Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  Maria presents the case of an upended minstrel stereotype who is also given a more fleshed-out persona that becomes nearly three dimensional in her portrayal. Unlike Porgy, whose ending reconfirms the boundaries of a staged black masculinity that constrains his heroism, and Bess, who reverts to her flawed Jezebel ways at the end when she succumbs to Sportin’ Life and leaves Catfish Row, Maria acts heroically throughout the opera. As a mezzo-soprano, her vocal and character types come with a deep legacy in opera that pairs deep treble timbres with power, authority, and heroism.

  The nineteenth century established a dual connection between the mezzosoprano voice and a path different from the soprano lead. In the first half of the primo ottocento, the 1810s and 1820s, this voice type frequently portrayed travesti roles wherein mezzos sang as the male heroic lead (for example, the title role of Tancredi, Tancredi [1813] and Arsace, Semiramide [1823], both by Rossini) before the tenor took over that position. Later in the nineteenth century the low mezzo-soprano less frequently had a leading role, but when she did, she had a different path than the higher sopranos who sang the Romantic heroine. Nonetheless, the mezzo-sopranos retained their connection to strength and access to power. Aspects of ancestry to Gershwin’s Maria can be seen in Verdi’s Ulrica (Un Ballo in Maschera [1859]), a sorceress who can speak with the supernatural, or Wagner’s mythic goddess Fricka (who appears in the first two operas of his Ring cycle, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre), who safeguards the rules and ultimately maintains order. Though I am not arguing that Gershwin deliberately made any of these connections from nineteenth-century opera, I bring them up to provide examples of how Maria’s role has, and can still, resonate with various audiences, particularly those who have experience with opera.

  Breaking through the minstrel conventions of the Mammy, Maria, with her deep mezzo-soprano, can also be heard in opera as a voice that has strength that comes from outside of customary sources. She confronts traditional gendered conventions with a strong vocal presence that can be both nurturing and authoritarian as it reinforces the rules and expectations that work outside a presumed white patriarchy. My reading of Maria borrows from, but ultimately inverts, the stereotypes of the minstrel Mammy. Rather than following the master’s rules by taking care of his house and children, Maria calls the shots and runs the community.

  The leading woman in this opera, Bess, is the abused, drug-addicted girlfriend of Crown, later love interest to Porgy, and ultimately the companion to Sportin’ Life when they leave Catfish Row together. She is a soprano that is heavier than the light voice of Clara, not quite as heavy a voice as Serena, and higher in range and timbre than Maria. Like all three of the other women, musically Bess can hold her own as she sings in different situations, and her vocal style adapts to her evolving characterization. Bess’s vocal line soars in her love duet with Porgy, and she becomes a bona fide operatic heroine as they declare their love and fidelity to each other. Yet Bess’s vocal role also gets heavier and more muscular in the scene with Crown on Kittiwah Island after the picnic. As she fights with him, her music grows more desperate when she tries to resist Crown’s strength. Unlike any other female role in the opera, we see three different phases of Bess’s character. The opening woman, when she is first introduced and is associated with Crown, is the hussy Jezebel who drinks hard, takes “happy dust,” and keeps up with the rough lifestyle required to be Crown’s girlfriend. We then see the rehabilitated Bess who seems to get over Crown, loves Porgy, and learns how to be a member of Catfish Row; she becomes an accepted member of the community. After the scene with Crown on Kittiwah Island, Bess is never quite the same, as her spirit has been broken. One of the strengths of her musical line and dramatic path is that as she moves in different directions, her persona can be interpreted in contrasting ways.

  Though Bess’s role comes out of the Jezebel minstrel stereotype, this is not her static characterization. Throughout the opera, we see how Bess relates to Crown, Porgy, and Sportin’ Life as she becomes connected to each one; she retains a sexualized element in her character as she interacts with each man. At various points in the opera, Bess is paired with each one as she enacts different models of desire, consent, abuse, and resignation (as I discuss later in the chapter). We also see how Bess is juxtaposed to the other women in the opera (Clara, Serena, and Maria) and how she incorporates elements from each of their characters into her behavior. Bess has the least direct interaction with Clara and Jake. It is as though their idyllic domestic relationship in the first half of the opera has little relevance to Bess’s lifestyle or her aspirations at that time. Yet after the hurricane, Bess becomes the surrogate mother for their abandoned baby and, for a short while, stands in with Porgy as the highlighted mother-father-infant family we see in Catfish Row.

  Serena and Maria are two strong figures in the opera and provide important models of black womanhood in Catfish Row. Widowed by the end of the first scene of act 1, Serena then joins Maria as exemplifying the different roles single women take on in the community. This is a lesson that Bess never learns. Bess always remains connected to a man and fails to be steady on her own, whether it is over the short duration of the picnic on Kittiwah Island one Sunday afternoon or for the several days Porgy spends in jail in act 3. Ultimately, Bess has a difficult time living any of the roles of respectable womanhood, and this is where she is undone by the Jezebel roots of her character. She runs out on being a mother and leaves the family she had created with Porgy when Sportin’ Life tempts her with drugs (“happy dust”) and a life of excitement in New York City. By leaving the South for the North, Bess and Sportin’ Life are rejecting the limits of the world of Catfish Row in search of an unattainable future in the North. In the world of Porgy and Bess, the promises of the Great Migration outside the South are unreachable and dangerous. However, the world inside Catfish Row is neither a safe haven nor an arena where the inhabitants can thrive. One of the challenges of this opera that keeps it within the limitations of the minstrel world is that the black characters are never far from destruction or devastation; their fates are tied to the bleakest vision of their existence. They are not given a full humanity wherein they can dream possible, plausible, and probable dreams that let them prosper and succeed.

  As a way to further explore a deeper characterization of Bess, I turn to two productions of the same scene and discuss the different interpretations the directors and performers present. The two productions come from the opera version (and I will refer to the widely available Glyndebourne production directed by Trevor Nunn) and the recent Broadway musical version (The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess [2012]); each presents different sides of Bess and the evolutions of her character.48 The scene in question appears as act 2, scene 2 of the three-act opera and at the end of act 1 of the two-act Broadway musical—the end of the Kittiwah Island scene when everyone is going back to the boat to the mainland after the Sunday picnic and Bess is detained by her confrontation by Crown. The result is that Crown overcomes Bess and, despite her protests (this is after she had been living with Porgy), Crown drags her offstage for a sexual encounter. In the whole work, this is the most sexually violent scene and the question of interpretation is how the director and performers interpret Bess’s nonconsent to Crown’s forceful physical sexual advances.

  The dramatic situation in both productions takes into account that Bess is in an abusive and destructive relationship with Crown. She asks Crown, “Oh what you want wid Bess?/She getting’ ole now….You know how it’s always been with me,/These five years I been yo’ woman,/You could kick me in the street, And when you want me back,/You could whistle, an’ there I was/Back again, lickin’ yo’ hand.” Her text further states that she wants to be with Porgy and that she wants Crown to leave her alone. Her last words in this scene to Crown are “Take yo’ hands off me,/I say, yo’ hands, yo’ hands, yo’ hands.” With each repetition of “yo’ hands” it is possible to hear her music becoming less resolute; a plausible interpretation could see Bess as weakening to the familiar
ity of always giving in to Crown as he is used to taking whatever he wants.

  In the Glyndebourne production of this scene, there is room for uncertainty in how to understand Bess in this scene. Is she a woman worn down by Crown out of defeat, or is she unsure of how to fight the unhealthy feelings she still might have for him? Though there is no denying that Bess is trying to resist Crown as she struggles to push him away and tells him to let her go, it is possible to watch this scene and feel the ambiguity (about whether or not her resolve against Crown has given way).

