Gershwin went to Hollywood to make some money after Porgy and Bess. He and Ira wrote the songs for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, Shall We Dance. Listen to "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They All Laughed," and "They Can't Take that Away From Me."

"'Porgy' and the Racial Politics of Music" (Cori Ellison, New York Times, December 13, 1998)

When we last left George Gershwin:

Virgil Thomson: "Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935."

 

Thomson would be an interesting subject for a research paper. He is an important twentieth century American composer. At about the same time that Porgy and Bess was appearing, his opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, was also being produced in New York. The opera had an all African American cast. Thomson set music to a libretto by Gertrude Stein.

 Is Porgy and Bess racist?

The paper prompt that wasn't: You are part of a UCI arts review board that determines what shows will be produced each year by the School of Fine Arts. The music department has proposed a revival of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. An anti-racist student organization on campus is protesting vigorously against the proposal. Its members maintain that the opera is demeaning to African Americans and that if the music department is going to put on a theatrical piece about African Americans, it should draw on the rich repertory of works that African American composers and librettists have produced. Another student organization is arguing with equal passion that Gershwin’s opera is not racist. It is an American classic. If it is produced at UCI, many students will have the opportunity to hear wonderful music performed by highly talented African American voice students. It would be a tragedy to deny these African American students the opportunity to perform this twentieth century masterpiece. It is your task to prepare a five page memo presenting and defending your position in this controversy. Should Porgy and Bess be performed at UCI?

But first... What do we do with Professor Lupton? I've heard her humming the "Internationale" around the HCC office. She soared on "Summertime." I think it's time to bring her back, and she'll be here next week.

I do not vanish: Office Hours until March 11, Tuesdays, 10:30-12, 452 Krieger Hall. (And from now until I ride off into the sunset, check office hours in the spring, check in the History Department office, 200 Murray Krieger Hall, or email me at rgmoelle@uci.edu

Gratitude:

  • HCC is a collective effort:
    • The people who do the heavy lifting
    • The crew back in the glass booth
    • The tech crew who helps me and Professor Lupton put together our lecture materials (We do our own stunt work)
    • 1100+ first-year UCI students who give us their attention and allow us to think out loud (and special thanks to all those who entered one or more of the challenges, sent me emails, came to office hours, introduced themselves on the ring mall)
    • The project: Introducing you to what we do in the Humanities
      • Writing intensive
      • Intellectually challenging
      • Content from some of the School of Humanities’ most accomplished teachers and research scholars
      • Working through difficult materials and work on writing with extremely smart, accomplished section leaders
      • (Making it work)
      • A course that's well over a year in the making
      • A course that will evolve over the next two years so tell us what you think
    • Working with others to make these parts fit together: That's why I am honored to be a part of this course
    • (Did I make it to Bryant Park?)

My teaching philosophy (and my secret fears)

But I'm not done yet...

Is Porgy and Bess racist? Is the answer to this question always the same? Does the answer depend on the context? Does the answer depend on how it's staged and the decision the director makes?

In the 1930s

  • Gershwin draws heavily on African American influences
  • But as African Americans define their own voices, they are less willing to have others to tell them what it means to be African American
  • Remember the Harlem Renaissance from last lecture
  • African American composers of orchestral works and musical comedies are emerging
    • Hall Johnson (1888-1970): promotes the spiritual, writes music for play, The Green Pastures (1930) and his own drama, Run, Little Chillun! (1933)
  • African American intellectuals are analyzing the problem of racism
    • W.E.B. Dubois: White stereotypes of blacks have a debilitating effect on African Americans; White America forces blacks to look at themselves "through the eyes of others"
  • African Americans are defining themselves culturally and politically

If we want to argue against the production at UCI, what evidence can we hunt and gather? (NOT another agitprop trial. By now we know agitprop makes things too easy, and this question is pretty complicated.)

