by Naomi Andre
34. Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing.
35. Sandra Seaton has degrees from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and Michigan State University. She has been a professor at Central Michigan University and has had residencies at Yaddo, Hedgebrook and Radgale artists’ colonies. She received the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature’s Mark Twain Award, which included having a full issue of the publication Midwestern Miscellany devoted to her work (Fall 2013, guest editor Arvid F. Sponberg).
36. Bolcom, “Preface,” 611.
37. Ibid.
38. Bolcom, “Program Notes” (recording notes).
39. Bolcom, “Preface,” 611–12.
40. This is a practice in the Michigan Quarterly Review text (discussed herewith) as well as in the recording text and musical score.
41. Seaton, “From the Diary of Sally Hemings.”
42. Bolcom, in his “Preface” (610–12), identifies this as the complete text Seaton gave him.
43. See the Monticello website, https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/hôtel-de-langeac.
44. December 23, 1789, is the date Thomas Jefferson, his daughters, and retinue (including Sally Hemings) supposedly returned to Monticello. http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/appendix-h-sally-hemings-and-her-children
45. Seaton, “From the Diary of Sally Hemings,” 619.
46. Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 59.
47. Rothman discusses excerpts from Callender’s reports in “James Callender and Social Knowledge,” which are included in Appendix B, “James Callender’s Reports,” Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson (259–61).
48. For a review essay of the score From the Diary of Sally Hemings, see Carman, “Music Reviews.” For a review of the recording see Rosenblum, “Bolcom,” and Sullivan, “Bolcom.”
49. Bolcom, “Program Notes,” From the Diary of Sally Hemings, Alyson Cambridge soprano, Lydia Brown piano. White Pine Music, CD recording, 2010.
50. Bolcom, “Program Notes.”
51. Bolcom, “Preface,” 612.
52. This listing of the divisions and song titles is from the table of contents of the piano vocal score, From the Diary of Sally Hemings, Edward B. Marks Music Company and Hall Leonard Corporation, 2001.
53. The times in this paragraph refer to the recording of From the Diary of Sally Hemings, sung by Alyson Cambridge, with Lydia Brown on the piano. White Pines Music, recording label of Central Michigan University, 2010.
54. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Lied “Das Veilchen,” K. 476, was composed in Vienna and dated June 8, 1785. It is one of the only texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that Mozart set. Perhaps fittingly, in its reference to Jefferson and Hemings in Paris at the beginning of their relationship, Goethe’s text (“The Violet”) is about a young maiden who tramples over a violet (metaphor for a lover’s heart) without noticing the pain she has caused. Many thanks to William Bolcom, who pointed me toward this Mozart reference.
55. Horsley, “Song Cycle.”
56. Midgette, “Alyson Cambridge Offers Ambitious but Flawed Recital.” The “flawed” in the title refers to Midgette’s less positive review of the two other works on the program, Jeffrey Mumford’s setting of poems by Sonia Sanchez (Three Windows) and Tres Mujeres with music by Adam Schoenberg setting the poetry of his wife Janine Salinas Schoenberg.
57. McLucas, “Monodrama.”
58. Neighbour, “Erwartung.”
59. Seaton discusses using quotations from Jefferson’s writings in the note to the piano-vocal score and indicates where they are through the use of italics (p. 68).
60. Seaton, “Program Notes.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 625.
61. Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (ca 1809–1876), also known as the “Black Swan,” is one of a handful of black operatic singers known to us from this time. She sang for Queen Victoria and was known for her concertizing where she sang Handel, Bellini, and Donizetti, among others (she sang concerts and recitals because there were no venues that allowed black operas singers to sing onstage). By calling the opera singer in The Will “Patti,” Seaton is also referencing the exceedingly popular Adelina Patti (1843–1919), a European opera singer whose fame extended into the United States when she made her debut in 1859 at New York at the Academy of Music in Lucia di Lammermoor and later sang at the White House for President Lincoln in 1862. “La Patti” (as she was known) sang a similar repertoire as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, and Seaton presents a rich musical reference in naming the opera-singing fiancé of Cyrus Webster’s other son “Patti.” The subtle references continue as Mathilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones (1868–1933) was also an early black singer who was known in her time as the “Black Patti,” referencing Adelina Patti.
