by Naomi Andre
On the other hand, even I must acknowledge that there are also many things to love about Porgy and Bess. Most of the tunes are already familiar through jazz standards (“Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”), and Gershwin’s music has that perfect combination of an undulating Puccini-esque lyricism with catchy syncopations that well capture the rhythms of the English language. Gershwin’s music achieves many things at once. It involves full-out operatic singing yet still has moments that feel like spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Serena’s “My Man’s Gone Now” at the funeral of her husband in act 1 showcases operatic virtuosity and brings on the chills of a new widow’s wail. The “Oh Doctor Jesus” chorus during the second act hurricane makes you feel like you have walked into a black church vigil. Gershwin’s insistence on a black cast makes going to Porgy and Bess a unique experience, and one especially exciting for black audiences, for practically nowhere else in the operatic repertory (before or since) do we have the chance to see so many black people onstage—and in the audience.26
What Is Opera in 1935?
With the death of Giacomo Puccini in 1924, the grand opera tradition came to a close. As the composer of La Bohème (1896), Madama Butterfly (1904), and his last opera Turandot (left incomplete at his death), the style and tradition of opera as it originated in Italy ended. Though Richard Strauss was still writing operas in Germany in the 1930s through his death in 1949, the situation with the Third Reich impeded the circulation of his later operas until after his death.
This is not to say that no operas written in the twentieth century have joined the canon. British composer Benjamin Britten (born in 1913) began an important career with his first full-length opera, Peter Grimes, in 1945 and wrote many more until his last opera, Death in Venice (1973), which premiered a few years before he died in 1976. Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007) achieved his first major triumph with his chamber opera The Medium (from 1947) and continued this success with his full-length opera The Consul (1950) and the extremely popular first opera written for American television (Amal and the Night Visitors, first televised on Christmas Eve 1951).
This situation left the 1930s opera scene open for new voices. Coupled with the desire to find an American voice in classical art music, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess filled a noticeable gap. The highly experimental collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson, Four Saints in Three Acts, which premiered with an all-black cast in 1934 (right before Porgy and Bess), did not lead to many future performances or initiate a new direction in opera.27
The history of American music, including operatic works, has not fully taken into account the compositions of African American composers. This is largely due to a presumption that black composers were either not interested in writing “art” music in a tradition outside of the spirituals or that there was a lack of opportunities for their training and nurturing. While this second notion is definitely truer than the first, it turns out that more scholars are beginning to pay attention to the presence of and compositions by black composers as such works are being found and rediscovered. We know that Scott Joplin wrote operas besides Treemonisha that were lost. We have heard the same about William Dawson. William Grant Still has been considered an “exception” as a composer who wrote operas, symphonies, ballets, and many other works that demonstrated his skill and training in the Western European musical tradition. As pioneering scholars find more works by black composers and then study, reconstruct, and perform this music, we begin to understand that it is possible to develop a richer narrative that more fully integrates black voices into the American musical scene. No longer only participating in the creation and formation of ragtime, the blues, and jazz, we now see that Du Bois’s famous construction of the double consciousness of black understanding around white and black behavior can present a new way of thinking about American music. There were many black composers and musicians who were well versed in classical music as well as in popular (ragtime, blues, jazz) traditions. The striking new reality is that black composers brought the vernacular popular styles together into classical music. Hence, William Grant Still’s use of the twelve-bar blues form and the style of the spiritual for the first and second themes of the exposition in the opening sonata form movement to his Afro-American Symphony is not the only case of such double-consciousness voice in music. Henry Lawrence Freeman’s use of the saxophone in his opera Voodoo (first performed in 1928) presents another example.28 These are not “exceptions” to our current view of the music of the United States; instead, they are part of a larger, unacknowledged tradition that needs to be discovered and incorporated into our story of American music. This is the voice that has been hidden, a shadow culture, of black opera that needs to be excavated from the past.
Over time, people have thought of Porgy and Bess as the Great American Opera, as well as a frustrating collection of stereotypes that emphasize a vision of black people who speak in a dialect-ridden English, drink and gamble too much, and have a loose moral code. To some extent, both of these assessments of the work are true. The opera touches on intensely human emotions that lead to both great passion and heart-wrenching devastation. Yet it is the music that touches us and gets under our skin in such a way that it feels like a part of us. And this is what makes Gershwin’s opera so easy to love and so difficult to stay mad at.
