SundayReview | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Variations on an Explosive Theme

Joe Nocera JAN. 21, 2012

WHEN George Gershwins Porgy and Bess arguably the most important piece of
American music written in the 20th century first opened on Broadway in 1935, the
operas libretto was littered with a word now shunned as an antiblack slur. The
African-American residents of Catfish Row, the only slightly imaginary block in
Charleston, S.C., where the opera is set, used it liberally, and so of course did the
white characters during their occasional menacing visits.

None of the operas early critics seemed to notice; whether black reviewer or
white, they primarily critiqued Porgy and Bess as a theatrical experience, focusing
in particular on the highly original way Gershwin fused blues tonalities, spirituals
and other elements of African-American music into a full-length opera. It had never
been done before. Some would say its never been done since.

In the early 1940s, however, during a Porgy and Bess revival which turned
the opera into a more commercially viable musical, not unlike the current Broadway
revival starring Audra McDonald a singer named Etta Moten, hired to play Bess,
refused to utter the word. Ira Gershwin, Georges brother, who co-wrote the lyrics
with DuBose Heyward, revised the line. By 1951, according to Howard Pollack, the
author of George Gershwin: His Life and Work, Ira Gershwin had totally
eliminated the word from the text, replacing it with such terms as tin horns, dummy,
low-life, suckers, buzzard, and baby. That year, the producer Goddard Lieberson,
who had just recorded Porgy and Bess for Columbia Records, said, Sometimes,
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happily, times change, and with the times, ethical values. It seemed proper to
eliminate certain words in the lyrics which, in racial terms, had proven offensive.

Porgy and Bess has always struck me as something of a miracle. A powerful,

empathetic portrayal of poor black city dwellers in the South, it was written by three
white men, two of whom had spent little time in the South. The one Southerner,
Heyward, was a Charleston insurance salesman turned poet who had written a novel,
Porgy, the inspiration for which had come from a news story about a crippled
beggar he used to see around town. Heyward spent years pushing Gershwin to
collaborate on an opera; once Gershwin agreed, Heyward mailed him lyrics the
only ones he ever wrote in his life that are some of the most sublime ever written.
Stephen Sondheim described them as the most beautiful and powerful in our
musical theater history.

Porgy and Bess was also Gershwins first opera and his last; he was dead
within two years, killed by a brain tumor at the age of 38. Who remembers Verdis
first opera? says Steven Blier, the musical historian and co-founder of the New York
Festival of Song. Yet Gershwin wrote something that ranks with Puccini in terms of
crafting great melodies and great theater. Its score contains an astonishing number
of songs Summertime, It Aint Necessarily So, I Got Plenty o Nothin and at
least a half-dozen more that are at the very heart of the American popular
songbook. Summertime alone has been recorded more than 25,000 times.

But for much of its history, Porgy and Bess has also been something else: a
reflection of race relations in America, and a prism through which African-
Americans have viewed their own history.

When it first opened in the 1930s, the mere fact that it had been written was
viewed as a triumph among most black writers and critics. For starters, instead of
using white actors in blackface, which was still relatively common, Gershwin cast
African-Americans in all the black roles. Though black opera singers were almost
unheard of, Gershwin never even considered casting white singers. This alone was
viewed as racial progress. For another thing, the music African-American music
was not being used for a vaudeville show, but was employed in the highest of musical
arts: opera. It didnt matter that the writer of that music was white Gershwin even
wrote his own spirituals for Porgy and Bess. What mattered was that he had
captured something real. Gershwin, said Eva Jessye, who conducted the original
Porgy and Bess chorus, had written in things that sounded just right, like our
people. J. Rosamond Johnson, an important black composer, called Porgy and
Bess a monument to the cultural aims of Negro art.

When that attitude began to change in the 1940s and 1950s, it wasnt just
because the libretto contained that word. The first stirrings of what would become
the civil rights movement caused African-Americans to begin to look askance at the
characters, to see them as white-inspired stereotypes, and to see the story itself
with its violence, drug use and subservience to white authority as degrading. It is
a vehicle of shame, sorrow and disgust, editorialized The Pittsburgh Courier, an
African-American newspaper.

Which is not to say it stopped being performed. On the contrary, it was

performed constantly. By the mid-1950s, a producer named Robert Breen, along
with an associate, Ella Gerber, had largely taken control of Porgy and Bess. Mr.
Breens original idea was to bring it to Europe, where he was sure it would be a hit;
to that end he created a touring company, whose original cast members included
Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway and which was backed by the State Department.

Now it was white as well as black Americans who feared the portrayals depicted
in Porgy and Bess, especially when the State Department approved a series of
performances in the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. But they neednt have
feared: Europe and the Soviet Union embraced the show in a way that Americans no
longer did. Its portrayal of the hard life of African-Americans at the turn of the last
century did not incite anti-American propaganda, as many Americans had worried.

