Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (115 page)

37
. Ewen,
George Gershwin
, 231.

38
. Jablonski, 288.

39
. The original 78
R.P.M.
discs (Victor 11878/81) were reissued on long-playing records (RCA Camden CAL 500) and again on CDs (Pearl Gemm CDS 9483). At the same October 14 session, which took place only four days after the Broadway premiere, Tibbett also recorded “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and, with Helen Jepson, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” The selections sung by Tibbett and Jepson have also been reissued on Pearl Gemm CDS 9483. The baritone was the Met’s most highly marketable commodity where new operas were concerned, and he had already portrayed a black man there (the title role of Louis Gruenberg’s
Emperor Jones
in 1933). It was not until the administration of Rudolf Bing that black singers were welcomed at the Met (Marian Anderson, the first, followed closely by Robert McFerrin, were both in 1955).

40
. A facsimile of the Los Angeles Gershwin program appears in Merle Armitage,
George Gershwin: Man and Legend
(New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1958), between pages 144 and 145. The Duncan recordings were issued on Decca DL-9024.

41
. Columbia OSL 162; reissued on Odyssey Stereo 32–36–0018.

42
. Armitage,
George Gershwin: Man and Legend
, 156–60.

43
. The idiosyncratic Davis-Breen version became the second published version of the opera libretto. See Stanley Richards, ed.,
Great Musicals of the American Theatre Volume One
(Radnor, Penn.: Chilton, 1973), 75–113.

44
. Gershwin, “Rhapsody on Catfish Row,” 1–2.

45
.
New York Herald Tribune
, July 8, 1934, sec. 5, 2.

46
. Wayne Shirley, “Reconciliation on Catfish Row.”

47
. Shirley, “‘Porgy and Bess,’” 104.

48
. Hamm, “Theatre Guild Production,” 495–532. Samuel Spewack and Bella Spewack,
Kiss Me, Kate
, anthologized in Richards,
Great Musicals
, 273.

49
. Wilfrid Mellers,
Music in a New Found Land
, 402.

50
. The video directed by Nunn was a Primetime/BBC and Homevale/Greg Smith Production, a Picture Music International Release, and was issued on EMI Records, Ltd., 1993.

51
. Allen Woll explores the “irony” of
Porgy and Bess
as a black musical created by whites for a white audience, and David Horn shows how Gershwin’s opera continues to pose “struggles over meaning” between various social and ethnic groups. See Woll,
Black Musical Theatre
, 154–75, and David Horn, “From Catfish Row to Granby Street.”

52
. Horn, “From Catfish Row to Granby Street.” Horn explores the ideological conflict in 1989 between the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society, who praised Gershwin for “forging a new musical language,” and the Liverpool Anti-Racist and Community Arts Association, who condemned Gershwin for “wading into black culture.”

53
. Miles Kreuger,
“Showboat,”
212.

54
. Ira Gershwin writes that in preparation for the 1951 recording of the complete opera he went through the score and changed “some opprobrious terms in the recitatives—there were about twenty—to substitutes inoffensive to the ear of today.” Ira Gershwin,
Lyrics on Several Occasions
, 83.

55
. Thomson, “George Gershwin,” 17.

56
. Hall Johnson,
“Porgy and Bess.”

57
. Ibid., 24. Johnson made the following comment about Gershwin’s recitatives: “We are confronted with a series of musical episodes which, even if they do not belong together, could be made to appear as if they do by a better handling of the musical connecting tissue.”

58
. Ibid., 25. Johnson also finds fault with Mamoulian’s staging for its misperceptions about African Americans.

59
. Ibid., 26. According to Johnson, it is incredulous that Sporting Life “could be so entirely liberated from that superstitious awe of Divinity which even the most depraved southern Negro never quite loses.”

60
. Ibid.

61
. Era Bell Thompson, “Why Negroes Don’t Like ‘Porgy and Bess,’” 54.

62
. Ibid.

63
. Harold Cruse,
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
(New York: Morrow, 1967), 100–01.

64
. Ibid., 103.

65
. Ibid., 102.

66
. Gershwin, “Rhapsody on Catfish Row,” 1.

67
. Edward Morrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s ‘Porgy,’”
New Theatre
(December 1935): 5–6; reprinted in Mark Tucker, ed.,
The Duke Ellington Reader
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 114–18 (quotation on page 115). For an informative study of
Porgy and Bess’
s reception and race see Gwynne Kuhner Brown, “Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of
Porgy and Bess
.”

68
. One important difference might be noted. In
Porgy and Bess
all six prayers are in the same key; in the African-American Pentecostal tradition each singer chooses his or her own key.

69
. The relationship between perceived authenticity and critical approbation is explored by John Spitzer in “Musical Attribution and Critical Judgment: The Rise and Fall of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b),”
Journal of Musicology
5 (Summer 1987): 319–56.

70
. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” “The Blindfold Test,” which forced unknowing listeners to make their listening judgments independently of
racial or gender bias, was invented by the influential English jazz critic, Leonard Feather, for
Metronome
in 1946. In his tribute to Feather, Gary Giddins assessed the test’s importance: “The significance of the blindfold test exceeds its entertainment value. It added a phrase to the language and a dimension to the issue of critical authority, demonstrating that people often judge a work of art differently when they don’t know who signed it.” See Giddins, “Leonard Feather, 1914–1994,” in
Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 101. Among famous test takers were Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis.

71
. Gershwin’s spiritual, “It Take a Long Pull to Get There,” also bears an uncanny resemblance to the Jewish folk song “(Haveynu) Shalom A’leychem,” music and Hebrew lyrics by Shlomo Ben-Chaim (New York: Henseley, 1960).

72
. “Gershwin Gets His Music Cues,” 2, and Goldberg,
George Gershwin
, 331.

73
. Starr, “Toward a Reevaluation,” 27.

74
. Additional connections between Porgy’s theme and other characters are charted in Deena Rosenberg,
Fascinating Rhythm
, 277, 279, 282, 285, and 294.

75
. Gershwin enhances the blues flavor by supporting Porgy’s melodic minor third (G[
]) with a major harmony (G[
]).

76
. Again, Gershwin creates a harmonic clash with a G[
] against the G[
] in the melody. Note also the resemblance between this Porgy theme and Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2 for piano composed in 1926.

77
. The melodic as well as rhythmic profile of Porgy’s “loneliness” theme also figures prominently in the River Family of themes in
Show Boat
shown in Example 2.2. It may not be too fanciful to speculate that Gershwin’s choice for Porgy’s motive, like Kern’s choice for his River Family of motives, may owe something to Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony and the African-American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (see chapter. 2, note 47).

78
. Starr, “Toward a Reevaluation,” 36; see also Starr’s extended analysis of a Gershwin song in “Gershwin’s ‘Bess.’”

79
. Examples include the following: “Oh, I Can’t sit Down!” (the word “
down!
” at the outset, and in the middle section, “
Hap
-py
feel
-in,’” “a-
steal
-in,’” “con-
ceal
-in,’” and many more); “It Take a Long Pull to Get There” (the frequently repeated “
get
there” and “
Lan’”
[the latter divided into two musical syllables]); and “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” (the repeated “
nut
-tin’” and “
plen
-ty”).

80
. Labeled by Gershwin in the typescript libretto 1–11. The presence of a separate “happy dust” theme was first noted by Shirley, “‘Porgy and Bess,’” 106.

81
. For two recent sources, which in the absence of Gershwin’s handwritten emendations reasonably argue against the presence of a “Bess” theme, see Rosenberg,
Fascinating Rhythm
, 285, and Joseph P. Swain,
The Broadway Musical
, 62.

82
. Vocal score (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation/Chappell, 1935), 272.

83
. Since Bess is Porgy’s woman now, it makes some sense for him to appropriate her theme as well.

84
. Vocal score, 533–36 and 559. The signature melodies for Porgy, Sporting Life (and his “happy dust”), Crown, and Bess do not exhaust the themes of the opera nor even those of act I, scene 2. Gershwin himself designated at least one other theme, the first fisherman theme used prominently in this and other scenes (see the beginning of act II, scene 1 [Vocal score, 189]). A second theme also introduced in act I is associated more specifically with the enterprising Jake; four measures before rehearsal no. 171 (Vocal score, 323) shows this theme as it opens act II, scene 3, shortly before Jake goes out into the storm that will take his life and that of his wife Clara. Finally, Gershwin assigns an orchestral motive to indicate the presence of the lawyer Frazier, who appears only in act II, scene 1,
a descriptive theme with a prominent dissonant syncopated leap of a major seventh (see rehearsal no. 41 [Vocal score, 214]).