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

Genre

Prior to its eventual acceptance into the operatic community, reviewers and historians alike were uncertain how to classify Porgy and Bess. At its premiere the New York Times did not know whether to approach the work as a dramatic event or a musical event, and assigned first-string reviewers in both camps, drama critic Brooks Atkinson and music critic Olin Downes, to review the work in adjacent columns.11 Most subsequent accounts of these reviews conclude that Atkinson, who praised Gershwin for establishing “a personal voice that was inarticulate in the original play,” appreciated the work more fully than Downes.12 It is true that Downes, in contrast to Atkinson, expressed reservations about the stylistic disparities in the work when he wrote that Gershwin “has not completely formed his style as an opera composer” and that “the style is at one moment of opera and another of operetta or sheer Broadway entertainment.”13 Nevertheless, Downes found much to praise in Gershwin’s melody, harmony, vocal writing, and the “elements of a more organic kind,” especially the “flashes of real contrapuntal ingenuity.”

Atkinson, who had nothing but praise for Anything Goes the previous year, put his cards on the table when he now wrote that “what a theatre critic probably wants is a musical show with songs that evoke the emotion of situations and make no further pretensions.”14 It is not surprising then that he expressed such distaste for the convention of recitative, which he, like Gershwin, designated as “operatic form.” Atkinson also questioned “why commonplace remarks that carry no emotion have to be made in a chanting monotone.”15 Playing from the same deck, Downes lamented that a composer like Gershwin, “with a true lyrical gift and with original and racy things to say, has turned with his score of ‘Porgy and Bess’ to the more pretentious ways of musical theatre.”16 For Downes as well as for Atkinson, a composer who can “go upstairs and write a Gershwin tune” but whose “treatment of passages of recitative is seldom significant,” should know his place and stick to writing great but unpretentious tunes.17

The question of genre and “operatic form” raised by Atkinson and Downes can be traced to the earliest stages in the collaboration of Gershwin and Heyward. In fact, the issue of recitatives was their principal source of artistic disagreement. As early as November 12, 1933, when he sent the first scene, Heyward offered the following suggestion: “I feel more and more that all dialogue should be spoken. It is fast moving, and we will cut it to the bone, but this will give the opera speed and tempo.”18 Gershwin differed strongly and overruled his librettist.

For the first decades of its history a critical consensus supported Heyward’s original conviction. In his review of the Theatre Guild production in 1935 Virgil Thomson writes critically of Gershwin’s recitative as “vocally uneasy and dramatically cumbersome” and concludes that “it would have been better if he had stuck to [spoken dialogue] … all the time.”19 Part of Thomson’s subsequent praise in 1941 for the Cheryl Crawford revival in Maplewood, New Jersey, can be attributed to her practice “of eliminating, where possible, the embarrassment due to Gershwin’s incredibly amateurish way of writing recitative.”20

Vernon Duke—like Gershwin a hybrid classical-popular composer but unlike Gershwin a man sharply divided between his two artistic personalities, Duke and Dukelsky—was similarly critical. In their pre-compositional discussions about Porgy and Bess he recalled that “George was still under the sway of the Wagnerian formula,” which Duke believed to be “anti-theatrical,” and wrote somewhat smugly that “it is generally acknowledged that the separate numbers are superior to the somewhat amorphous stretches of music that hold them together,” that is, the recitatives.21 Less surprisingly, Richard Rodgers, who rarely abandoned the Broadway convention of spoken dialogue, also believed that Gershwin had made “a mistake in writing Porgy and Bess as an opera.”22 According to Rodgers, “the recitative device was an unfamiliar and difficult one for Broadway audiences, and it didn’t sustain the story.” Consequently, it was only “when Cheryl Crawford revived it later as a musical play that it gained such overwhelming success and universal acceptance.”23 More recently, Gershwin biographer Charles Schwartz concurred with the above-mentioned composers that the Crawford revival “vindicated” Heyward’s original conception of the work, “for as he had argued, Gershwin’s recitatives impeded the pacing of the original production.”24

In addition to his controversial decision to give his work operatic form by connecting his musical numbers with recitatives, the composer had the audacity to load his score with hit songs, which makes the distinction between aria and recitative more glaring than in most hitless operatic works (see the list of scenes and songs in the online website). Clearly this issue was a sensitive one for Gershwin, who felt the need to publicly defend the presence of songs in Porgy and Bess:

It is true that I have written songs for “Porgy and Bess.” I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs. In “Porgy and Bess” I realized I was writing an opera for the theatre and without songs it could be neither of the theatre nor entertaining from my viewpoint. But songs are entirely within the operatic tradition. Many of the most successful operas of the past have had songs. Nearly all of Verdi’s operas contain what are known as “song hits.” “Carmen” [then performed with Ernest Guiraud’s added recitatives] is almost a collection of song hits.25

In his overview of Gershwin’s posthumous reputation Richard Crawford offers an insightful summary of several seemingly insurmountable criticisms that made Gershwin so defensive about inserting popular songs in a serious work that in the composer’s words “used sustained symphonic music to unify entire scenes.”26 Crawford writes:

We see Gershwin as a great natural talent, to be sure, but technically suspect, and working in a commercial realm quite separate from the neighborhood in which true art is created. So there sits Gershwin, as Virgil Thomson once wrote, “between two stools,” vastly appealing to the