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

Authenticity

Somewhat related to the problems of genre definition is another controversy surrounding Porgy and Bess: how to determine an authentic performing version. To place this debate in perspective it may be helpful to recall the difficulties in establishing a text for Show Boat (discussed in chapter 2). Since Kern and Hammerstein themselves revised their work nineteen years after its original Broadway run for the 1946 Broadway revival, it is arguable that this later version represents the final intentions of the creators. Despite its claim to legitimacy, however, revisionists such as John McGlinn rejected the 1946 version as an impure mutation of original authorial intent. Further, the Houston Opera (1983), McGlinn (1988), and Prince (for the 1994 Broadway revival) restored material that had been discarded—presumably with the consent of the Kern and Hammerstein estates—in the pre-Broadway tryouts. The appearance of the dropped “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” in the first published vocal score provides fuel for the idea that Kern really wanted this music in the show but capitulated to external pressures. Other reinsertions were not supported by equally compelling evidence.

The authenticity problems associated with Porgy and Bess (and many European operas in the core repertory) differ from those posed by the performance history of Show Boat. For example, in contrast to the Show Boat score, which was published four months into the original Broadway run, by which time the cuts had been stabilized, the Porgy and Bess vocal score was published as a rehearsal score prior to the Boston tryouts on September 30, 1935, and therefore includes most of the music that was later cut in the Boston tryouts. Thus the Gershwin score, unlike the first published Show Boat score (with the exception of “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’”), is not a score that accurately represents what New York audiences actually heard on opening night ten days later. Thanks to the work of Charles Hamm it is now possible to reconstruct what audiences did hear on the opening night of Porgy and Bess (October 10, 1935) down to the last measure.28 But the question remains: Were these cuts made for artistic or for practical or commercial considerations?

Hamm argues that “most cuts made for apparently practical reasons were of passages already questioned on artistic grounds,” and that “the composer’s mastery of technique, his critical judgment, his imagination, and his taste come as much in play in the process of final revisions as in the first stages of composition.” In addition to the relatively modest “cuts to tighten dialogue or action,” “cuts of repeated material mostly made before the opening in Boston,” and “cuts to shorten the opera,” the openings of three scenes were greatly reduced. By the time Porgy and Bess reached New York, only twenty measures of Jazzbo Brown’s music remained before “Summertime” (and even these were eliminated a few days later), and the “six prayers” that opened act II, scene 4 were removed (though a far shorter reprise could still be heard at the end of the scene). More than two hundred measures from act III, scene 3, had also been discarded, including much of the trio portion of “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess.”

An examination of one deleted portion, Porgy’s “Buzzard Song” from act II, scene 1, might help to shed light on the complex issues of “authenticity” and the relative virtues of “absolute completeness.”29 As in the play Porgy by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, upon which the opera libretto is based (rather than on the novel Porgy), the libretto draft that DuBose sent to George on February 6, 1934, concludes this scene with the appearance of a buzzard.30 In the play, the fact that the buzzard lights over Porgy’s door represents the end of the protagonist’s newly acquired happiness and peace of mind with Bess and prompts the final stage direction of the scene, “Porgy sits looking up at the bird with an expression of hopelessness as the curtain falls.”31

The text of the “Buzzard Song” in the libretto shows Porgy’s superstitious response to and fear of the buzzard, but in keeping with his attempt to be more upbeat in his adaptation from play to opera, Heyward presents a triumphant protagonist who reminds the buzzard that a former Porgy, decaying with loneliness, “don’t live here no mo.’”32 Because he is no longer lonely, the Porgy in the first draft of Heyward’s libretto revels in his victory over superstition and loneliness: “There’s two folks livin’ in dis shelter / Eatin,’ sleepin,’ singin,’ prayin.’ / Ain’t no such thing as loneliness, / An’ Porgy’s young again.”33

Several pages earlier in the libretto manuscript George wrote the words “Buzzard Song.” The song cue appears shortly after the arrival of the bird in the scene and Porgy’s observation that “once de buzzard fold his wing an’ light over yo’ house, all yo’ happiness done dead.”34 By placing the “Buzzard Song” earlier in the scene, Gershwin paved the way for the following duet between Porgy and Bess, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” a subsequent addition.

Shortly before Porgy and Bess premiered in New York, the “Buzzard Song” was among the deletions agreed to by Gershwin and director Rouben Mamoulian. There is general agreement among various first- and secondhand explanations for this cut. Mamoulian, in his 1938 tribute to Gershwin, wrote that “no matter how well he loved a musical passage or an aria (like the Buzzard Song in Porgy and Bess for instance), he would cut it out without hesitation if that improved the performance as a whole.”35 According to Edith Garson’s completion of Isaac Goldberg’s 1931 Gershwin biography, the composer agreed to this particular cut for practical reasons: “In fact, during the Boston run, it was George who insisted on cutting fifteen minutes from one section, saying to Ira, ‘You won’t have a Porgy by the time we reach New York. No one can sing that much, eight performances a week.’”36 David Ewen writes that “Porgy’s effective ‘Buzzard