{"id":1579,"date":"2019-11-09T10:44:38","date_gmt":"2019-11-09T15:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1579"},"modified":"2019-11-09T10:44:44","modified_gmt":"2019-11-09T15:44:44","slug":"porgy-take-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2019\/11\/porgy-take-four.html","title":{"rendered":"Porgy — Take Four"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Curtain call for \u201cPorgy and Bess\u201d with Rouben Mamoulian in glasses <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The latest installment<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>of Conrad L. Osborne\u2019s indispensable opera blog takes stock of Porgy and<\/em> Bess<\/em> and the Met\u2019s acclaimed new production. It also graciously plugs my own recent series of Porgy<\/em> blogs in this space, my American Scholar<\/a><\/strong><\/em> review<\/a><\/strong> of the Met Porgy<\/em>, and my book <\/a><\/strong>(\u201cOn My<\/em> Way\u201d \u2013 the Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and \u201cPorgy and Bess\u201d)<\/em> about this opera\u2019s complex and illuminating genesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To my ears, Porgy and Bess<\/em> is the highest creative\nachievement in American classical music. Osborne is not convinced.  A crucial sticking point is the anomaly my\nbook exposes: it is an opera with two endings. The first is that of DuBose Heyward,\nwho wrote Porgy<\/em> the novel: Bess\ndeserts Porgy; Porgy collapses (\u201cOh Bess, oh where\u2019s my Bess?\u201d). The second was\ninvented by the opera\u2019s first director, Rouben Mamoulian: Porgy lifts himself\nup and declares himself on his way \u201cto a heav\u2019nly land.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is this double ending, not\ncreated but creatively absorbed by Gershwin, a unique inspiration? Or is it an\nunwanted confusion imposed by an ingenious but meddlesome stage director then\nat the peak of his fame and influence? (Rouben Mamoulian received equal billing\nwith George Gershwin: think about that.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Osborne finds the Mamouian ending unconvincing, tacked on \u2013 \u201clike a rather perfunctory, conventional music-comedy happy ending.\u201d I believe in the Mamoulian ending. Like Porgy\u2019s, this is an act of faith: I have yet to see it adequately realized on stage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Mamoulian should have changed Heyward\u2019s ending \u2013 a process explored in detail in my book \u2013 was merely predictable. He rigidly espoused uplift, and Heyward\u2019s ending  — \u201ca face that sagged wearily, and the eyes of age lit only by a faint reminiscent glow from suns and moons that had looked into them, and had already dropped down the west\u201d \u2013 is lyrically yet unrelievedly bleak. If Mamoulian had merely picked Porgy up, the new ending would be risible. But Mamoulian did a lot more than that. He fundamentally reconceived Porgy\u2019s character as prepossessing, actually heroic. He fundamentally reconceived Porgy\u2019s story as an odyssey of personal realization: a cripple made whole. And he furnished a brilliant linchpin for Porgy\u2019s regeneration, the opera\u2019s most telling line: \u201cBring my goat!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I have argued, two\nnecessary ingredients to bring this line off are missing in the Met production,\ndirected by James Robinson with Eric Owens as Porgy. They are also not to be\nfound in the DVD of the San Francisco Opera production directed by Francesca Zambello\nwith Owens as Porgy again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first ingredient is the declaration \u201cBring my goat!\u201d itself — or something sufficiently like it. There is no goat in either production. That is: Porgy is not severely crippled. Rather than ambulating on a goat-cart because his legs are limp, he walks on crutches. For all that we can glean, he could have gone to that picnic after all. His crucial self-assessment \u2013 that when God made cripples he made them to be lonely \u2013 no longer tells. He is by no means a man for whom winning a woman seems self-evidently inconceivable. So his story of unlikely self-realization, a central tread of the opera, is greatly diminished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second necessary\ningredient, arising from the first, is that Porgy\u2019s resolve to pick himself up\nmust become a moment of crisis and surprise. We must not know \u2013 he must not\nknow — that he can make it. If we do, Mamoulian\u2019s ending is truly \u201ctacked on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A further point: Gershwin makes the most of Mamoulian\u2019s ending. He not only provides a great tune; he conceives a musical master-stroke to seal Porgy\u2019s odyssey. We know that his models for Porgy and Bess<\/em> included Wagner\u2019s Die Meistersinger<\/em>, Bizet\u2019s Carmen<\/em>, and Berg\u2019s Wozzeck<\/em>. An important 2007 article by Christopher Reynolds shows, for instance, that Gershwin\u2019s pertinent study of Wozzeck<\/em> was far from casual. In my book, I propose