by Naomi Andre
In March 2017 I had an opportunity to be in touch with composer William Bolcom and writer Sandra Seaton to ask if they had any current thoughts or comments about From the Diary of Sally Hemings. Seaton keeps up with news around the Hemings and Jefferson history and forwarded me the recent article from the Washington Post, “For Decades They Hid Jefferson’s Relationship with Her: Now Monticello Is Making Room for Sally Hemings,” by Krissah Thompson, about the restoration of the room believed to have been the home to Sally Hemmings.69 This article outlined how archaeologists have been working at Monticello to restore Sally Hemings’s room where “her space will be outfitted with period furniture and artifacts, such as bone toothbrushes and ceramics excavated on the property.” In addition to my excitement to hear that Monticello was continuing to better incorporate the stories of the slaves who worked there, I was also dismayed to read in the comments section to this article that there were many people who still denied the possibility of a relationship between Hemings and Jefferson and were hostilely dismissive to evidence revealed in the DNA reports. It seems that this history is still fighting acceptance, despite the credible scientific evidence available.
William Bolcom had attended a performance of From the Diary of Sally Hemings by Marti Newland and Artis Wodehouse in New York City in 2013 and “thought they were terrific.”70 He also mentioned a few things he was thinking about as he composed the music,
Sally grew up in the house with the Jefferson children, read the same books in the library and so forth, and could have been well acquainted with white culture possibly more than with her “own.” Not that she would have disdained anything like Juba dancing and syncopation. … We know from Gottschalk that ragtime’s roots go way back before it became known as ragtime, just as boogie-woogie existed already in the 1900s (then called “sixteen”), but Sally may not have been anywhere to see or hear this music in an early form very much. Only in the last few notes of Hemmings does her black heritage peek out shyly at us; it’s there but rather buried throughout the rest of the cycle.”71
With the CD recording by Alyson Cambridge and this performance by Marti Newland (available on YouTube), it is wonderful to see performances of this work becoming available and, hopefully, more integrated into a regularly performed repertory. As is seen from the liner notes and articles about this work, Bolcom and Seaton did not blithely play with history and fantasy in their collaboration. Instead, they carefully examined the historical and musical contexts at the dawn of the nineteenth century, researched all available information about Jefferson and Hemings, and thoughtfully brought in their own experiences around black-white culture in the United States to flesh out a compelling narrative of this story. Though a musical work might initially seem to be an unlikely place for addressing the larger questions around race, gender, and the founding history of the United States, it is precisely the creative artistic space that allows for multiple interpretations to overlap simultaneously. The incarnation of Sally Hemings as a ghostly presence in U.S. history becomes a way to emancipate her existence into a palpable and plausible embodiment.
4Contextualizing Race and Gender in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
Since its first performance in 1935, Porgy and Bess has had a steep climb into recognition as an opera (instead of something better adapted for the Broadway musical theater stage). Aided by the Houston Grand Opera production in 1976 and the Metropolitan Opera production in 1985, in recent decades the work has finally reached the status as one of the all-time great American operas.
The 1920s and 1930s in the United States encompassed the “folk” of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression, while currents of immigration, the Great Migration (of black people from the rural South to urban centers in the North and West), and definitions of what “Americanness” meant provided foundational support in the construction of a national cultural and artistic expression. This chapter examines how Porgy and Bess is situated in these contexts.
There are three themes of inquiry that shape this study. First is the question “Who tells this story?” since the issues of representation form a centerpiece of this work’s reception. Second, with regard to how blackness is staged, is how the context of the U.S. Southern and Jewish immigration for the composer and librettists helped shape the telling of story as well as who is being represented. A unique characteristic of Porgy and Bess is that it presents multiple and complex representations of black manhood and black womanhood; this discussion brings in the multiple representations of black people with gendered and racialized identities. And third: though this is a story that focuses on blackness, it reveals things about whiteness and Jewishness. As I explore the contexts around the first performances of Porgy and Bess, I am conscious of who has watched and continues to watch this story, how the opera resonated with meaning in the past as well as in productions of the opera and adapted versions for the musical stage today.
I start with two focal points, in extended quotations, that reflect this book’s greater emphasis on opera in the United States and South Africa.
First, a quotation from William Bolcom, featured composer of From the Diary of Sally Hemings in chapter 3, about American opera in the twentieth century. In a 2006 interview, cultural historian Daniel Herwitz asks Bolcom about historical models in American opera, as Bolcom had become a leading opera composer with McTeague (1992), A View from the Bridge (1999), and A Wedding (2002). Bolcom replied:
But I have to say, if you ask about models, somebody in the press once asked me what I think are the six most important operas in the American twentieth century. Well, I said Porgy and Bess, Porgy and Bess, Porgy and Bess, Porgy and Bess, Porgy and Bess, and Porgy and Bess. I still feel that way. I don’t see anyone even come close.1
Second, as Porgy and Bess has come to occupy the position of the quintessential “American” opera, it is also one that has been performed in multiple presentations in South Africa after the dismantling of apartheid. Journalist Peter Cox covered a production in South Africa that later toured Europe in 2012.