Hall Johnson, "Porgy and Bess: A Folk Opera," Opportunity 14, 1 (1936): 24-28) (here as a .pdf file)

Making a case against Gershwin (drawn from Hall Johnson):

Gershwin has not achieved authenticity:

"A good Negro opera… must be not only good opera but must be written in an authentic Negro musical language and sung and acted in a characteristic Negro style."

Gershwin's attempts to capture authenticity amounts to exotic tourism:

Background: Gershwin has traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, with Dubose Heyward (librettist and author of the novel and play on which the opera is based) to learn about African American culture in the south

"The informing spirit of Negro music is not to be caught and understood merely by listening to the tunes and Mr. Gershwin’s much-publicized visits to Charleston for local color do not amount even to a matriculation in the prepatory-school that he needed for his work. Nothing can be more misleading, especially to an alien musician, than a few visits to Negro revivals and funerals. Here one encounters the ‘outside’ at its most external. The obvious sights and sounds are only the foam which has no meaning without the beer. And here let it be said that it is not the color nor the aloofness of the white investigator which keeps him on the outside. It is the powerful tang and thrill of the ‘foam’ which excites him prematurely and makes him rush away too soon, to write books and music on a subject of which he has not even begun to scratch the surface.” (Does this language seem sexual to you or is it just me? Remember those waves in that Botticelli painting? Sea meets sky and Venus emerges? Those white caps in the background?)

The real meaning of African-American culture completely eludes Gershwin; he is intoxicated by a strange flower, and he allows it to die:

“Artistically, we darker Americans are in a most peculiar situation [echoes of "peculiar institution," the name given to slavery, RGM] with regard to what we have to give the world. In our several hundred years of enforced isolation in this country we have had plenty of time and plenty of reason to sing each other songs and tell each other tales. These songs and stories have a hidden depth of meaning as well as a simple and sincere external beauty. But the same wall which forced them into existence has closed in tight upon their meaning and allows only their beauty to escape through the chinks. So that our [African-American] folk-culture is like the growth of some hardy, yet exotic, shrub, whose fragrance never fails to delight discriminating nostrils even when there is no interest in the depths of its roots. But when the leaves are gathered by strange hands they soon wither, and when cuttings are transplanted into strange soil, they have but a short sickly life. Only those who sowed the seed may know the secret at the root.” (Importance of imagery of nature; peculiar relationship of slave community to nature; who sows the seed under slavery?) (Other connections: The African American artist, Billie Holiday, will record "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching, in 1939. You can hear a clip of Holiday's version.)

It is only the African-American cast that saves the show:

“It is only as good as it seems to be because of the intelligent pliability of the large Negro cast. While obviously working under strict direction, they are still able to infuse enough of their own natural racial qualities into the proceedings to invest them with a convincing semblance of plausibility.”

Those are Hall Johnson's charges: We can add to this

Duke Ellington's comment: "The times are here to debunk Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms."

Gershwin's singers may be African Americans but key members of his creative team are white

Rouben Mamoulian (October 8, 1897 – December 4, 1987), Director, also director of 1927 stage version of Dubose Heyward's play, Porgy on which the opera is based. Later goes on to become a Hollywood film director. Also directs Oklahoma and Carousel on Broadway.

Alexander Smallens (January 1, 1889 – November 24, 1972), conductor and music director

Alexander Steinert, the vocal coach, is also not African American.

But... In Defense of Gershwin ... Understanding what Gershwin sought to achieve (on the way to a Yes/But thesis?)

Gershwin wants to create a uniquely American art form

  • Fully aware of the European operatic tradition
  • Fully aware of the difference between Broadway and the stage of the Metropolitan Opera
  • Gershwin celebrates multi-cultural America: "Old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear."

And another way of understanding the creative team for Porgy and Bess:

  • Mamoulian is Armenian, leaves Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution
  • Smallens, also born in Russia, moves to US before the war
  • Steinert, the singing coach, is also a Russian immigrant. (He also worked with the U.S. company that produced Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District when it came to New York in early 1935.)

