Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy and girl have some problems and then all is well - or sort of. Life is not easy in opera. Porgy and Bess with its sex, dope, violence, temptations and salvation certainly offers a variation on the standard operatic theme of messy romance.
Except it is all a bit more complicated - even biblical - complete with Catfish Row as a robust Garden of Eden inhabited by its Adam, the crippled Porgy, with Bess as its wayward Eve and Sporting Life as the resident serpent. Only a gambler with a belief as firm as the irrepressible George Gershwin (19001937) could have endured the opposition to his dream of an American opera. For all his success, there were many who felt even someone as gifted as the frenetic New Yorker should draw the line at composing an opera, when another Broadway musical seemed more realistic.
Having earned his credentials as a serious artist with his dazzling, if loosely constructed, Rhapsody in Blue in 1925, followed by the Piano Concerto in F, many who praised those achievements were still not convinced about his planned foray into such a challenging and overwhelmingly European genre.
But Gershwin, the son of Russian Jewish emigres and a self-taught musician who had learnt his art on the street, had other ideas. He knew the sounds of Harlem as well as his own Jewish tradition, but he felt his future also lay in symphonic music. This vision had led him to Europe, where he had approached Stravinsky, Glazunov and Ravel, eager to learn. He had written Broadway shows, songs by the hundred and concert-hall works, but was drawn to opera. Describing his hopes for Porgy and Bess, he said: "If I am successful, it will resemble a combination of the drama and romance of Carmen and the beauty of Meistersinger."
As was so often the case, Gershwin was right. Porgy and Bess has the drama and sexual passion of Carmen, with its big, rhythmic score with its sensuous blend of jazz and spiritual, and its share of catchy solos and haunting choral pieces which offer fine scope for the chorus. And through the vivid portrait of Catfish Row as a living place, it evokes a sense of community as palpable as Wagner's Nuremburg in the Meistersinger.
There is no doubting the physical quality of Gershwin's music and interestingly, among the many strengths of this work, is the sophisticated characterisation. Porgy and Bess is far more than a love triangle, and aside from Sporting Life and his antics, there are wonderful female parts such as those of Serena and the awesome Maria. It is a realistic libretto and, while the opera's open-eyed portrayal of the poverty of the Black experience unnerved some viewers when it premiered, many Black people resented it. Duke Ellington said: "No Negro could possibly be fooled by it."
The beginning of the realisation of Gershwin's dream happened by chance. By nature restless, he never slept well and reading helped to pass long nights. While staying in a hotel, he read a novel called Porgy. Written by Edwin Du Bose Heyward, it was originally inspired by a newspaper story about a crippled Black man who assaulted a woman and tried to flee, aboard his goat cart. Heyward took the bare bones and allowed his imagination to do the rest.
His version certainly gripped Gershwin, who quickly wrote to the author, outlining his ambition to base an opera on it. There was a problem; Heyward and his wife were already dramatising it for a stage production. Gershwin looked elsewhere and was poised to work on an opera based on the Yiddish classic, The Dybbuk, for the Metropolitan Opera in 1929, but pulled out on discovering the rights weren't his. Projects came and went but he never gave up on the idea spawned by a novel read in a hotel room.
In 1932, he wrote again to Heyward expressing his interest in setting the now five-year-old stage version to music. "I am about to go abroad in a little over a week, and am thinking of ideas . . . I came back to one that I had several years ago, namely Porgy . . . and the thought of setting it to music." Never a man to sell an idea short, Gershwin concluded: "It is still the most outstanding play that I know about the coloured people".
He didn't get to Europe that time because his father died. But the operatic rights were clear; Gershwin, his brother Ira and Heyward announced plans to begin work in January 1933. However, a further possible setback emerged when Heyward revealed Al Jolson was keen to commission a musical based on the book. Gershwin swallowed and tried to make the best of it, remarking that Jolson was unlikely to attempt an operatic version. The Jolson project never progressed, and Gershwin's work with Ira and Heyward began. As ever, he travelled in search of sources. Intent on experiencing the South, George listened to Black music as sung in churches and nightclubs.
Despite this long gestation, the actual writing and orchestration of Porgy and Bess took only 20 months. The world premiere took place on September 30th, 1935 in Boston. Moving on to New York, it ran for 124 performances, but was considered a box office failure. Gershwin died within six months and was not to know how successful it would be. But Ira, living until 1983, saw it run throughout Europe - at La Scala, in Vienna and Leningrad. In 1985, the Metropolitan Opera performed its first Porgy and Bess. Three years later, it debuted at Glyndebourne.
Musical or opera? It is an opera, its songs are composed within operatic conventions. Gershwin's dream remains the great American opera, its Carmen. It is also probably the finest first opera of all time.
Scenes from Porgy and Bess will be per- formed at White's Hotel Barn on October 20th, 23rd and 26th at 3.30 p.m., on October 29th at 11 a.m. and on November 4th at 3.30 p.m.