Immigration and the Great Migration
To say that Porgy and Bess was produced by a racially homogenous “white” creative team does not tell the full story. Indeed, there was someone on the collaborative team who personified quintessential American whiteness: DuBose Heyward.29
Heyward was from Charleston, South Carolina, and though his family was not as financially prominent as it once had been, he could trace his ancestors back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Heyward came from deep roots in a well-heeled Southern white heritage. Conversely, George and Ira Gershwin were born to Russian Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1890s. In my discussion of immigration and the Great Migration in Porgy and Bess, race matters. Though a scientific basis to biological differences rooted in race has been disproved in current scholarship, this was not the case for nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century constructions of race, and this directly affects Porgy and Bess. Yet rather than starting with the more expected racial discussion about whether or not Porgy and Bess is racially insensitive or how blackness is expressed in the opera, I want to spend time on how different articulations of whiteness can be found in the opera.30
Scholars in the field of whiteness studies have examined how European immigrants from the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth tried to distinguish themselves from blacks when they arrived in America. Sometimes these strategies included distancing themselves from blacks and trying to climb up a hierarchy where slaves and former slaves were conveniently at the bottom of the socioeconomic and educational structure. But this was not the only tactic, and sometimes immigrants joined in abolitionist and social justice movements that combined forces with African Americans and worked toward common goals of social uplift.31 Regardless of their individual stance, Jewish people themselves experienced anti-Semitism and were branded with negative stereotypes, some of which were similar to those associated with blacks.32 At the time of Porgy and Bess, this was especially relevant. Karen Brodkin, along with other scholars, cites the 1920s and 1930s as “the peak of anti-Semitism in America.”33 An area that has not received much attention in the Porgy and Bess literature is the background to the richness of the interactions between blacks and Jews in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. At this time ragtime and the blues, Yiddish musicals, early jazz and klezmer were circulating alongside each other in popular culture and could provide a more nuanced investigation into Gershwin’s experience and use of black musical idioms. My discussion here concentrates less on these provocative musical interactions and more on a context for these types of musical intersections: What happens when w
e think about constructions of race around whiteness, Jewishness, and blackness in the time Porgy and Bess was written, and how might this shape our thinking about this opera when it is performed today?
The themes of motion and relocation are brought to the fore when we think about George Gershwin coming from a family that immigrated to New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. To further enrich this discussion, I want to juxtapose the concept of people moving to America with the counterpoint of people moving within the United States, and specifically with the Great Migration. With this internal reshuffling, we see a moment in American history, post Reconstruction and after World War I, that featured the movement of African Americans from the American South to the North and West. Porgy and Bess encompasses both worlds of displacement. For George Gershwin, his parents Moshe (Morris) Gershovitz and Rose Bruskin emigrated from the area around St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1890s, met, and married in New York in 1895. They lived in (and moved around in) New York’s Lower East Side—Ira Gershwin recalls the family moving twenty-eight times during his childhood, before 1916.34
Isabel Wilkerson has beautifully and insightfully written about the Great Migration in her Pulitzer Prize–winning national bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.35 In tracing the journeys and stories of hundreds of people, she fleshes out the themes, places, and rhythms of the lives she documents. As this era recedes into the past, Wilkerson outlines this time from 1915 to 1970, conducting her research at the turn of the turn of the new millennium, when the survivors of this movement are dying. With their stories, this narrative—of extreme poverty, utter lack of opportunities for advancement, and the ever-present threat of lynching in the Jim Crow South—is rewritten into current memory and preserved in history. The caricatures of the vicious white roles in Porgy and Bess (the Coroner, the Detective, and the Policeman) feel more “real” when reading page after page of Wilkerson’s interviews, as we relive some of the terror and constant fear of stepping out of place. The stereotypes in Porgy and Bess are usually leveled at the black characters in minstrel garb, and these are certainly present in the opera with the Jezebel Bess, Sambo Porgy, Crown the Buck, and others.36 Nonetheless, the equally extreme exaggeration of operatic drama in the white characters serves the story well and brings to life some of the lived emotion Wilkerson captures in her documentary study of the motivations fueling the Great Migration.
Scholars have already noted a connection between some of Gershwin’s tunes in Porgy and Bess that bear resemblance to the style of Jewish secular (e.g., klezmer and Yiddish theater) and liturgical music. Howard Pollack’s 2007 biography of Gershwin picks out “Oh Hev’nly Father” (act 2) as “reminiscent of a ‘davenning minyan.’”37 Geoffrey Block has demonstrated that Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” is similar to the familiar Jewish prayer “Baruch atah adonai” in melodic shape and content.38
In Sportin’ Life’s centerpiece number on Kittiwah Island “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” all of the references to the Bible are from the Old Testament, indeed from the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Five Books of Moses or the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). With cleverly crafted lyrics about David and Goliath, Moses found in the Nile by the pharaoh’s daughter, Jonah and the whale, and Methuselah (living nine hundred years), these stories work well for the Bible-believing people of Catfish Row. Moreover, these stories would also have resonance for those from the Jewish faith, and would therefore speak directly to diverse religious backgrounds in the first audiences through quotations spanning both Christian and Jewish cultural associations. Regarding the handling of “Baruch atah adonai,” the adaptation of this well-known Jewish prayer appears strategically as it is featured in the “anti-sermon” (“It Ain’t Necessarily So”) that Sportin’ Life delivers after Sunday church services at the picnic on Kittiwah Island (act 2). Making the connection between these two religious traditions allows us today to have a greater appreciation of this charged moment, laden with religious allusions, staging multiple identities at once.