The search for a modern American musical idiom that is deeply tied to African American culture:

  • Gershwin: "I do not know what the next decade will disclose in music. No composer knows. But to be true music it must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today. Of tomorrow, and of my tomorrow, as an interpreter of American life in music, I am sure of but one thing: that the essence of future music will hold enough of melody and harmony of today to reveal its origins." ("Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul" [1926])
  • Ten years later, jazz is present, and for Gershwin, the "American Soul" is in Catfish Row
  • Emphasizing the centrality of the African American experience for defining a uniquely American culture and a "distinctive American musical idiom," "something indigenous, something autochthonous, something deeply rooted in our soil." (Gershwin) (Do you know what idiom means? Indigenous? Autochthonous? Do you know where to go if you don't know? There's nothing wrong with not knowing. There's plenty wrong with not learning what you need to know.)
  • An American opera that privileges African American culture
  • Gershwin directly challenges nativist traditions that exclude African Americans from America and claim that America is defined by its Anglo-Saxon heritage
  • A musical, moral, and political commitment... paid for by Feen-a-Mint (a chewing-gum laxative)

Other cases of debates over authenticity might make for an interesting research topic. Is Eminem just a white boy trying to be black? Did Elvis just steal his moves from an African American musical tradition? Why do the Rolling Stones get credit when black blues musicians did all the work? Debates over authenticity raise really interesting questions about who gets to be a maker and what they get to make.

 Racist... compared to what? (Remember the C for Context? Can we judge Gershwin in the historical context in which he produces this opera?)

(Remember the Bauhaus lecture? Sometimes comparison are helpful, and you need to move beyond your immediate object of study.)

Representations of African Americans on stage and screen

Al Jolson and Jolson in 1945 dramatized version of Gershwin's life (Rhapsody in Blue)

Showboat (premiers 1927, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein III, based on the book by Edna Ferber, published 1926); 1936 film version with Paul Robeson, "Can't help, lovin' that man of mine" (Hattie McDaniel, Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner); and another Robeson clip with Hattie McDaniel, includes "Ole Man River"

 

Jolson's blackface has its origins in minstrelsy, a nineteenth century American music hall form. The history of this art form would make for a really interesting research project that would let you learn a lot about race and culture in the United States.

  • Gershwin competes for rights to Dubose Heyward's Porgy with Al Jolson in proposed collaboration with Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein
  • Gershwin doesn't do enough research to satisfy Hall Johnson, but he does do research. Trip to Charleston with Dubose Heyward would have exposed him to:
    • Shouts (McIntosh County Shouters, like what Gershwin might have heard when he visited Charleston and the South Carolina coast with Dubose Heyward)
    • Gospels (The Mighty Clouds)
  • And familiarity with cultural forms coming out of the Harlem Renaissance would have exposed him to:
  • He knows the difference between what he writes and the musical forms from which he takes his inspiration. (Review the music clips from the last lecture, Act II, Scene 4, Begins Chapter 24 of the DVD)

And he recruits Eva Jessye and her choir for the ensemble

  • Jessye is choral director of a concert gospel choir in NY
  • She does extensive research in particular in African American culture in South Carolina

And testimony from Gerhswin's Porgy (Todd Duncan) and Bess (Anne Brown) (my excerpts, I won't read all of these, this is what I typed out, I'd need to trim it and be selective if I were incorporating it into a paper)

The set for the 1935 production

Opening night

These are my text excerpts, the evidence for my argument. I will not read them all out loud. In a written paper, I would excerpt from the excerpts and choose carefully what in this quotation fit into my own prose.