that Gershwin also had a good look at Wagner\u2019s Gotterdammerung<\/em>. When Siegfried dies, Wagner composes a singular symphonic dirge. Its power derives from its narrative trajectory; rather than merely memorializing Siegfried, the orchestra here retells a family history beginning with the love and pathetic fate of Siegfried’s parents, Siegmund and Sieglinde. At the close of Porgy and Bess<\/em>, Gershwin has his orchestra recapitulate Porgy\u2019s story. Not on stage, but in the pit, strands of \u201cI got plenty o\u2019 nuttin’,\u201d \u201cWhat you want with Bess?,\u201d and \u201cBess you is my woman now\u201d (among other tunes) are tellingly reprised. It should become one of the opera\u2019s most stirring events, sealing Porgy\u2019s trajectory. Here again the Met production disappoints. This orchestral peroration needs more weight and balance than it receives under David Robertson\u2019s baton. To my ears, it is too brisk (Gershwin\u2019s final instruction  is \u201cGrandioso\u201d and fortissimo). And the motives do not get equal weight, with the trumpet\u2019s \u201cWhat you want with Bess?\u201d in the foreground and the strings\u2019 \u201cplenty o\u2019nuttin\u201d a secondary strand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Osborne, in his blog, suggests that essentially Porgy and Bess<\/em> may be “a remarkable\u2014probably the most remarkable\u2014example of music theatre in the tradition of American stage realism, certainly transcending the model of the musical, though quite strongly influenced by it.” Perhaps this was Gershwin’s drift, however subliminally. If so, he should never have insisted on Rouben Mamoulian directing Porgy and Bess<\/em>. From Mamoulian’s direction of the play-with-music Porgy <\/em>in 1927, Gershwin would not only have known the Mamoulianized Porgy and Mamoulianized ending, both of which originate with Mamoulian’s draconian revisions of the Porgy <\/em>script. He would have also known that Mamoulian, shunning verisimilitude, was a master choreographer of elaborate tableaux. Most notably, Mamoulian in 1927 turned Robbins’ funeral into something like a stylized voodoo rite with towering, precisely calibrated shadows. And in the hurricane scene he unforgettably grouped a huddled mass of terrified human beings into a triangular wedge. Both these effects would be recapitulated in the opera eight years later, as would be a daybreak “symphony of noises” with choreographed sweeping, snoring, and pounding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heyward’s Catfish Row had been a cultural anthropological reconstruction by a native Southerner. It is no wonder that he advised Gershwin to hire a different director (he proposed the young John Houseman). In sticking with Mamoulian, Gershwin opted for an anti-realistic staging — the one with the “miracle” ending. Whatever the wisdom of this decision, it is a crucial and conscious component of the opera’s gestation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Adducing a realistic Porgy and Bess<\/em> aesthetic, Osborne adds that “Kurt Weill\u2019s Street Scene,<\/em> also a tragedy, is the closest comparison I can think of.” Interestingly, Mamoulian was Weill’s first choice for Street Scene<\/em> — which Mamoulian would doubtless have Mamoulianized. Weill subsequently succeeded in landing Mamoulian for Lost in the Stars<\/em> — with controversial results.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P.S. \u2013 I have not attempted to share the characteristic richness of detail and insight in Conrad Osborne\u2019s posting. Read it yourself (or read my Wall Street Journal<\/em> review<\/a><\/strong> <\/a>of his seminal mega-book Opera as Opera<\/em>). Here\u2019s an e.g.: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is no way\n. . . that one can take in the words, music, and dramatic functions of any of\nthe more prominent characters [of Porgy\nand Bess<\/em>] and label them stereotypes. They\u2019re fleshed-out, living people. Nonetheless, they have been\nvulnerable to attack from the not-good-for-African-Americans p.o.v., which from\nits more extreme angles objects to the very presence of unpleasant or even\nmorally conflicted characters. It\u2019s tantamount to\nsaying you can\u2019t represent black\npeople, disadvantaged people, poor people, unless it\u2019s to ennoble\nthem, as in a patriotic pageant or on a valorizing mural. That\u2019s not a valid\nartistic principle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest installment of Conrad L. Osborne\u2019s indispensable opera blog takes stock of Porgy and Bess and the Met\u2019s acclaimed new production. It also graciously plugs my own recent series of Porgy blogs in this space, my American Scholar review of the Met Porgy, and my book (\u201cOn My Way\u201d \u2013 the Untold Story of […]<\/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-1579","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-pt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","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=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions\/1603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}