When the Cape Town opera company first began performing Porgy and Bess in 2006, they produced the opera as it was—an American story. But reviewers and fans began pointing out how the opera was so closely linked to the story of black South Africans.
With that in mind, the company decided to reset the piece in the Johannesburg township of Soweto. They put the piece in the 1970s, when the country was still under apartheid. The opera’s dialogue has been infused with Xhosa and Zulu, and some African musical flourishes have been added to the piece.2
Later on, South African singer Otto Maidi (who was performing the role of Porgy) said,
Even though it was composed by an American, the relationship is that it tells our story as black people. … It also informs and also entertains at the same time. Everything which happens in Catfish Row, it’s really, really, really, going together with our daily lives in the townships.3
With William Bolcom emphasizing the central position of Porgy and Bess as a foundation for American opera, the productions in South Africa demonstrate that the black musical idioms and character representations resonate with performers, composers, and audiences across the Atlantic. In this chapter I present a concise history of the composition and performance of the work and explore the context around Gershwin’s own words that Porgy and Bess was an American folk opera. This designation around American music, the construction of the “folk” for European and black people, and the genre of opera were all multivalent in their specific meanings at that time in the early twentieth century. Regarding race, I delve into meanings of whiteness (specifically around anti-Semitism and immigration) and blackness during the time of the Great Migration and in references to black minstrelsy stereotypes.
Finally, I take advantage of this opera, the only one in the current repertory, to examine these multiple presentations of black womanhood. I read these characters, especially the title character Bess, through the various lenses—through an intersectional an
alysis that brings together race, gender, and a hypersexuality; in the company of another canonical opera heroine (Donna Anna from Mozart’s Don Giovanni) in the handling of sexual indiscretion, honor, and revenge; and across time, in the interpretation of Bess’s role from her presence in DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel Porgy through her role in the 1935 opera and in a millennial adaptation of her role in the production that writer Suzan-Lori Parks and director Diane Paulus reimagined for a modern audience. Finally, I listen to an important early interpreter (Leontyne Price) talk about what Bess meant to her, and I consider this role in the career of a legendary performer who was part of the first generation of black opera singers who sang across the color line in the leading opera houses of the world.
Constructing the Story of Porgy and Bess
George Gershwin was born in 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, and died unexpectedly in 1937 at age thirty-eight from an undiagnosed brain tumor. One of his last and most important works was Porgy and Bess, which premiered in 1935. His untimely death has led to several questions about Porgy and Bess—questions that Gershwin would have most likely addressed when he revisited this work, had he lived to oversee subsequent productions of the opera. Porgy and Bess was the first work to engage an almost exclusively black cast in the 1930s and that continues, in varied versions, up to the present day to be a pivotal work that features black performers and a story about black people in the United States. From its premiere in 1935 up through the present, Porgy and Bess has mobilized integrated audiences and critically speaks to the ways black people have been—and continue to be—configured in an ever-changing American consciousness.
Turning to the more recent and high-profile production on Broadway in 2012 (with previews in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011–2012) that subsequently went on tour in the United States, Porgy and Bess has been presented in a so-called “postracial” society that has seen affirmative action instituted, accepted, and now challenged. The messages of Porgy and Bess provide a cautionary tale from the past, a yardstick for poor urban and rural centers today, and a lurking fear for the future. Through various modifications to the story and music, the new version for Broadway (2012) updates the work in ways that resonate differently with contemporary audiences. A picture emerges that highlights the experiences of racially diverse audiences and continues to shape the multiple layers of meaning present in Porgy and Bess over time. I seek to ask questions about Porgy and Bess that opera scholars have not focused on but are very much a part of the life of Porgy and Bess as a work that has been consumed by real people (the audience) who have gendered, racialized, and ethnic identities and who bring diverse vantage points into the theater.
I am especially interested in how Porgy and Bess has generated meaning since its premiere in 1935 and up through the 2011–2012 revival on Broadway, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, directed by Diane Paulus and adapted by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray, with a widely talented cast led by Audra McDonald (for which she won her fifth Tony Award as Bess), Norm Lewis, and David Alan Grier.4 This production subsequently went on tour (with different performers). I was fortunate to see this production on Broadway twice in the summer of 2012 and then in March 2014 while the show was on tour at the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit.
As a musical or as an opera, Porgy and Bess is a work that expresses many issues around gender, class, and what it means to be American. Through articulations of blackness, whiteness, and Jewishness, Gershwin brings together how racial and ethnic discourses of the past still resonate today. I outline this path through a discussion of the folk and the quest in the early part of the twentieth century among white and black critics to find an “American” musical voice that was discrete from European dominance. In narratives around Eastern European immigration to the United States and the Great Migration among African Americans within the United States, Porgy and Bess articulates experiences of self-definition. Through the established shadows of minstrelsy, Porgy and Bess reinforces these stereotypes as well as breaks past them to allow black performers and audience members from all backgrounds to feel the power and the pain such assumptions reinforce.