Anne Brown (b. 1912), interviewed in 1995: "“And so there I was, standing beside his Steinway… I sang a French aria by Massenet, several German lieder, Russian songs in English, even a Gershwin melody. And George Gershwin was full of praise. And then he asked me to sing a Negro spiritual. Well, unless one is nearly as old as I am and has lived in the United State before the Second World War and understood the insidious damage racial prejudice can afflict on both the victim and the racist, it may be difficult to understand my reaction at that moment. I said, 'Well, weren’t you satisfied with what I sang?’ And he said, ‘Yes, of course, it was lovely—beautiful.’ ‘But why do people always ask Negro singers to sing spirituals as if that is the only thing that they should be singing and not German lieder or French arias.’ I was very much on the defensive. George Gershwin simply looked at me and he said, 'Ah huh, I understand.’ And I realized that he did understand and then I wanted more than anything else to sing a spiritual for him. How dumb I had been! Wasn’t this to be an opera about Negroes? ‘I didn’t bring any accompaniment for a spiritual,’ I said, ‘but I could sing one without accompaniment if you would like.’ ‘Oh, yes, please do,’ he said. So I sang a spiritual, ‘A City Called Heaven.’ And when I finished I knew that I had never sung it better nor would I ever sing it better.”

More text excerpts

See note in previous box on text excerpts

Todd Duncan (1903-98), B.A. Butler University, M.A. Columbia University, faculty of Howard University, summoned to NY by Gershwin to audition for Porgy, sings Italian aria for audition. A week later, he returns for Gershwin and his brother Ira to play him the music for Porgy: "All this choptsticks, it sounds awful. This stinks. [But]ut the more they played, the more beautiful I thought the music was. By the time twenty minutes or a half hour had passed I just thought I was in heaven. These beautiful melodies in this new idiom--it was something I had never heard. I just couldn't get enough of it... Well, they finally finished, and when he ended 'I'm on My Way,' I was crying. I was weeping." To a friend he later remarked, "I literally wept for what this Jew was able to express for the Negro."

  • Drawing on African American influences without claiming to be African American
  • Depicting an African American community in transition
    • Not a simple romantic story in which happy African Americans have no cares
    • Crown is an outsider but he races out into the storm
    • Porgy asserts his masculinity by becoming like Crown (question of staging and direction; in original, Porgy has a cart pulled by a goat. Why put him on crutches? How should he say "you got a man now!")
    • The community remains ambivalent about Bess
    • Sportin' Life is an outsider who is also an insider
    • And the opera ends with the breakdown of community
  • Insistence on all African American cast (a condition of Gershwin's last will and testament)

The music vs. the spoken word in the play (the music as evidence for the argument) :

Heyward:

Porgy: Der, der, Bess.
Yo’ ain’t need to be afraid. Ain’t yo’ gots yo’ man? Ain’t yo’ gots Porgy fo’ take care ob you’? What kin’ ob nigger yo’ tinks yo’ gots anyway, fo’ let anudder nigger carry he ‘oman? No, suh! Yo’ gots yo’ man now! Yo’ gots Porgy!

And Gershwin (Ch. 14)

Heyward:

Sportin' Life: "Listen! I’ll be gon’ back up to Noo Yo’k soon. All yoo gots to do is to come wid me now. I’ll hid you’ out an’ take you’ on wid me when I go. Why, yo’ and me’ll be a swell team! Wid yo’ looks an’ all de frien’ I gots dere, it’ll be ebery night an’ all night—licker, dus’, bright lights, an’ de sky de limit!

Gershwin (Ch. 17 of DVD)

And importance of chorus: In the play, there are no multi-part harmonies; this character has a distinctive voice

How are white characters presented?

