{"id":1358,"date":"2019-04-30T23:21:47","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T03:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1358"},"modified":"2019-04-30T23:21:55","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T03:21:55","slug":"why-porgy-and-bess-is-more-than-a-period-piece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2019\/04\/why-porgy-and-bess-is-more-than-a-period-piece.html","title":{"rendered":"Why “Porgy and Bess” Is More than a “Period Piece”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

However popular it may be, Porgy and Bess <\/em>remains an object of rampant controversy and confusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An odd item<\/a><\/strong> in the New York Times<\/em> the other day reported that the white cast of the Hungarian State Opera\u2019s Porgy and Be<\/em>ss (above) had been instructed to declare themselves \u201cAfrican-Americans.\u201d \u201cThe singers were asked to sign a declaration stating that \u2018African-American origins and spirit form an inseparable part\u2019 of their identity.\u201d Commenting on the Gershwin Estate\u2019s insistence that Porgy and Bess<\/em> be cast with black singers, Szilveszter Okovacs, the State Opera\u2019s general director, said he was opposed to allowing \u201cthe presence of people in a production to be determined by skin color or ethnicity.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That seems like the makings of a reasonable or at least interesting sentiment — the Gershwin Estate’s restriction on casting is increasingly anachronistic. And yet the Budapest production itself, which situates Gershwin’s opera in a refugee camp, is probably nuts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, a review<\/a><\/strong> i<\/a>n The<\/em> Guardian<\/em> of the new English National Opera Porgy and Bess<\/em> \u2013 a traditional staging that opens the Met\u2019s new season next September \u2013 opines that it\u2019s a \u201cperiod piece\u201d: a snapshot of another time and place, stuck one hundred years in the past when race relations were vastly different than today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the fundamental topic of Porgy and<\/em> Bess<\/em> a black Carolina subculture ca. 1920? If so, does that validate the Gershwin Estate\u2019s insistence that only blacks sing it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having written a book<\/a><\/strong> about the genesis of Porgy and Bess<\/em>, I would say: certainly not. The basis of Gershwin\u2019s opera is a 1925 novella by a Southern regionalist: DuBose Heyward’s Porgy. That<\/em> is a book about a black Carolina subculture \u2013 the Lowcountry Gullahs — ca. 1920. But if Porgy and Bess<\/em> retains the story of Porgy<\/em>, Gershwin\u2019s Porgy is not Porgy<\/em>\u2019s Porgy (not even close) \u2013 and neither is his fate remotely that of Porgy in the novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conrad L. Osborne, in his indispensable mega-book <\/a><\/strong>Opera as Opera<\/em>, extrapolates a \u201cmeta-narrative\u201d governing virtually all nineteenth century grand opera plots.  An outcast male protagonist falls obsessively in love with a forbidden woman who returns his love; the fated couple encounters inflamed opposition; it all ends badly for the lovers. And this, truly, is the story of Carmen<\/em>, of La traviata<\/em>, of Tristan<\/em>, of you-name-it. Osborne cites only two post-Beethoven exceptions: the original version of Mussorgsky\u2019s Boris<\/em> Godunov<\/em>, in which there is no love story, and Wagner\u2019s Parsifal<\/em>, in which Parsifal spurns Kundry\u2019s advances and proceeds to redeem himself and everyone else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Porgy and Bess<\/em>, in Osborne\u2019s account, hews to the basic nineteenth-century template: an outcast male, a forbidden woman, a doomed love relationship. But that\u2019s at most one-half of what Porgy and Bess<\/em> is about.  That Gershwin\u2019s opera is in fact an exception to the ingenious Osborne taxonomy is a useful starting point in figuring out whether it\u2019s a black \u201cperiod piece\u201d or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The essential observation here is that Porgy and Bess<\/em> tells two overlapping stories. The first is doomed love, a la Carmen<\/em> (which it resembles in all sorts of ways). The second is a saga of redemption, a la Parsifal<\/em>. The first story comes from DuBose Heyward, who ends his novel with Porgy, by Bess abandoned, sinking into a fog of oblivion. The second story comes not from Heyward, not from George or Ira Gershwin, but from Rouben Mamoulian, who staged both the 1927 play Porgy<\/em> and the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess<\/em>. Mamoulian (drawing inspiration from Yevgeny Vakhtangov, with whom he studied in Moscow) had fixed ideas about stage dramas, including a basic story template: not doomed love, but the miracle play. He therefore changed Heyward\u2019s ending to Porgy Redeemed. And in order to do that, he invented a different Porgy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Heyward made of\nall this may be gleaned from his advice to Gershwin when it came time to stage\nthe opera: don\u2019t hire Mamoulian. What Gershwin thought may be gleaned from his\ninsistence that Mamoulian direct. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so in the opera\nPorgy is not the sorry outcast Heyward had crafted. Rather, he is popular,\nrespected, even esteemed. In scene one, he is greeted with an outburst of affection.