By the 1960s, Porgy and Bess had become, at best, a mixed blessing for black
singers. It was widely scorned among the African-American intelligentsia, who
viewed it as an example of Uncle Tomism. And, if it provided steady work for black
actors and singers, it was also a trap from which they rarely escaped. You could be
ghettoized in Porgy and Bess, says John Miller, who manages opera singers. It
became a stigma. Once you sang in it, you couldnt get cast in anything else.
 By then, too, Ms. Gerber had taken over the production from Breen indeed,
the Gershwin estate would not allow a new production to go forward without her
participation and the production had become outdated, with touches of minstrel
show that its cast members found humiliating. Ms. Gerber herself was often
condescending toward African-Americans, and the cast bridled at her patronizing
attitude. Singing in Porgy and Bess put food on the table, but it had become a
distasteful experience.

A large part of the reason African-Americans began to embrace Porgy and

Bess again in the mid-1970s was simply the passage of time. The life it depicted
in which black men called white men boss and white men called black men boy
began to recede as African-Americans asserted their rightful place in American
society, as the black middle class began to grow, and as black accomplishment
became an ordinary part of American life rather than something unique. With shows
like The Jeffersons, books by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and plays by LeRoi
Jones, the Porgy and Bess characters were part of a richer depiction of African-
American life.

But a second reason was that Porgy and Bess itself changed. In 1976, as part of
the countrys bicentennial celebration, the Houston Grand Opera decide to mount a
new production, one that would restore Porgy and Bess as a full-length opera,
including music that Gershwin had originally cut to shorten the piece. The producer,
Sherwin Goldman, met resistance from the Gershwin estate, and from Ira Gershwin
himself. (Why tamper with it? he asked Goldman.) Eventually, though, Goldman
not only secured permission, but got the Gershwin family to agree to do it without
the involvement of Ella Gerber.

The now-tattered reputation of Porgy and Bess made it difficult to find a cast.
But in time, a group of young opera singers enlisted, including Donnie Ray Albert as
Porgy and Clamma Dale as Bess, both of whom have gone on to have long,
distinguished careers in opera. Once the singers were assembled, the young director,
Jack OBrien, and the opera companys musical director, John DeMain, did
something no white director had ever done before: they consulted with the cast on
how Porgy and Bess should be played. Jack and John kept asking us, How do we
feel about doing it this way? Does this feel right to you? recalls Mr. Albert. Mr.
OBrien soon came to see the chorus, which had been minimized in the Breen
productions, as the key to Porgy and Bess.

The choral voices in Porgy and Bess sing a greater percentage of the score than
almost any other opera I can think of, Mr. OBrien told me. The chorus is the
community. They look out for each other because nobody else is going to look out for
them.

As the cast members rehearsed this new production, they gradually came to feel
ownership of the opera, and with that came feelings of pride in the story they were
telling and the songs they were singing. As opening night neared, Clamma Dale
approached Mr. OBrien with a request that once would have been unthinkable. At a
key moment in the opera when Bess is angrily trying to turn away from the
cocaine being offered her by the drug dealer Sportin Life she wanted to restore
the original language. After consulting with the cast and the producers, Mr. OBrien
agreed. If it is an exaggeration to say that this was the moment that Porgy and Bess
was restored to its rightful place in the pantheon of American art, its not much of
one.

After its 1976 run in Houston, the opera played in Washington, on its way to
New York. Todd Duncan, Gershwins original Porgy, saw it there. Forty years earlier,
Mr. Duncan had refused to sing Porgy and Bess in Washington unless the theater
where it was being performed was desegregated. (It was, but only temporarily.)
When he went backstage to shake the latest Porgys hand, he could only marvel at
what he had seen. Its so black! he told Mr. Albert.

Mr. OBrien says that he doesnt think of Porgy and Bess as African-American
music. Its American music, he said and really, who can disagree? The blues and
spirituals that make up the core of Porgy and Bess, written by a white Jewish
composer and originating in the African-American community, is music we all
embrace. It is part of Americas heritage and a source of American pride. It is
unlikely that will ever change, for which we should be thankful.

I cant say I like the current Broadway production; to my mind, Porgy and
Bess loses much of its emotional power when it is turned into a musical and
stripped of its operatic qualities. The chorus is bare-bones, and the efforts by the
 current producers to make this version as racially inoffensive as possible seem
misguided, given its history.

Still, at the matinee performance I saw recently, I sat near several African-
American women who were enjoying it immensely. At the intermission, we got to
talking and I asked them if they remembered when Porgy and Bess was viewed as
Uncle Tomism.

Oh, yes, said the woman sitting in front of me. That was my era. I was part of
that.

Whats different now? I asked.

Everything, she said.

Joe Nocera is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 22, 2012, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Variations on an Explosive Theme.

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