  • Whites have no singing voice; only spoken dialogue
  • African Americans make fools of whites, playing on whites' racist assumptions about blacks
  • Only exception is Mr. Archdale who represents a self-conscious South seeking to make amends for slavery
  • Example of Porgy
    • Detective: "Look at me, yu damn dummy!"
    • Porgy: "I don't know nuttin' 'bout it, boss."
  • Example of interrogation of Serena (Act III, Scene 2)
  • And Todd Duncan's reflections on "I Got Plenty o' nuttin'" (Act II, Scene 1)

See note above on text excerpts

Todd Duncan interviewed in 1990: “It seems to me that the Porgys that I’ve heard really don’t know who Porgy is. They’ve not gone into the depth of who the characer is; they don’t know the man himself. And when they sing ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’'[Ch. 12 of DVD] they think it’s a buffoon song for a blackface ‘setp-and-fetch-it’ song. It’s not that at all. It is a very deep philosophy and I got it from the composer himself. It is making fun of very wealthy white people. I got this from George Gershwin’s own mouth when he said to me, 'Todd, you’re not singing what we’re after. This is a bitter song and you have to sing it with tongue-in-cheek; you have to sing it smiling all the time. Because what you’re doing is making fun of us. You’re making fun of people who make money and to whom power and position is very important."

Remember the double-time of the opera (double-time means considering the time in which the drama is set, the early 1900s, and the time at which it's produced, 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression) :

  • Set sometime between the turn of the century and immediate post-World War I period (and I think Mr. Archdale gives us evidence for early twentieth century; I also know I talked about double-time in the first Gershwin lecture, but it's a difficult concept, worth talking about a second time)
  • But set against the background of the Great Depression when many rich people have lost a lot

Gershwin's solidarity with the cast: When show travels to segregated hall in Washington, D.C., Gershwin insists on desegregation for the run

Racist compared to what (again, involves moving beyond the immediate object of study)? How do other operas represent the "other"?

Happy peasants in Mozart's Don Giovanni (Zerlina is the lovely young thing whom Donny G will try to seduce)

An angry Chinese empress and her intimidated subjects in Puccini's Turandot

The gypsy music of Bizet's Carmen (sung by a Russian gypsy?)

And the exotic Japanese of Puccini's Madama Butterfly (Licia Albanese, funny, she doesn't look Japanese)

What's different in the case of Porgy and Bess?

  • The black/white divide and the legacy of slavery fundamentally define America
  • African Americans can speak for themselves and are critical of those who pretend to speak for them

But still,would you rather have Jolson in blackface or Todd Duncan?

The limits of the language of race:

Back to Hall Johnson:

“A good Negro opera… must be not only good opera but must be written in an authentic Negro musical language and sung and acted in a characteristic Negro style."
“[G]enuine Negro music” he argues, has “the quality of utter simplicity.” This escapes Gershwin because of his “involved treatment of his thematic material… and sophisticated intricacies of attitude which could not possibly be native to the minds of the people who make up his story.”
"I Got Plenty o' Nottin" lacks “every true racial quality."
“Dere’s a Train Leavin’ Soon for New York” is “a real Negro gem” but "It Ain’t Necessarily So” is “so un-Negroid, in thought and in structure, that even Bubbles cannot save it.”
“It is not easy… to believe that Sportin’ Life… could be so entirely liberated from that superstitious awe of Divinity which even the most depraved southern Negro never quite loses.”
Mr. Gerswhin’s music “has missed a Negro feeling."

Johnson and Gershwin share an essentialist view of race. Both argue that there are certain qualities inherent in all African Americans. Their E is quite different, but in some ways their L and their P are the same.

So where does this leave me? How do I vote?

Working toward a tentative hypothesis (which will lead me to abstain):

In the 1930s, both Gershwin, his enthusiasts and his critics, had conceptions of racial difference that assessed African Americans by the "color of their skin," not the "content of their character."* Gershwin and his critics agreed that all African Americans embodied certain essential qualities. At issue was not whether those qualities existed but rather who most authentically could articulate and express them.

(* I am consciously borrowing language from Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I have a dream" speech. I'd indicate that in a footnote. This suggests that I see the opera as part of a bigger story of race, culture, and politics in twentieth century America.)

Coda: Gershwin loses tons of his own money on Porgy and Bess. He goes to Hollywood (Shall We Dance, 1937), dies in 1937 following surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Hollywood showtunes as Gershwin's equivalent to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony? Paying the bills and winning your way back into the public's heart?