62. Seaton, “Program Notes,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 624.
63. Ibid., 624–25.
64. Ball, Slaves in the Family, 1.
65. Bacon, “Inheriting Slavery.”
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Thompson, “For Decades.”
70. This performance, sponsored by MELODEON, was performed on November 3, 2013, at Christ and St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, New York City. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifOF8LTYa_4.
71. Personal email correspondence with the author, March 22, 2017.
Chapter 4. Contextualizing Race and Gender in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
1. Herwitz, “Writing American Opera,” 525.
2. Quotations from Voice of America, freelance journalist Peter Cox writing http://www.voanews.com/a/south-africans-remake-porgy-and-bess-musical/1403616.html “South Africans remake Porgy and Bess Musical” by Peter Cox, July 12, 2012.
3. Cox, “South Africans.”
4. The critical edition of the musical score of Porgy and Bess is scheduled for release in 2018; at the time of this writing, access to this score is not available. It will be published by the Gershwin Initiative based at the University of Michigan, general editor Mark Clague. Porgy and Bess will appear in Series Four: Operas, edited by Wayne D. Shirley. Connected to the lack of a definitive performing edition, there have been different versions performed of Porgy and Bess (whether Porgy’s “Buzzard Song” is included is variable, whether the opera opens with Jasbo Brown’s Blues scene or another scene, and so forth) reflect these differences. Sometimes a version has been called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess”—a title used for adaptations by Trevor Nunn (1993 and 2006), Diana Paulus, Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre Murray (2011) (to be discussed later), and a London production directed by Timothy Sheader (2014) based on the version by Parks and Murray. Trevor Nunn first directed the opera in 1986 for the Glyndebourne Festival. This version was expanded and adapted in 1993 for Television and aired on the BBC in Britain and PBS in the United States.
5. Brown, “Performers in Catfish Row.”
6. In fact, until 2018 there has not been an “official” standard version of Porgy and Bess, since productions up to that point needed to decide which music to include and which to cut (due to time constraints). Before 2018 I had seen the opera several times, each one slightly different from the other (sometimes Porgy’s “Buzzard Song” is included, sometimes the introduction with Jasbo Brown’s blues piano is included; Maria’s cursing Sportin’ Life in “I Hates Yo’ Struttin’ Style” and several others were added or left out depending upon the directorial vision).
7. A good source for exploring these multiple versions of Porgy and Bess is Noonan, Strange Career of Porgy and Bess, esp. chap. 5.
8. Preminger’s 1954 film Carmen Jones was well received and nominated for several Oscars (including Best Actress for Dorothy Dandridge in the title role). See Smith, “Black Faces, White Voices.” A discussion of Carmen Jones appears in chapter 5 herewith.
9. The Boston premiere of the work was at the Colonial Theatre on September 30, 1935. The New York premiere was at the Alvin Theatre on October 10, 1935.
10. Richard Strau
ss (1864–1949) was still writing operas, but by 1935 his most popular operas were behind him (Salome [1803], Elektra [1809], Der Rosenkavalier [1911]), and his later operas tended to be more obtuse in meaning (for example, Die Frau ohne Schatten [1919]; Die Ägyptische Helena [1927]; Daphne [1937]). An exception may be seen in Arabella from 1932, first performed in Dresden in 1933. Though it was performed the next year at London’s Royal Opera House, it did not come to the Metropolitan Opera until 1955.
11. The relationship between Burleigh and Dvořák is discussed in Snyder. Harry T. Burleigh (see esp. chap. 5).
12. Henderson, “Dr. Dvorak’s Latest Work.”
13. Work, “Negro Folk Song.”
14. Johnson, Black Manhattan, 116.
15. Locke, Negro and His Music, 106–7.
16. Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, 161–62, endnotes on 211.
17. Sinclair, Descriptive Catalogue, 717.
18. Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, 161.
