgy and Bess
by Cori Ellison
There seems to be this perpetual debate about Porgy and Bess: Is it an opera, or is it a musical? Where do you weigh in on that question?
FRANCESCA ZAMBELLO: I don’t think it matters. What matters is that it’s a revolutionary piece, one that transcends narrow classifications. It’s also revolutionary in that it deals with deep, uniquely American issues, ones which are still very much with us. There are few American music theatre pieces that confront crucial issues like race and class in the same way that Mozart and Verdi did in their time.
And it’s particularly moving to me that a white, northern, Jewish composer—Gershwin—was drawn to tell this story. DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy hit him so hard when he read it in 1926 that he became obsessed with getting the rights to it, and that alone took seven years. Gershwin recognized that Porgy had that “something” that so many great operas have—a deeply personal story, but one set in the context of a larger society. The setting of Porgy, Catfish Row, is a microcosm, but it’s also a metaphor for a whole society. It’s about class, race, economic disadvantage, all these things that separate people from one another and prevent us from having a harmonious society. Many people see Porgy as this great love story, but I feel it’s really more about unrequited love, jealousy, passion, abandonment—all those great operatic themes. For one brief moment, there’s some kind of happiness between Porgy and Bess. But Bess’s drug addiction is unfortunately stronger than her love, which is why she leaves for New York with Sportin’ Life.
The piece often gets sugar-coated, but it’s dark—it’s about drugs, abuse, crime, violence, and all these things that continue to plague our culture because of poverty and prejudice. Everyone in Catfish Row is in some way imprisoned by this situation. But Porgy, by leaving for New York at the end, tries to break that cycle. He may never find Bess, but he’ll break out of that situation. That’s the one ray of hope I’m trying to follow in this piece.
Porgy has often been perceived as non-operatic because, for many decades, it was presented in a compromised form. When Gershwin chose to premiere it on Broadway in 1935, he made a lot of compromises. He reduced the orchestration, replaced the recitatives with dialogue, and cut a good deal of music. We didn’t get to experience it in its full operatic glory until the 1970s, when it was presented in its original form by Houston Grand Opera. Then we could see what Gershwin was talking about when he named Carmen and Meistersinger as his models.
FZ: And it truly does rise to those operatic heights. It’s true American verismo, with characters of humble social station voicing emotions that transcend their realm. It does what a great opera, like a Verdi opera, does. It uses the same tools—arias, recits, ensembles, and motifs. And also, as in Traviata or Rigoletto, Gershwin unfolds social issues through an intensely personal story, so we really care about it.
It also reminds me of the great Russian operas in that it’s about a community. The chorus really is the protagonist, and they must be individuals, each with his or her own place in Catfish Row.
And Gershwin was of Russian-Jewish heritage, so I guess that was in his DNA, even if he didn’t realize it. But what wasn’t in his DNA was the African-American experience, so it really was audacious for him to delve into this story. Do you feel any sense of that yourself as you approach Porgy?
FZ: Of course I’ve thought a lot about that. What can I bring to the piece? And I’ve been very upfront with the cast about it, because as a white person addressing it, I can’t go from inside out, I have to go from outside in. But I guess you have to think that about any piece—none of us are gypsies from Seville or Teutonic goddesses, either. But I don’t take on an assignment if I don’t think I have something to say about it. And Porgy has been, for me, a dream show. I’ve wanted to stage it for over twenty years, since I was first introduced to it by my friend Olive Warfield, who sang in its European premiere. So when I found out that Washington National Opera was considering doing it, I begged Plácido to let me direct it. Because I’ll bring to it the respect that the piece and its characters deserve, and present them in, I hope, a truly noble and universal fashion. I’ve been working very hard with the designers Peter Davison [sets], Paul Tazewell [costumes], and Mark McCullough [lights] to create a visual metaphor for the piece that opens it up for today’s audiences.
Can you give us an idea how you’ll go about that?
FZ: Well, Catfish Row is a ghetto, a kind of prison, so Peter has designed a set that heightens that claustrophobic feeling. The space feels small for such a large community. The people are packed in, just like the fish they catch and put in cans for a living, so when there’s a drama, everybody knows about it, because everyone’s living on top of each other. It’s a unit set, one structure, based on a fish cannery, that with slight changes becomes all the different locations. It’s an encasement that nobody can get out of. Not until Porgy leaves do we start to see some air, some sky. It’s sort of an abstracted tenement. The music soars to such incredible emotional and spiritual heights that I don’t think the piece should look too absolutely realistic.
Also, Paul has given the clothes a contemporary look. Instead of the original 1920s, we’re setting it in the 1950s, when racial tensions were just getting ready to boil over into the upheavals of the 1960s. Porgy, in its original period, can seem too soft, too idealized, and I wanted it to keep its edge. I want to lift it out of Never-Never-Land, to go back to the strength of the incredible music and lyrics, and really let it sing out for today.
--Cori Ellison is dramaturg at New York City Opera
- Approximate running time: 3 hours, 5 minutes including one intermission
- Sung in English with English supertitles
- Washington National Opera production
- This production was made possible by Company Sponsors John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn, and the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Philanthropic Fund.
- Production photo: Karin Cooper, courtesy of Washington National Opera
- Cast, program and schedule are subject to change
All Performances Sold Out
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Cast
Production
*San Francisco Opera debut
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