Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  Though these might sound like helpful labels, all of these terms “American,” “Folk,” and “Opera” were not straightforward in the 1930s. Moreover, there are several issues surrounding Porgy and Bess that are prevalent in the literature: the question of genre, the intent of race, and the status of the score. The question of genre is relevant because Porgy and Bess seems to be a work that can exist in multiple forms. Gershwin’s own comments on this topic are both helpful and complicated. What is “American” music at this point in history? To whom does the “folk” refer, and what does that mean in the 1930s? What is opera in the early twentieth century, nine years after Puccini died and as no American composer (or one from another nationality, for that matter) had yet emerged as a leading figure?10

  American Music: The First Decades of the Twentieth Century

  From the end of the nineteenth into the first half of the twentieth century, a few examples stand out to show how the identification of music “native” to the United States became a deep concern for white and black audiences invested in America’s musical profile. In 1885, Jeanette Thurber, the prominent New York music patron, founded the National Conservatory of Music and the American Opera Company in New York City. Born in Delhi, New York, she was the daughter of Danish immigrant Henry Meyers (a violinist), who sent her for music training to the Paris Conservatory. While in Paris, she was impressed with the French system of providing conservatory training at the government’s expense and decided to emulate this in the United States. Through her music knowledge and funding from her wealthy grocerymerchant husband (Francis Beatty Thurber) Jeanette was able to obtain a charter from the state of New York and open these institutions. Progressive for its time, the National Conservatory admitted women and men, as well as African American and Native American students.

  In 1891 Thurber sent piano faculty Adele Margulies (also seen as “Margolis”) to Czechoslovakia to invite Antonín Dvořák to become the director of the National Conservatory. Dvořák accepted this invitation and served as director from 1892 to 1895. Thurber sought out Dvořák primarily for his success in finding ways to bring his own Czech (Bohemian) identity into classical European music—symphonies, string quartets, and other orchestral and chamber works. Thurber’s goal was for Dvořák to find an “American” voice in the United States that could be woven into a classical art music tradition. As an outsider, he might have a fresh ear to ferret out “folk” materials and create American music. Dvořák’s most famous compositions from this period in the United States were his symphony in E minor, known as his 9th Symphony “From the New World,” and his “American” String Quartet—written during the summer of 1893, when he was in Spillville, Iowa, a small town in the northeast corner of the state with a sizeable Czech immigrant population. Being in an environment where African American and Native American students were allowed to study, Dvořák probably was exposed, even nominally, to these cultures. At the conservatory in New York, Dvořák met Harry T. Burleigh, an African American composer and singer who would sing spirituals to Dvořák and introduce him to that style of music.11

  From the time of the premiere of Dvořák’s 1893 symphony while he was in the United States, the work was heralded as an “American” work, with the folk music of African Americans and Native Americans considered to be the core of the sound of the nation. Referring to Dvořák, J. W. Henderson, (music critic for the New York Times), wrote,

  What he has done is to saturate himself with the spirit of negro music and then to invent his own themes. He has made himself completely the master of the fundamental melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic peculiarities of negro tunes. … Having thus learned how negro music is made, Dr. Dvorak built symphonic themes. He made melodies perfectly adapted to the processes of symphonic development. … Finally, is it American? The answer to his question depends wholly upon the attitude which the American public decides to take in regard to the sources of Dr. Dvorak’s inspiration. That both Indian and negro music share some of their peculiarities with the folk-music of the Old World need not be accounted to the discredit of the composer’s attempt. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, the plantation songs of the American negro possess a striking individuality. … A national song is one that is of the people, for the people, by the people. The negroes gave us their music and we accepted it.12

  This assessment that Dvořák found American music to be composed of Native American and African American voices became an important current in early-twentieth-century American culture. Dvořák’s prominence in helping find an “American” voice in music was mentioned in black commentaries during the time of Porgy and Bess. In 1923 John W. Work II, composer and educator, wrote about the “Negro Folk Song” and mentioned Dvořák’s role in helping define this music in the United States:

  After Dvorak had made a thorough study of music in America, he pronounced the Negro folk-song “original and American,” adding that if America ever had a national music, it must be based upon the songs found among the Southern Negroes. Confident in the hope that it would be the beginning of the national music, he composed his “New World Symphony,” employing thematically and characteristically the Negro folk-music as a basis and inspiration.13

  By 1930, noted writer, diplomat, and historian James Weldon Johnson outlined the important role that African Americans played in New York City from the prerevolutionary days of the eighteenth century through the Harlem Renaissance with a special emphasis on their musical and theatrical contributions. In his discussion of Harry T. Burleigh, Johnson writes,

  Mr. Burleigh was a student at the National Conservatory of Music in New York while Anton Dvorak was director. … He not only studied with Dvorak, but spent a good deal of time with him at his home. It was he who called to the attention of the great Bohemian composer the Negro Spirituals and is therefore in that degree responsible for the part they play in the “New World Symphony.”14

  In this passage about Burleigh, Johnson writes as though it is already an accepted understanding that Dvořák’s music gave credence to how American music was being defined; behind the scenes we see the voice of Burleigh and the spirituals. Prominent writer about the Harlem Renaissance and Howard University professor Alain Locke, a leading voice in African American life, also recognized the connection between Dvořák and black music. In Locke’s 1936 The Negro and his Music, he wrote about Dvořák’s “From the New World Symphony”:

  In the “Largo” of the symphony, we sense the true atmosphere of a Negro spiritual, and in the Scherzo or fast third movement, Papa Dvorak, without fully sensing it, was nose close to jazz, for he took his rhythms and tone intervals from the shout type of Negro dance. In this important pioneering, the record stands that Dvorak’s guide and musical interpreter was the Negro musician and composer, Harry T. Burleigh, then a graduate student at the National Conservatory, Brooklyn, where Dvorak taught during his American visit.15

  Though Thurber, Henderson at the New York Times, and the black critics John Work, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke concurred with the assessment of African American music having important roots for an American voice in art music, not all composers in the United States initially followed Dvořák’s lead. For example, one of the pioneering “American” voices during this time was New England composer Charles Ives (1874–1951), who is frequently considered to be the first American composer of note to have studied fully in the United States without traveling to Europe to find his American voice. Ives spent his college years at Yale University, and his music shows marked influence from the music he grew up with, notably church hymns, band music his father conducted, and parlor tunes promoted through sheet music popular in American homes. Being associated with Connecticut his whole life, Ives is considered a quintessential American voice with roots in an ethnicity that speaks of New England’s historical connection to its puritanical culture of whiteness. Yet it seems that even Charles Ives became aware of the growing attention African American songs, notably the spirituals, were getting. Sho
rtly after James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Lawrence Brown published their art-song arrangements in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), Ives wrote “In the Mornin’” (1929), which has the inscription in the score “Negroe Spiritual.” He heard Mary Evelyn Stiles sing it in 1929; she had known the work “from her father, Major Robert Stiles, of Richmond, Va., who heard it when a boy. It is quite probably considerably over 80 years old.”16 In Sinclair’s catalog of Ives’s work, he notes that Ives has used some of the music from the spiritual “Give Me Jesus” in the accompaniment.17 Ives scholar Gayle Sherwood Magee notes this as “Ives’s ethnographic attempt to record an oral tradition outside of his own white New England repertoire that originated in a parallel past, that of African Americans in Virginia.”18 As we assemble this picture, we see a composer from New England known for finding his own “American” voice and who seems to have had little connection with African American life, near the end of his composing career, harmonizing a Negro spiritual. It seems evident that the spiritual and “black” music at this time had something central to do with American identity. We see leaders in the white and black press as well as the first generation of “American” composers at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth being drawn to various repertoires in black music.