19. Wyatt and Johnson, Gershwin Reader, 217.
20. Crawford, “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul,” 27.
21. Crawford, “Where Did Porgy and Bess Come From?” 708.
22. Allen, “Triangulating Folkness,” 256.
23. One discussion of the difficulty in finding a print of the Porgy and Bess (1959) film appears in Masters, “David Geffen.” On a few occasions, I have heard that there have been special viewings of Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess (1959) film since it was withdrawn in the early 1970s. I write about this film from having seen photographic stills but not the film itself. Hence, my comments about the film are based on the essays I cite by Hall Johnson, James Baldwin, and Harold Cruse. I rely also on Lorraine Hansberry’s interview with Otto Preminger on Irv Kupeinet’s At Random TV show mentioned both by Cruse (Crisis of the Negro Intellectual) and Era Bell Thompson in “Why Negroes Don’t Like Porgy and Bess.”
24. Johnson, “Porgy and Bess”; Baldwin, “On Catfish Row”; see also an interview with Preminger in Variety, May 27, 1959, 16. Cruse adds his own assessment and discusses those of Hansberry and Johnson (Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 100–111).
25. Thompson, “Why Negroes Don’t Like Porgy and Bess,” 54.
26. At all performances of the work I have seen (in American urban centers that happen to encompass large black populations) black folks come out to the opera when Porgy and Bess is showing.
27. Four Saints in Three Acts and Porgy and Bess are not frequently seen to have much in common besides their use of nearly all-black casts; they were premiered a year apart (1934 and 1935). Other similarities between the two works are that Eva Jessye was the choral director for both productions and Leontyne Price was asked by Thompson to sing in Four Saints (in 1952) right before she was cast as Bess in Porgy and Bess in 1953. For a more thorough discussion of Four Saints in Three Acts see Barg, “Black Voices/White Sounds.”
28. I was fortunate to see a performance of Freeman’s opera Voodoo in a concert performance during June 2015 at the Kathryn Bache Miller Theatre at Columbia University during a conference that celebrated the donation of Freeman’s archive to Columbia. Not as a “jazz” sound, this opera showcases the use of the saxophone for a dramatic dark timbre during the conjure scene. Along with Voodoo, Freeman wrote what is estimated to be twenty operas. Cooper, “Voodoo.”
29. A version of this section appeared as “Immigration and the Great Migration: Porgy and Bess in the Harlem Renaissance,” in the American Music Review, vol. 40, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 17–21.
30. A sampling of the excellent literature that mentions Porgy and Bess and blackness includes Crawford, “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul”; Allen, “An American Folk Opera?”; and Brown, “Performers in Catfish Row.”
31. The literature on how immigrants to the United States navigated racial identities between black and white include Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White?; and—especially helpful for this study—Goldstein, Price of Whiteness.
32. See Goldstein, Price of Whiteness. A picture is reproduced from 1902 (with the caption “Is the Jew White?”), which is described as “a Jew with protruding lips and dark, kinky hair, physical traits that were often attributed to blacks in popular culture” (45).
33. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 25–26. Brodkin also cites Gerber, Anti-Semitism in American History, and Dinnerstein, Uneasy at Home.
34. Crawford and Schneider, “Gershwin, George.”
35. Wilkerson, Warmth of Other Suns.
36. A discussion of the minstrel stereotypes in Porgy and Bess appears later in this chapter.
37. Pollack, George Gershwin, 46. Pollack, in this connection between “Oh Hev’nly Father” and the davenning minyan, cites Maurice Peress as making this observation about the similarity in the counterpoint.
38. Block, Enchanted Evenings, 77–78, ex. 4.2 (b). Several internet sites also mentioned a connection between Gershwin and this Torah blessing. Thanks to saxophonist Jeff Siegfried for helping me understand that this is a very well-known Jewish prayer; it is the beginning of many blessings and frequently used over food. By referencing this prayer, Gershwin was using something that would be familiar to his Jewish audience.
39. Tye, Rising from the Rails; Allen, Brotherhood.
40. The Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (1900–1967) included Charleston–NYC; under a different name (the Wilmington & Manchester Railroad connected with the North Eastern Railroad—which brought in Charleston in 1857). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Coast_Line_Railroad.
