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

Social historian Harold Cruse takes Hansberry to task for focusing on content in her criticism of Porgy and Bess.63 Cruse instead sees the work “as the most perfect symbol of the Negro creative artist’s cultural denial, degradation, exclusion, exploitation and acceptance of white paternalism.”64 He deeply resents the fact that blacks themselves did not produce their own authentic folk opera. He also considers it as indisputable that even if blacks had written such a work, it “would never have been supported, glorified and acclaimed, as Porgy has, by the white cultural elite of America.”65

In Gershwin’s time knowledgeable black critics responded negatively to the composer’s attempt to come “as close to the Negro inflection in speech as possible” in his recitatives.66 Even the normally circumspect and polite Duke Ellington was reported to have said that Porgy and Bess “does not use the Negro musical idiom” and that “it was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.”67 Others found the idea of whites speaking for blacks and the subject matter itself rather than the final product the principal source of consternation.

Even those who for the most part reject Gershwin’s “fake folk-lore” might find something to appreciate in Gershwin’s assimilation of black culture inspired by his month at Folly Beach in 1934. Although simplistic by the standards of a master drummer, the polyrhythmic drumming that precedes “I Ain’t Got No Shame” in act II, scene 2, comes closer to black African drumming style than most jazz drumming (by drummers of any race) before the 1950s. Similarly, Gershwin’s attempt to capture the effect he and Heyward heard while listening outside a Pentecostal church in the opening and closing of act II, scene 4, “Oh, Doctor Jesus,” in which six prayers are presented in a six-part texture (unfortunately mostly cut in Boston and New York), is a dazzling translation of the black experience.68 Certainly, these two examples possess a “fake authenticity” analogous to nineteenth-century slave narratives written by whites or Forrest Carter’s best-selling bogus biography of the Cherokee Indian, The Education of Little Tree.69 If we use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “blindfold test” (in which an expert usually failed to determine the race of various jazz trumpeters without previous knowledge) to judge a work’s authenticity, Gershwin’s evocation of African-American drumming and prayer meetings might be heard more charitably.70

For the sake of musical homogeneity, Gershwin in most instances purposefully created his own idiosyncratic pseudo-spirituals rather than copy those he had heard. He also preferred to freely adapt his own Russian-Jewish ethnicity into a personal interpretation of the African-American experience rather than slavishly imitate it. The strong kinship between these musically compatible traditions is evident in Sporting Life’s theme, which might be interpreted as a chromatic transformation of the Jewish blessing that precedes and follows the reading of the Torah (Example 4.2b).71

How do we judge Porgy and Bess today, an opera that plays on black stereotypes and has served as a negative symbol of black exploitation? Is it enough to counter that the “civilized” and, moreover, non-singing whites in the drama “are also more unemotional, drab and dull” and, as Edith Garson says in her completion of Goldberg’s biography, “cruel and foolish”?72 In the 1980s, Lawrence Starr attempted to defuse the passions of this debate: “To insist on viewing Porgy and Bess as a racial document is to apply criteria which lie wholly outside the tradition to which this work relates, with the consequent risk of blinding oneself to the virtues it possesses.”73 Unfortunately, when considering the escalating tensions between Jews and African Americans after 1935, it seems less likely in the 1990s that the universal values of Gershwin’s opera espoused by Starr will soon transcend artistically as well as politically divisive racial issues.

Establishing and Transforming Musical Character

It was previously observed when discussing Show Boat that Kern chose musical themes in part for their symbolic possibilities and reworked these themes in order to reveal dramatic connections and oppositions (see the “River Family” of motives, Example 2.2, pp. 29–30). Kern also transformed two themes, Cap’n Andy’s musical signature and Magnolia’s piano music, to convey the continuity that underlies changing dramatic situations. Gershwin’s treatment of the first technique is similar to that of Kern, since Gershwin assigns specific themes to important characters (or to a thing like “happy dust”) and allows his listeners actively or subliminally the possibility of attributing dramatic significance to these themes.

But Gershwin went beyond Kern in discovering varied and ingenious new ways to transform his melodies (even his hit tunes) for credible dramatic purposes. In altering Cap’n Andy’s theme and Magnolia’s piano theme, Kern altered tempo and character—and presumably asked Robert Russell Bennett to orchestrate these transformations—but he did not change the pitch content of either theme. When Gershwin musically responds to the ever-changing dramatic circumstances of his characters and their relationships, he frequently alters the pitches of the initial melodies by using a technique known as paraphrase. As his characters evolve, Gershwin adds and subtracts pitches and alters rhythms to create new melodies. In most cases these new melodies retain the identity inherent in their fundamental melodic contours. Some of Gershwin’s melodic transformations are difficult to perceive and are consequently meaningless to most listeners. Other transformations are questionably related to the central themes. The remarks that follow will focus on the most audible and dramatically meaningful of Gershwin’s melodic manipulations, a union of craft and art.

Musicals, operatic and otherwise, thrive when they show two people in love that audiences can care about. The opera Porgy and Bess, like all the adaptations treated in this book, similarly places its greatest dramatic emphasis on the love-story component of its literary source. A related theme is the attempt of the principal characters to overcome their physical and emotional handicaps and dependencies, their loneliness and poor self-esteem, and to establish themselves as fully accepted members within a loving community. Act II, scenes 1 and 3, provide a good introduction to how Gershwin created a symbolic musical language to express these great dramatic