In the Great Migration from the American South to the North and West, specific urban centers emerged as prime locations for people to settle and relocate. Chief in outlining these paths of migration were the railways that provided transportation to new homes and futures. These connections drew lines between otherwise seemingly unlikely geographic locations: people from rural Mississippi would end up in Chicago; people in Florida would easily travel up to New York City. To facilitate these transitions, locals in the new northern cities would help the migrating southern newcomers settle by providing housing, food, support, and networking.
Not only as a primary means of transportation, the railways also posed career opportunities for blacks to earn a respectable living. For example, a specific subgroup of porters that started soon after the Civil War—the Pullman Porters—were men hired to work on sleeping cars. As workers with gainful employment and wages, they soon formed an influential voice, creating the first all-black union in 1925 and were later important agents in the civil rights movement.39 Trains offered a primary means of delivery in the Great Migration by physically transporting former slaves and their descendants to the North and metaphorically providing them with a route to a more plentiful and safer Promised Land out of the dangers of the Jim Crow South.
One of the southern areas early-twentieth-century African Americans left were communities like the one presented in Porgy and Bess. Catfish Row was based on a real place in Charleston, South Carolina, that their native son DuBose Heyward wrote about; however, Heyward changed the name from Cabbage Row to Catfish Row in his 1925 novel Porgy. Cabbage Row is an extended building that contains two structures, each three stories tall, connected by a central arcade. It dates back to the Revolutionary War era, but in the early 1900s this structure was a tenement inhabited by African American families of freed slaves. In DuBose Heyward’s time blacks would sell cabbages grown in the building’s courtyard from their windowsills and doorsteps, hence the name—Cabbage Row. Today, the place is still called Cabbage Row, as well as “Catfish Row.”
Near the end of the opera Porgy and Bess, Sportin’ Life has a big number that lures Bess to get back on “Happy Dust,” leave Porgy (who is temporarily in jail), and join him in a high-struttin’ lifestyle in New York City. In fact, this is one of the most memorable numbers in the show: “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York.” I suspect that the catchiness of this tune has obscured a central question: Why a boat? Who would take a boat from Catfish Row, South Carolina, to New York City, especially when there were several train routes available and running between Charleston and Manhattan.40
From the beginning of the twentieth century, from 1900 to 1967, the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad included the Charleston-NYC route. And even earlier than that, in the middle of the nineteenth century and under a different name, the Wilmington & Manchester Railroad connected to the North Eastern Railroad, which brought in Charleston in 1857. Today these routes continue, and Amtrak easily makes this journey. While boat travel was not unheard of between Charleston and New York City in the early part of the twentieth century, it was certainly not the most common means of travel for ease or saving time after the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1930s, trains were much faster and made personal travel by boat seem almost anachronistic. Nonetheless, Charleston and Manhattan were important port cities along the Eastern Seaboard for transporting cargo and freight. Going back to the eighteenth century, the prominent Schermerhorn family of New York City set up trade with Charleston for rice and indigo. It would be quite plausible for characters such as Sportin’ Life with Bess, or even Porgy later on in pursuit of them, to try to use the least expensive means of travel or try to sneak aboard a ship heading to New York City.
While it is probable that Gershwin’s characters would take the train, the main question lurking in the background remains: Why should Gershwin have them take a boat from Charleston
to Manhattan? In fact, not even George Gershwin himself took a boat from New York City down to Folly Island (off the coast of Charleston) when he went there to learn more about the Gullah culture in June 1934; we know he took the train.41 With this unusual second look at these memorable lyrics that flow perfectly, smoothly signifying multiple things at once, we can learn a great deal. “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” presents a line of trochaic pentameter that jauntily scans with a swing beat over Gershwin’s syncopated setting. With the black dialect presented against the syncopation, we hear the voices of these men from Catfish Row clearly. Yet the black men would probably find more consolation traveling in the company of other black train porters. Who takes a boat to New York City? I argue that it is Moshe Gershovitz and Rose Bruskin, Gershwin’s parents, exemplars of the Jewish emigrant experience.
I bring these things to our attention not to nit-pick about transportation routes but rather to expose a broader story of how Porgy and Bess can be seen to reflect the experiences of George and Ira Gershwin. They were not only writing about the African American experience (what they knew, what they made up, what they learned while working on the show) but also an immigrant experience that was familiar in their family and to many audience members who would have attended the early productions. These were the first generation of children born to recently immigrated Russian Jewish parents who had made the migration to a “Heav’nly Land” (to quote Porgy’s last number of the opera—“Oh Lawd, I’m on my way to a Heav’nly Land”). And like many other Eastern European Jewish people who arrived at the end of the nineteenth century seeking opportunity, they traveled by steamship. Does this bring a little of the Gershwin history into the opera? Were they writing themselves into history, consciously or not? Whatever the reason to use the word “boat” rather than “train,” the context around it deserves investigation.