41. “On June 16, 1934, George Gershwin boarded a train in Manhattan bound for Charleston, South Carolina. From there he traveled by car and ferry to Folly Island, where he would spend most of his summer in a small frame cottage.” David Zak, Smithsonian.com, August 8, 2010. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/summertime-for-george-gershwin-2170485/?no-ist. This is also mentioned in Wyatt and Johnson, George Gershwin Reader, 184.
42. DuBose Heyward, in Heyward and Heyward, Porgy: A Play in Four Acts, xi.
43. An effective revision of Porgy’s character in the 2012 Broadway version by Paulus and Parks presents Porgy with aspirations; his love for Bess has transformed him and he now desires to be more of an able-bodied man, which he equates with getting a leg brace to walk with more ease. His rendition of “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” comes right after he and Bess first consummate their relationship and contains a clever sly subtext, where “nuttin’” is a stand-in for sexual experience.
44. André, “From Otello to Porgy.”
45. Ibid., 24–25.
46. Joplin’s cover of “Summertime” was recorded with Big Brother and the Holding Company on the last album they made together where Joplin was the lead singer, Cheap Thrills (Columbia, 1968).
47. For more information on the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” see the Center for Disease Control website, “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee” https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm. Combined with the recent book (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, 2010) and movie of the same title (directed by George C. Wolfe with Oprah Winfrey and Elise Renée Goldsberry in 2017), the issues of African Americans not being treated ethically, not being fully informed, and not given the opportunity to consent for how organs and medical tissues are used are still relevant and pressing as these stories continue to emerge from the past.
48. For an overview of the Broadway production see Als, “A Man and a Woman.”
49. Though not articulated in such terms in the 1930s when the opera was written, today we can understand an interpretation of Bess as a victim of domestic violence and battered person syndrome (also known as battered women’s syndrome).
50. Standifer, Porgy and Bess.
51. Leontyne Price was the inspiration behind Samuel Baber’s Anthony and Cleopatra as well as his Hermit Songs. I discuss Price as Aida in the introduction to this book.
52. Shortly after Porgy’s entrance in act 1,
as we are just getting to know him, he says “When Gawd make cripple, he mean him to be lonely. Night time, day time, he got to trabble dat lonesome road.”
53. Leontyne Price, born in 1927, was raised in Laurel, Mississippi.
54. Other excellent sources for thinking about Bess in Porgy and Bess from the performer’s perspective (especially from interviews of singers who portrayed Bess) can be found in Standifer, Porgy and Bess, and Brown, “Performers in Catfish Row.”
Chapter 5. Carmen
1. Romani as an adjective can also be Romany and Rom. These people call themselves Romani as well as Roma.
2. I discuss the Senegalese Karmen Geï and South African U-Carmen eKhayelitsha in a separate article: see André, “Carmen in Africa.”
3. A few of the best sources that provide an overview of the Carmen adaptations are: Powrie, Babington, Davies, and Perriam, Carmen on Film; Zanger, Film Remakes; Davies and Powrie, Carmen on Screen.
4. The adaptations of Carmens vary from stage productions (such as Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man [loose adaptation], in 2000 at Theater Royal in Plymouth, England, and later at Old Vic in London) to films for the cinema and TV. See Hickling, “Bollywood Carmen,” and Davies and Powrie, Carmen on Screen.
5. Dibbern, “Literary Sources” (see esp. n2 and n3, p. 264, re: the opening of the novella).
6. These “Letters from Spain” were published between January 1831 and December 1833 in La Revue de Paris. Dibbern, “Literary Sources,” 238.
7. Ibid., 264.
8. Robinson, “Mérimée’s Carmen”; and McClary, “Genesis of Bizet’s Carmen.”
9. I also discuss the position of Don José (in Bizet’s opera) as a proxy for the Mérimée novella French narrator in my article “Carmen in Africa.”.
10. Carmen, act 1, Jose-Micaëla duet. Jose: “Et bien, tu lui diras/que son fils l’aime et la vénère/et qu’il se repent aujourd’hui;/il veut que là-bas sa mère/soit contente de lui!” (Well then, you’ll tell her—/that her son loves and reveres her/and that today he is repentant;/he wants his mother back there/to be pleased with him!). Such a line implies that Don José is making up for a negative past deed. The implications of this are fleshed out with a backstory added in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha.