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‘Porgy and Bess’ Enters the Operatic Canon

‘Porgy and Bess’ Enters the Operatic Canon

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- “I was always angry that I had to defend Porgy and Bess,” Damon Evans was saying over the weekend, just days before New York’s most famous opera house, the Metropolitan Opera, would open its new season with America’s most famous — and most controversial — opera.

Evans, 69, is a teaching artist at Marymount College in Manhattan, but he spent a long career in both television (he played Lionel in “The Jeffersons” for three seasons) and on Broadway. Yet the role he treasures above all others is that of Sportin’ Life in “Porgy and Bess.”

The man who composed “Porgy and Bess” was of course George Gershwin, who wrote it at the age of 36, three years before he died of a brain tumor. Since it was first performed in 1935, there have been great productions and not-so-great ones. Evans was lucky to have been in one of the great ones: a 1989 production, directed by Trevor Nunn, for the Glyndebourne Festival in England.  As Sportin’ Life, he got to sing one of the best-known songs in the American popular canon: “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

But Sportin’ Life is a dope peddler, who inflicts harm on the working-class African-Americans living on Catfish Row, the fictional block in Charleston, South Carolina, where the opera is set, by selling them cocaine — “happy dust,” he calls it. Bess, a fallen woman trying to redeem her life, can’t escape the clutches of that happy dust, which Sportin’ Life uses in the last act to lure her to New York, where he is headed. The opera ends with Porgy, a disabled beggar who loves Bess, calling for his goat and his cart and departing to find her.

Can you see the problem here? A dope peddler. A fallen woman. A disabled beggar. The fourth main character, Crown, is a rapist and a murderer. And they are all black. Gershwin, meanwhile, was a white New Yorker, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His brother Ira, who composed some of the lyrics, and DuBose Hayward, the Charleston writer whose novel and play “Porgy and Bess” was based on — and who was the primary lyricist — were also white. 

There is no escaping the fact that “Porgy and Bess” deals in stereotypes of African-Americans that have long been considered offensive. “The story presents a black community that gambles, kills each other, and succumbs to dangerous drunken and drug-induced behavior,” wrote Naomi André, an African-American musicologist, in “Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement,” a book published last year.

But to my great surprise, negative stereotypes wasn’t what Evans had in mind when he talked about having to defend the opera. “When I decided to play Sportin’ Life, I went back and read Hayward’s book, ” he told me. “There are definitely stereotypes in the book. But as a black artist, it was up to me to humanize them. That’s what black singers always have to do when they take on ‘Porgy and Bess.’”

No, what bothered him was something else entirely. In his view, the classical music establishment has never taken “Porgy and Bess” seriously, considering it to be a mere entertainment rather than something fit for the operatic stage. Evans pointed out to me that while many American opera houses had staged “Porgy and Bess” over the years, it had never entered the repertoire of any of them; indeed, the last time the Met staged it was almost 30 years ago.

Evans recalled a time he entered an important vocal competition for operatic tenors; when he announced from the stage that he would be singing Sportin’ Life’s final song, “There’s a boat that’s leavin’ soon for New York,” he heard audience members chuckling condescendingly. For most of his career, he told me, it was always like that. “I felt I had to defend `Porgy and Bess’ more to the classical music world than to black people,” he said.

Needless to say, Evans is thrilled that the Met is finally staging “Porgy and Bess” again. So am I. There is no condescension this time around. Eric Owens and Angel Blue, who play Porgy and Bess, are bona-fide opera stars, who have sung Wagner, Verdi and Puccini on opera stages all over the world. In recent weeks, the stars, along with the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, have held a series of public events ahead of Monday night’s opening, in which they’ve talked up the opera’s greatness, stressing that it’s far more than a series of beloved show tunes, like “Summertime”  and “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin.’”

The choreographer, Camille A. Brown, who is black, talked at one such event about her pride at seeing “90 black people on a stage where we were not allowed to have a voice.” (The first black singer to grace the Met’s stage was Marian Anderson in 1955.) If, as is rumored, this new production of “Porgy and Bess” becomes part of the Met’s repertoire, that imprimatur will allow it to finally claim its rightful place as the most significant piece of American music of the 20th century.

From a commercial point of view, the Met’s decision to stage “Porgy and Bess,” makes a lot of sense. It’s expensive to mount because it means hiring a huge all-black chorus while its well-paid, mostly-white chorus sits on the sidelines. But the Met badly needs to attract audiences that are both more diverse and younger — and “Porgy and Bess” has a far better chance of doing that than anything in the standard European repertoire.

As for the controversies over race and identity that have long surrounded the opera, they seem less urgent than they once did. In the 1940s and 1950s, when “Porgy and Bess” was a mainly a show that toured Europe (and was presented as a pared-back musical rather than a full-length opera), the singers felt demeaned by the production, which included aspects of minstrelsy that Gershwin himself would never have countenanced. (In fact, Gershwin insisted that the opera be sung by African-American precisely because he abhorred the idea of having it performed by whites in blackface.) No one would ever consider staging it like that anymore.

Owens points to another reason why the issue of negative stereotyping is less fraught than it once was. “I’m lucky enough to live in a time where you can go elsewhere in the entertainment world…and you can see positive images of people of color,” he said at one of the pre-opening events.  “Back in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, I can understand people wanting to portray a positive image of the black community. Now, it’s not like we’re hard pressed to see people of color on television.”

More recently, questions about racial stereotyping have been replaced by a more modern concern: cultural appropriation. Shouldn’t such stories be reserved for African-American story-tellers, whose authority comes from lived experience?

Perhaps Gershwin's intention and approach provide some defense. Steven Blier, the music historian and co-founder of the New York Festival of Song, thinks the idea that Gershwin improperly appropriated “Porgy and Bess” is wrong-headed. The composer spent the summer of 1934 living on Folly Island in South Carolina, where he spent his days absorbing the music and culture of the Gullah blacks who farmed and fished in South Carolina and Georgia. While composing “Porgy and Bess,” he had at his bedside an anthology of African-American poems and songs.

For my taste, this demonstrates serious commitment and research into a beautiful and neglected part of American culture,” said Blier. “Not stealing. Respect. Inspiration. Multiculturalism.”

Above all else, there’s the music itself, which is transcendent and beautiful, and deeply, unambiguously American. Opera singers say that singing “Porgy and Bess” is every bit as complex as singing any European opera. But that’s not really the point. The point is that Gershwin’s music — and Hayward’s poetic lyrics—transport the listener, as any great piece of music must. As Naomi Andre puts it, ultimately it’s the music in “Porgy and Bess” that makes it “so easy to love and so difficult to stay mad at.”

In 1993, it was adapted for television, and shown on PBS. You can watch it here.

Called, simply “Porgy,” it was published in 1925, a decade before he and Gershwin collaborated on the opera.

At one of those events, the conductor David Robinson said that the first time he heard “Summertime,” it was Janis Joplin’s famous version.

Gelb says he has been trying to stage “Porgy and Bess” since he became general manager in 2006, but the rights were not available from the Gershwin estate. What he’s too discrete to add is that the Gershwin estate is notoriously difficult to deal with.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Timothy L. O'Brien at tobrien46@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

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