  Though sexually violent and pushed to an extreme, there is precedent for this type of sexual tension and violence in a canonic opera from the late eighteenth century: the beginning of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In a stylized (and usually less explicitly staged) violence, the opening of Mozart’s 1787 opera presents a conflict between Don Giovanni and Donna Anna. Immediately following Leporello’s opening number about not wanting to be a servant anymore (“Notte e giorno faticar”), Donna Anna tries to hold onto Giovanni physically and restrain him from leaving. She sings, “Non sperar, se non m’uccidi/chi’io ti lasci fuggir mai!” (There is no hope, unless you kill me, / that I will ever let you go!). We see the two disheveled characters in Donna Anna’s bedroom (or, as sometimes staged, at the doorway of her bedroom), where they have recently had a sexual encounter, and it is clear that Don Giovanni is trying to leave while Donna Anna is trying to restrain him from going. Directors have taken liberties with this scene to make it seem that either Donna Anna is wanting to continue the sexual affair that has just happened or Donna Anna has just been sexually violated (no consent given) and is trying to hold on to the masked perpetrator so that he can be punished. Though both interpretations affect the characterizations of Donna Anna—she consented, enjoyed the sexual encounter, and is angry that the masked man is leaving, or she did not consent and is trying to bring justice to her rape—the result in the opera is played out the same way. In the terms of the opera, Donna Anna’s virtue has been violated, her father (the Commendatore) is killed while trying to defend her, and she is a woman whose honor must be restored. Regardless of her consent, Donna Anna’s integrity is ultimately not compromised because her father was killed protecting her honor. Even if she had briefly consented to the sexual encounter in the moments preceding the opening of the opera, it is all reversed when her father is sacrificed and she devotes the rest of her time (and the mission of her fiancé Don Ottavio) to avenging her father’s death. Hence, the issue of “honor” becomes more associated with the Commendatore’s death in fighting to defend his daughter and less connected to any actions directly initiated by, or perpetrated against, Donna Anna.

  No one dies defending Bess’s honor. Instead, one could argue that this is in part why Porgy kills Crown later in the opera. However, those actions also seem to be motivated by the fear that Bess will leave when Crown comes back to claim her; either Bess is weak and will be seduced by Crown, or he will remove her from Porgy by force. When Porgy kills Crown in revenge, any nobility of the action is nullified by its cold-blooded calculation. When Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, the Don is ultimately punished when the Commendatore returns at the end of the opera and drags Don Giovanni down to hell. Rather than the sacrifice of the Commendatore, Porgy gets away with murder and is never brought to justice. Though his intent might be to defend Bess’s honor, Porgy loses something in exchange; he no longer embodies the upright citizen who abides by the law.

  In Porgy and Bess, the incidents that happened on Kittiwah Island besmirch Bess’s reputation, regardless of one’s interpretation of those events. In the opera, we know that Crown is violent and dangerous; he killed Robbins in the first act and he now forces himself on Bess. Her honor is compromised because she has a sexual encounter with Crown, after pledging her love to Porgy (earlier in their nearly show-stopping duet “Bess, you is my woman now”/”Porgy, I’s yo’ woman now”). If Bess is seen as wanting Crown back, she is further flawed for cheating on Porgy. This is not to imply that Bess as a victim of rape should be blamed; she clearly says “no” multiple times to Crown (in the libretto several times she says “Lemme go” and “Take yo’ hands off me”). The point here is that Bess is abused by Crown, and her innocence is weighted down by his violence against her, regardless of whether she resisted him forcefully or was weakened in her resolve. When she gets back to Catfish Row from Kittiwah Island she is delirious, sick near death, physically and morally defiled. In addition to physical healing, she seeks moral redemption.

  A difficulty in watching this scene today is to reconcile current understandings of sexual violence with those from the past. In both the opera and Broadway version the tension in the drama derives from whether or not we believe that Bess truly loves Porgy and how the director treats the aftermath of her attack. There is no confusion about Crown’s violence and coercing Bess to have sex. For most of us today, there is no question that Bess is not giving consent, and this should guarantee Bess’s innocence. Today we see Bess as the victim of a sexual crime.