  In addition to the rather bold declaration that Dr. Dvořák was using Indian and negro music to create a nationalistic American sound, Henderson also brings up a theme that will resurface in Gershwin’s comments about his own use of African American folk music. They both claim to have absorbed the style or an “atmosphere” (to use Locke’s word regarding Dvořák) of black music. What is at stake with such comments that allow Europeans, white Americans, and black Americans to emulate the music of African Americans as American music? When a race, or ethnicity, becomes recognizable to a larger public, has it succeeded in representing a nation?

  American music, by the time of Porgy and Bess in the mid-1930s, was still in the early stages of defining itself and figuring out its own “classical” or “art” music. Though Gershwin started out as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter, his move into more “serious” forms of music has given him a special place in early-twentieth-century American musical identity. His combinations—of popular, “low brow” songs and show tunes along with more “serious high brow” rhapsodies and concertos (Rhapsody in Blue [1924], Concerto in F [1925])—gets at the heart of what American music was developing into: finding a new, homegrown voice that evolved out of, but was not wholly dependent on, European tradition. Yet this combination, especially when it brought in elements of black music—such as jazz and the blues—was something that conflicted with what many people thought an “American” musical voice should be. In the 1930s, jazz and the blues were still considered rather subversive musical forms associated with lowerclass society and negative sides of black identity; many white people and some black people shared these ideas. The artistry and skill in jazz and the blues were not generally appreciated until much later, in the 1960s and 1970s. Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues,” published in Alain Locke’s 1925 collection The New Negro, was an early example, against the norm, of praising and accepting the blues as a genre. Taking all of these things into consideration helps illustrate how Gershwin was pushing the comfort zone of respectable society when he announced that his use of black music was part of an indigenous “American” musical voice.

  Who Are the “Folk”?

  Gershwin began his October 20, 1935, New York Times article, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row: Mr. Gershwin Tells the Origin and Scheme for His Music in That New Folk Opera Called Porgy and Bess” with discussion of “folk”:

  Since the opening of Porgy and Bess I have been asked frequently why it is called a folk opera. The explanation is a simple one. Porgy and Bess is a folk tale. Its people naturally would sing folk music. When I first began work on the music I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece. Therefore I wrote my own spirituals and folksongs. But they are real folk music—and therefore, being in operatic form, Porgy and Bess becomes a folk opera.19

  In this oft-quoted excerpt, Gershwin seems to be saying two things at once: the music is “real folk music,” yet he also admits that he wrote all of his own original “folk songs” and “spirituals.” I am not the first to notice this; Richard Crawford writes about this claim as an example of “fakelore,” a term coined by Richard Dorson in 1950, wherein the “raw data of folklore [is falsified] by invention, selection, fabrication, and similar refining processes for capitalistic gain.”20

  The use of folk in Gershwin’s descriptive phrase about the work is especially rich with meaning. In the 1930s, the term “folk” had multiple connotations. Scholars have long engaged in the conversation about folk as coming out of the European context. And it might be helpful to see this in the context that George and Ira Gershwin were first-generation Russian Jews living in America. Crawford carefully outlines the use of “folk” as Broadway folk dramas, the rural-urban divide of how folk music reflects community life, the development of the American Folklore Society in 1888, and the efforts of the U.S. government to collect folk music before World War I and increasingly so during the 1930s Depression, when the Federal Music Project, a New Deal program, “seeking to shore up national identity during economic hard times, sponsored folk-related projects.”21

  Ray Allen, professor at Brooklyn College, has also looked into the varied associations of the “folk” in his article “An American Folk Opera? Triangulating Folkness, Blackness, and Americanness in Gershwin and Heyward’s Porgy and Bess.” Here Allen explores more of the meanings of “folk” in black culture and mentions W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, Alain Locke’s formation of the “New Negro,” and the discourses around spirituals as embodying an elevated form of black music in Harlem Renaissance writing. Allen brings the black and nonblack “folk” together at the end of his article and argues that Porgy and Bess helped elevate Southern blacks to join other nonblack ethnic groups as folk in the United States during the 1930s. Allan writes,

  The door had cracked open for the spiritual-singing folk of Catfish Row to take a seat at the table where they might dine with Steinbeck’s wandering Oakies, Lomax’s singing cowboys, Henry Ford’s fiddling hillbillies, and Grant Wood’s stoic farmers, who had come to embody a deep and distinctly American mythos during the tough times of the Great Depression.22

  I would like to build on this thinking about the “folk” to explore a larger context. One of the complications in writing about this work is the difficulty in finding a trenchant way to think about blackness. Too frequently, it seems that the issues have been framed around the dichotomous inquiry: “Is Porgy and Bess racist or not?” This question usually encompasses the assumed narrative that the “all-white” team of George and Ira Gershwin, along with DuBose Heyward (who had written the novel Porgy in 1925 and had been involved with the libretto for the opera), wrote about black Southern life from their “white” vantage point. I find this binary construction to be rather unhelpful because it feels like a weak assessment of the situation. From my own vantage point, it seems clear (and somewhat obvious by today’s standards) that there are many racist things about this work. How do we put these different perspectives in conversation with each other so we can understand the past and how the past resonates today when this work, in its various versions, is performed?

  The representation of black life in the 1920s (the time setting for the opera) reinforces many negative stereotypes around minstrelsy. Additionally, the story presents a black community that gambles, kills each other, and succumbs to dangerous drunken and drug-induced behavior. A few characters show hope, such as the religious Serena, who has high morals; yet she suffers the loss of her husband Robbins in the first scene when Crown kills him over a craps game. The most promising family of Jake, a self-employed fisherman, and Clara, who sings “Summertime” to their little baby (all of whom have such a brigh
t future in the beginning of the opera), is decimated when both parents are killed in a hurricane. Their innocent infant is then abandoned by Bess at the end of the opera when she leaves Catfish Row in disgrace.

  The reception of Porgy and Bess has undergone a sharp current of criticism. Especially compelling are the critiques of the work in the aftermath of the film directed by Otto Preminger, Porgy and Bess, in 1959. The film had a star-studded cast with many of the same actors from the director’s Carmen Jones, just five years earlier in 1954 (Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters, and Diahann Carroll), with the addition of Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis Jr. Many years ago, the rights of this film reverted back to the Gershwin family and was pulled from circulation by the Gershwin estate; it has been very difficult to see this film for decades.23 Hall Johnson, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Harold Cruse are among many who denigrated the film for its lack of authenticity and the persistence of negative stereotypes.24 Cruse was especially damning of the work (as an opera, musical, and the 1959 film) and extrapolated his criticism to a larger situation he saw in the corrupt relationship between Jewish and white people against African Americans. James Baldwin situates the film in the context of the recent death of Billie Holiday (and makes the connection between “happy dust” and Holiday’s heroin addiction) and, in his candid and penetrating style, outlines the ways black America during segregation, Jim Crow, and the deadly threat of lynching was all too familiar with the realities in the world of Catfish Row. Era Bell Thompson, an editor at Ebony magazine, also agreed that the movie perpetrated outdated, negative stereotypes. She writes, “Porgy and Bess ain’t necessarily a movie. It’s a shame!” She concludes her article referring to the broader adaptations of Porgy and Bess and summing up a widely held view: “ To a whole lot of Negroes, drama, novel or opera, it is ‘plenty of nothing!’”25 Reading these reactions by African Americans who were thoughtful, reliable commentators of black life in their own time reveals a perspective on mid-twentieth-century experiences that could easily fade into the background with the suppression of the 1959 film version. This history of Porgy and Bess is relevant today as we shape the “bigger picture” of how this work has produced meaning since its inception, premiere, and the various productions and settings into a continuously evolving present. The sharp critique of Porgy and Bess seems to be a persistent, perhaps indispensable, part of its reception.