Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

year after its Met debut the international reputation of Porgy and Bess as an opera was further enhanced in Glyndebourne. A third uncut recording generated by this production was made in 1989. See the Discography and Filmography in the online website.

5. After Gershwin’s Pardon My English, Freedley (without Aarons) would produce four hits for Porter shows: Anything Goes (1934), Red, Hot and Blue! (1936), Leave It to Me! (1938), and Let’s Face It (1941).

6. See especially Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 11–118; David Ewen, George Gershwin, 218–65; Jablonski, Gershwin, 250–91; and Charles Schwartz, Gershwin, 243–71. For an important source on the genesis of Porgy and Bess that was published since the first edition of Enchanted Evenings, see Howard Pollack, George Gershwin, 567–91.

7. Dorothy Heyward, “Porgy’s Goat,” Harper’s 215 (December 1957): 37.

8. Jablonski, Gershwin, 255.

9. The outline of scenes and songs in the online website indicates the division of lyrical labor between DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin.

10. Gershwin began his orchestration with act I, scene 2, completing it in February 1935. In a letter to Schillinger (May 16) the composer wrote that he had completed act I, scene 1. act II occupied Gershwin’s attentions at least for the remainder of May and June, and on July 19 Gershwin conducted a run-through of acts I and II at the CBS studio. Completion dates for act III are even more meticulously documented: scene 1 (July 22); scene 2 (August 4), scene 3 (August 23). Several weeks later Gershwin wrote on the first page of the orchestral score, “finished September 2, 1935.”

11. Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes, “‘Porgy and Bess,’ Native Opera, Opens at the Alvin; Gershwin Work Based on DuBose Heyward’s Play,” New York Times, October 11, 1935, 30.

12. Atkinson and Downes, ibid.

13. Downes, ibid.

14. Atkinson, ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Downes, ibid.

17. Ibid. Several days later the New York Times gave the composer an opportunity to respond at some length to his critics: “I chose the form I have used for ‘Porgy and Bess’ because I believe that music lives only when it is in serious form. When I wrote the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ I took ‘Blues’ and put them in a large and more serious form. That was twelve years ago and the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is still very much alive, whereas if I had taken the same themes and put them in songs they would have been gone years ago.” G. Gershwin, 1.

18. Jablonski, Gershwin, 264.

19. Virgil Thomson, “George Gershwin,” 18.

20. Thomson, “Porgy in Maplewood,” New York Herald Tribune, October 19, 1941; reprinted in Thomson, The Musical Scene (New York: Knopf, 1945), 167–69.

21. Vernon Duke, “Gershwin, Schillinger, and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences,” Musical Quarterly 33 (January 1947): 108.

22. Richard Rodgers, “Foreword,” The Gershwins, by Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon (New York: Atheneum, 1973), xiii.

23. Ibid.

24. Schwartz, Gershwin, 318.

25. George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” 1–2. Interestingly, neither Atkinson nor Downes was bothered by Gershwin’s songs. In fact, according to Atkinson it was their presence that made the “hour of formal music transitions” palatable. Similarly, Downes may have felt that there were a few songs too many “which hold back the dramatic development,” but he undeniably shared Atkinson’s view that “it is in the lyrical moments [i.e., songs] that Mr. Gershwin is most completely felicitous.” Gershwin finds an ardent recent defender in Lawrence Starr, who observes that “for a nineteenth-century European like Verdi, it is acceptable—perhaps even appropriate and admirable—to have ‘hit tunes’ in an opera; for a twentieth-century American it is inappropriate and vulgar.” Starr, “Gershwin’s ‘Bess,’” 430.

26. Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” 1.

27. Richard Crawford, “Gershwin’s Reputation,” 259.

28. Charles Hamm, “Theatre Guild Production,” 495–532.

29. The following discussion of the “Buzzard Song” is adapted (with some changes) from Block, “Gershwin’s Buzzard.”

30. The play by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward was originally published by Doubleday in 1927. Page references in this chapter correspond to the version of Porgy anthologized in Famous American Plays of the 1920s (New York: Dell, 1959), 207–307. The typescript of DuBose Heyward’s libretto with George Gershwin’s annotations is now housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Gershwin Collection, Box 27, Item 2).

31. Dorothy and Dubose Heyward, Porgy, 252.

32. Typescript libretto, 2–18.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 2–14.

35. Armitage, George Gershwin, 52.

36. Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin, 325.

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