Instead of a conclusion

Sharing the gift the Core Course gave me:

  • Many, many questions and an agenda for the same thing you'll be doing this spring--RESEARCH
  • Your paper is due at the end of the spring quarter.
  • My paper is due whenever I'm good and ready. I am taking on much more than you could possibly take on in a quarter or in 8-10 pages. (And isn't it amazing that the taxpayers of California pay me to do this??!!!)

Playing around with the New York Times or the afterlives of Porgy and Bess

Fast-forwarded: Different answers to the same question, is it a racist opera?

First Stop:

  • Revival in 1952-54, Porgy and Bess on tour in western Europe

In the lower lefthand corner, you can see that the recording was awarded a prize by the German recording industry

Leontyne Price as Bess (this is another photograph by Carl van Vechten). Price earned a reputation as one of the most accomplished opera divas of the 1950s and 1960s, esp. for her interpretations of Puccini and Verdi.

William Warfield who played Porgy in this revival (Warfield also had an established reputation as a singer and appeared in many Hollywood movies, including a 1951 remake of Showboat)

Cab Calloway was Sportin' Life (Calloway had an incredibly successful career as a band leader who put on variety shows and recorded extensively)

And in the ensemble, Maya Angelou (the same person who wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

State Department Intentions: US is not racist

  • Consequences of directions: Europeans see an exoticized African American sexuality
  • And some African Americans deplore an opera that is "the most insulting, the most libelous, the most degrading act that could possibly be perpetrated against colored Americans of modern times." (Another part of research: I found this quoted in a secondary source. I would like to get the original.)

But the jury remains out:

From Maya Angelou's memoir of the European tour: Porgy and Bess was to be the first American opera sung at La Scala. Famous white sopranos, tenors and baritones from the United States had soloed at Milan's renowned opera house; now and entire cast of Negro singers were nervously rehearsing on the legendary stage...
We had performed Porgy and Bess as never before, and if the La Scala patrons loved us, it was only fitting because we certainly performed as if we were in love with one another."

 

Leontyne Price: "Being Bess was already half of me, I mean, most of me anyway. I don't mean the character itself, I mean being wonderfully black... It's like, here I am, isn't it terrific."

 

Warfield: It was "a celebration of our culture, and not an exploitation of it. The work didn't snigger at African-Americans. It ennobled the characters it depicted."

  • Warfield and Price both use the European tour to do concert performances of classical repertoire

Second Stop: Porgy and Bess meet the Communists, Moscow, 1956, also other parts of Eastern Europe (very early hunting and gathering stages)

Third Stop: Porgy and Bess in Hollywood

Instead, Otto Preminger, Sidney Poitier (dubbed by Robert McFerrin, Bobby's father), Dorothy Dandridge (dubbed by Adele Addison) Diahann Carroll (Clara, dubbed by Loulie Jean Norman, a white woman), Sammy Davis, Jr. (Sportin' Life, sings), Brock Peters (Crown, remember To Kill a Mockingbird?) and Pearl Bailey (Maria, sings) (premiers 1959)

  • Against the background of pitched battles over desegregation and the emerging civil rights movement
    • 1954: Brown v. Board of Education
    • 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama
    • 1957: Soldiers accompany 9 African American students to desegregate a school in Little Rock, Arkansas
    • And for more of this timeline...
  • Poitier performs only because of contractual obligation
  • Pearl Bailey rejects the "dialogue bit"

Lorraine Hansberry, African American playwright (Raisin in the Sun): "My feeling about stereotypes is something that's seldom said--that they constitute bad art. They produce half a character (and) hostility to it should come from every responsible human being, realizing they're being cheated, that the artist hasn't tried hard enough to understand his characters."