Introducing Porgy and Bess (1935)
Porgy and Bess the opera premiered at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on September 30, 1935, and had a New York opening and run at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway beginning October 10, 1935. The singers composed an all-black cast (with white singers for the few white roles, all of which speak and do not sing—the Detective, the Coroner, and the Policeman). Todd Duncan (1903–1998), a voice professor at Howard University, was Gershwin’s original Porgy. In 1945, Duncan became the first black man to sing a large role at New York City Opera, as Tonio in I Pagliacci (ten years before Marian Anderson’s historical debut as Ulrica in Ballo at the Met in 1955). Anne Brown (1912–2009), a twenty-two-year-old Juilliard graduate, was the first Bess. Many other classically trained singers joined these classically trained leads. In addition, John William Sublett (1902–1986), known professionally as John W. Bubbles (and who was one of the leading tap dancers and vaudeville entertainers of the time), played the leading role of Sportin’ Life. Though “Bubbles” did not read music and needed to be taught his role by rote, Gershwin admired his musicianship and defended keeping him on, even when others felt he was slowing down the rehearsals. To help coordinate the large chorus community of Catfish Row, Gershwin enlisted Eva Jessye (1895–1992), one of the leading choral directors of time, who had university degrees in classical music training and pedagogy (Western University in Kansas and Langston University in Oklahoma) and experience working with composer Will Marion Cook and in Broadway shows and motion pictures. In addition to having been the choral director for Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts that premiered in 1934 (the year before Porgy and Bess), Jessye’s Original Dixie Jubilee Singers (which later become the Eva Jessye Choir) was an ensemble that performed spirituals, work songs, mountain ballads, ragtime jazz and light opera.
Scholars have noted that Gershwin himself was in between the “popular” music tradition with his Tin Pan Alley past and successful Broadway musicals and was also moving into the “classical-art” music tradition with his Concerto in F, Rhapsody in Blue, and An American in Paris; additionally, he was finding his own compositional voice that included a large dose of jazz traditions. Gwynne Kuhner Brown has written about how Gershwin supported the important collaborative voice that the black performers brought to the first performances.5 My emphasis here is the wide range in the types of black voices Gershwin brought into this work. As a microcosm of the black musical community, Porgy and Bess of 1935 shows that there were black musicians who were involved with so many different styles of music from this time—the vaudeville tap dancing popular tradition, classical opera, jazz, and spirituals and black art choral singing.
Porgy and Bess ran for 124 performances at the Alvin (closing on January 25, 1936) and then toured (Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Washington, D.C.) until March 1936. Though 124 successive performances of a single opera in New York could hardly be called a disaster at that time, it was considered a box office failure because it lost all of its $70,000 investment and the financial backers did not make money. Gershwin’s unexpected death in 1937 prevented him from going back to this production and working out the details for what might have led to one or two final versions of the work: one for Broadway and/or one for the opera house. As it is now, we have the version from 1935–36 that Gershwin oversaw, but it can hardly be considered definitive, since he wrote too much music and parts of the composition were cut during the rehearsal period and after the premiere.6 We also have several other posthumous versions: a film (1959) that is now withdrawn from distribution, several opera productions following the momentous Houston Grand Opera revival (1976), and the Glyndebourne film that originally aired on television in the early 1990s, directed by Trevor Nunn and conducted by Simon Rattle. There are various stage musical versions that were performed in the 1940s through the 1960s.7
The 1959 Samuel Goldwyn movie version, directed by Otto Preminger, with Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll, Pearl Bailey, and others (Maya Angelou appears as a dancer in an uncredited role), presents a constellation of many themes that illustrate how problematic the legacy of this work has been. Using the leading black singers and actors of the time, with a bold and accomplished director, this movie version seems to have been a recipe for success. Yet the complications of staging blackness—visually and aurally—in the joint media of film and opera uncovered challenges around race and representation. One issue was that this movie version uses dubbed voices with classically trained operatic voices behind the Hollywood faces. Robert McFerrin sang for Porgy (played by Sidney Poitier) and Adele Addison was Bess’s singing voice (played by Dorothy Dandridge). In a historical moment of racial uplift that led into the civil rights era, the film presented a difficult cognitive dissonance with great acting and musical talent portraying a story based on negative stereotypes, adverse assumptions, and tragic outcomes for the black community. While the 1959 Porgy and Bess film has been recalled by the Gershwin family and is very difficult to find, it brings to mind some of the same issues with a black setting of a different opera in the Western European tradition, Bizet’s Carmen. In 1954, five years before Preminger turned to Porgy and Bess, he worked with many of the same performers (Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll, and Pearl Bailey) in an all-black cast in his exceedingly popular film version of Hammerstein’s 1943 musical, Carmen Jones.8
Unpacking Each Word: American Folk Opera
Gershwin called Porgy and Bess an American folk opera. He discussed his ideas and motivations for the work in the article he wrote, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row: Mr. Gershwin Tells the Origin and Scheme for His Music in That New Folk Opera Called Porgy and Bess” for the New York Times on October 20, 1935, just ten days after the New York City premiere.9