\nA cripple, he has never had a woman. He then proceeds to fall in love and is\nloved in return. When his love is threatened by a source of evil, feared by\nall, he single-handedly murders Crown. At the opera\u2019s close, he declares\nhimself on his way \u201cto a Heav\u2019nly Lan\u2019\u201d \u2013 an ecstatic song (originating with\nMamoulian in the 1927 play, with a tune different from Gershwin\u2019s) in which\neveryone joins. As in Parsifal<\/em>, this\nculminating tableau of redemption is both personal and communal. Porgy, moral\ncompass of Catfish Row, is a cripple made whole. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heyward\u2019s ending to Porgy<\/em> is intended to seem real. When the Theatre Guild advertised Porgy <\/em>the play as an \u201cauthentic\u201d representation of Gullah life, Mamoulian was apoplectic. He disavowed verisimilitude. His ending, including Porgy\u2019s resolve to drive his goat-cart from South Carolina to Manhattan, is archetypal, metaphoric, symbolic \u2013 anything but a real-life event. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two endings of Porgy and Bess<\/em> arrive almost on top of\none another. First we have Porgy discovering that Bess is gone. He sings a\nmagnificent lament: \u201cOh Bess, oh where\u2019s my Bess? Won\u2019t somebody tell me\nwhere?\u201d Then he picks himself up and sings an equally magnificent paean of\nself-actualization: \u201cOh Lawd, I\u2019m on my way.\u201d How did Mamoulian and Gershwin\nweight these two endings? Mamoulian trimmed \u201cOh Bess\u201d by half \u2013 a courtesy to\nTodd Duncan, who had to sing Porgy six times a week, but also a signal that the\nmore important finish was yet to come. Gershwin\u2019s score features a pregnant E\nminor \u201cPorgy\u201d theme: the primal interval of a fifth girds a minor third (G\nnatural) crippled by a mashed grace note. Only in the final measure of the\nopera \u2013 the culmination of \u201cOn my way\u201d — does he raise the G natural of\nPorgy\u2019s theme to G-sharp and secure an E major close. Porgy\u2019s saga of doomed\nlove is transcended by Porgy\u2019s life-odyssey. Gershwin\u2019s redoubles this message\nby having his orchestra, a la Wagner, recall key stages in Porgy\u2019s story \u2013 \u201cI\ngot plenty o\u2019 nuttin\u2019,\u201d \u201cWhat you want with Bess?\u201d \u201cBess you is my woman\u201d —\nunderneath the singing.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a linchpin in this double ending. It is the opera\u2019s most famous line, a line called by Stephen Sondheim \u201cone of the most moving moments in musical theater history\u201d: \u201cBring my goat!\u201d Mamoulian directs that Porgy issue this command twice: first as a directive — \u201cMingo, Jim, bring my goat!\u201d — and then \u201dcommandingly\u201d: \u201cNo! I\u2019m going! Bring my goat!\u201d He is initially disbelieved, but his exalted resolve to pick himself up proves irresistible. The goat is brought. The uplift begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author of the words \u201cBring my goat!\u201d was Rouben Mamoulian \u2013 in the working typescript for Porgy<\/em> the play, you can see him delete Heyward\u2019s \u201cPorgy turns his goat and drives slowly with bowed head toward the gate\u201d and hand-write something wholly different. In Porgy and Bess<\/em>, Mamoulian\u2019s 1927 rewrite of the story\u2019s ending is retained almost verbatim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that is why staging Porgy and Bess<\/em> without a goat-cart for Porgy \u2013 now common practice — becomes a problem. Doubtless there are multiple reasons to do without a goat onstage. And yet: the Porgy of Heyward, Mamoulian, and Gershwin cannot at all use his legs; he walks on his knees. If Porgy is merely a cripple on crutches, his infirmity is diminished, and so therefore is his victory. And what to do with \u201cBring my goat!\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it happens, I\u2019m teaching a graduate seminar at SUNY Purchase this Spring with an inquisitive group of music students, and we\u2019re studying Porgy and Bess<\/em>. In class over the past several weeks, we\u2019ve sampled two DVDs \u2013 a San Francisco Opera <\/a><\/strong>production, and the rather famous Trevor Nunn Glyndebourne production<\/a><\/strong> conducted by Simon Rattle. Neither uses a goat. In the San Francisco Porgy and<\/em> Bess<\/em>, Eric Owen (who will be the Met\u2019s goat-less Porgy this Fall) exclaims \u201cBring my crutch!\u201d But a crutch is the last thing Porgy would ask for in the throes of his redemptive ecstasy. And Owen\u2019s anguished delivery is also wrong. The ending fails because it contradicts the sense of the opera\u2019s words and music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nunn\u2019s solution is better:\nWillard White exclaims: \u201cI\u2019ve got to go!\u201d And Nunn understands redemption. His\nPorgy discards<\/em> his crutches, and to\nthe stupefaction of all proceeds to stagger on his own two feet into a glare of\nsunshine. That is not the ending to a period piece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

However popular it may be, Porgy and Bess remains an object of rampant controversy and confusion. An odd item in the New York Times the other day reported that the white cast of the Hungarian State Opera\u2019s Porgy and Bess (above) had been instructed to declare themselves \u201cAfrican-Americans.\u201d \u201cThe singers were asked to sign a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-lU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1369,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions\/1369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}