  For me, the Broadway musical presents a less ambiguous version of Bess than the Glyndebourne production, one that feels more cognizant of today’s understanding of sexual violence and its lingering damaging effects. Though she refuses Crown initially, eventually Bess capitulates, and we see her subjugation as she yields to Crown and returns his violent groping with a desperate submission. Yet this is not a true consent because she is defeated and hates herself for it.49 During this pivotal scene, we see how she is not just distraught but through this final encounter with Crow, Bess has been damaged in such a way that she never fully gets over it. Even when she goes back to Porgy, he forgives her and she says she wants to be with him—yet there is something broken in her that cannot be fixed. Not all of Porgy’s love or the acceptance of Catfish Row can fully save her. The audience senses that perhaps she betrays Porgy at the end of the opera not because Sportin’ Life has convinced her to be with him but rather because since Kittiwah Island, she no longer feels worthy of Porgy; her honor and self-worth have been stripped from her. In this scenario, it is possible to see her decision to leave Catfish Row at the end of the opera as though she were operating under a twisted sense of honor: her choice to leave Porgy is her internal logic not to saddle him with her own flawed self.

  Unlike Donna Anna, Bess (in both the opera and Broadway musical) has lost her inner sense of integrity. This is all the more poignant, because there is an added scene in the Broadway version, after Bess comes back from Kittiwah Island, where the women of Catfish Row bathe her and help her through her fever and recovery. In the opera she is only seen with Porgy watching over her, but in the musical, one sees Bess more fully integrated into the community where the women have accepted her as one of their own. In what becomes a communal scene in the musical, it is as though the women of Catfish Row baptize and anoint Bess as they wash her and see her through the delirium. It thus feels as if Bess is losing so much more in this musical version, since she has the other women supporting her and even almost overcomes being the lost Jezebel she was at the beginning. In the musical, Bess is forgiven and becomes one of us—one of the community and the audience—who witness her evolution and breaking free of the stale minstrel caricature. Her redemption is within her grasp, she just does not feel she deserves it.

  Bess Onstage and in the Audience

  Let’s explore a complementing interpretation of Bess that starts from a performer’s perspective and moves on to illustrate how that view articulates something that has resonated and continues to do so with a lot of women who sit in the audience. In James Standifer’s documentary Porgy and Bess: An American Voice (1997), Leontyne Prince talks about singing Bess”

  Being Bess was already half of me, I mean most of me anyway … it wasn’t a matter of sort of accenting this or accenting that. Well, there was little to prepare for. I don’t mean saying that [about?] the character itself. I mean being a … being wonderfully black … wonderfully, a, a, a[n] unhampered [untampere
d] by, you know having to, I don’t know it’s just sort of, I’m getting sort of side tracked by, you know a. … like here I am, isn’t it terrific.50

  This is not an easy transcription to make, nor is the meaning perfectly obvious; though I think the message gets across more clearly in the live interview. Let me provide a little context.

  When she sang the role of Bess, Leontyne Price was early in her career (1953, twenty-five years old). As a student at the Juilliard School she sang Alice Ford (1949, in Verdi’s Falstaff) and was cast in a revival of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thompson in 1952, right before she was cast as Bess. Later, as her career matured and she became one of the greatest singers in the world, her roles focused more on the standard repertoire of Mozart, Puccini, and especially Verdi. Though she definitely was a progressive singer—as the muse for Samuel Barber and her roles as Handel’s Cleopatra (Giulio Cesare) and Poulenc’s Madame Lidoine (Dialogues des Carmélites) show—the mainstay of her repertory was not focused on “black” characters after her early stints as Bess and in Four Saints. (The one tremendous exception is the title role in Aida.)51

  My point here is that in the interview for Standifer’s documentary, when Price is recalling her time as Bess, she says, “Being Bess was already half of me, I mean most of me anyway …” and she refers to Bess as “being wonderfully black.” Without trying to simplify Price’s characterization of Bess, since she struggled to find the full expression of her thoughts, it is easy to see in the interview that there was an animation to her comments that seem to reflect a sense of ease with understanding where Bess, the character, came from. Perhaps Bess had a backstory that was easier for the young Price, newly arrived in New York City from Laurel, Mississippi, to immediately grasp than the Elizabethan Alice Ford (of Verdi’s Falstaff) or the other repertory roles she was learning at Juilliard.