Movie version has few defenders, but Preminger--a Jewish refugee from Austria in the 1930s--responds: “I’m Jewish,” he declared. “I ran away from Hitler. How can they say I’m anti-Negro?” (competing ELPs)

Fourth Stop: By the 1960s, Porgy and Bess is in cold storage

  • Civil Rights movement
  • Black Power movement

See note above on text excerpts

"As a symbol of that deeply-ingrained, American cultural paternalism practiced on Negroes ever since the first Southern white man blacked his face, the folk-opera Porgy and Bess should forever be banned by all Negro performers in the United States. No Negro singer, actor, or performer should ever submit to a role in this vehicle again... In theme, it presents 'simple black people' just the way white liberal paternalists love to see them... Culturally, it is a product of American developments that were intended to shunt Negroes off into a tight box of subcultural, artistic dependence, stunted growth, caricature, aesthetic self-mimcry imposed by others, and creative insolvency." (Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual [New York, 1967], 104.)

Fifth Stop: Back onto the stage, this time as American opera (with no folk attached)

Revival in 1976 by the Houston Grand Opera as opera... as part of the bicentennial: America's quintessential opera

A story that just keeps on unfolding...

Finally, five decades later (1985)--as part of the fiftieth anniversary of its premier--on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York

And in 1998, we're still asking the question

Cori Ellison, "'Porgy' and the Racial Politics of Music," New York Times, December 13, 1998 (and by now you know how I found this article): "As the millennium approaches, a pop-inflected, genre-bending, dramatically singular masterpiece of the 20th century is finally edging into the standard operatic repertory. Is it... Shostakovich's 'Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District'? It could be... but the opus in question is Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess,' which shares with [that] mighty work... enough visceral dramatic sweep and power, musical invention and craft, vocally and theatrically meaty characters, and mythical resonance to match any of Verdi's middle-period operas.'

Bobby McFerrin--son of Robert McFerrin, the opera singer who dubbed Poitier--conducted this staged version described in the article. Quoting McFerrin: "'The main issue with blacks is, how can a white person write the black experience?' Mr. McFerrin said. 'Well, they can't. It's as simple as that. But Gershwin spent a lit of time in Charleston at churches, homes and nightclubs, listening and getting the rhythms in his body... So it's not anthropology. But the bottom line is, he captured something in a special way. Was 'Carmen' written by a Gypsy? Was 'DonG Giovanni' written by a Spaniard? No. But do thee operas capture something about the human condition? Do they have gorgeous music? You bet.'"

 

Which is your Porgy and Bess?

I can't figure out the date on this. Anyone want to help?

This one dates from 1976

This is from a 2006 revival

And this is the recording of the cast you've heard, released 1989

 

And while you were slogging through Grosz, Heartfield and Weimar art...

Porgy and Bess in Austin, set in Katrina (and read the New York Times review)

I'm confused and I love it: I have research to do.

  • Hire a research assistant (I have one now, but she's going on EAP to Paris next year. Looking for a job? Send me an email.)
  • In two weeks: Gershwin archive at New York Public Library at Lincoln Center (located archival sources on WorldCat)
  • My summer vacation: The UCI library, inter-library loan, UCLA special collections archive for Preminger and the movie version, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., for more of Gershwin's papers
  • And in some distant future: National Archives for Department of State coordination of European tour; Berlin and Vienna for European reception; Harry Truman Library, Independence, Mo. (do I really want to do this project? Will I be able to find a decent restaurant in Independence? Where will I stay?) and Dwight D. Eisenhower library in Austin, Tx (definitely not in the summer)
  • The great circle of scholarly life: Research informs pedagogy informs research informs pedagogy. This is why you chose to come to a research university.

Time for one last song...

But wait, wait, there's still time for one last singalong:

Gershwin dies in 1937, but before then, he makes it Hollywood to make some serious money after losing a ton of his own money in Porgy and Bess.

Remember how way back in my first lecture, I said that historians were interested in:

  • The way they wore their hats
  • The way they sipped their tea
  • The way they held their knives
  • The way they danced 'til three