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

perfect fourths of the Mississippi River (Example 2.3, p. 31), Sporting Life’s attempt to be a part of Catfish Row is demonstrably false, musically as well as dramatically.

Example 4.2. Sporting Life’s themes

(a) Sporting Life

(b) Jewish prayer (“Boruch attah adonoi”)

(c) Happy Dust theme

Like Porgy’s theme, the melody that Gershwin assigned to Sporting Life is encompassed within a perfect fifth and concludes with a prominent minor (or blue) third. What betrays Sporting Life as an unwelcome outsider, however, is the prominence of the diminished fifth (the same sound as Parthy’s dissonant augmented fourth, or tritone), an interval that has been associated with the devil since the Middle Ages when it was known as the diabolus in musica. The chromatic machinations of Sporting Life’s theme appropriately enough suggest the movements of a snake-in-the-grass, analogous to the serpent who manages to tempt Eve out of the Garden of Eden. The agent of Sporting Life’s evil, his “happy dust” (cocaine), receives a suitably chromatic, serpentine theme (Example 4.2c).80 Even if one takes the optimistic view that Porgy will eventually find Bess after the final curtain, it must be acknowledged that both Bess and Porgy have been forced to leave Eden and search elsewhere for the Promised Land.

The third principal male character, Crown, exhibits a highly charged orchestral theme that contrasts markedly with Porgy’s theme (Example 4.3).

Example 4.3. Crown’s theme

Crown’s strength and restless vitality, like those of a caged animal, are evident in the relentless syncopation of his theme. Musically, Crown’s theme is also confined, within the narrow limits of a minor third. Further, in keeping with his dominating presence, whenever Crown appears all other themes are subordinate. His music even dominates the final struggle with Porgy in act III, scene 1, before Porgy states his musical supremacy and manages to overcome and kill his nemesis. In act II, scene 1, however, Crown, who has been absent a month from Catfish Row, does not exert any dramatic influence on the actions or thoughts of Porgy and Bess, and his musical theme is appropriately absent from this peaceful scene.

What about Bess? Does she not merit a theme of her own? Commentators on the opera have without exception neglected to assign her one.81 Crown’s music dominates his fight to the death with Porgy, but Bess’s musical identity is less assertive and strongly influenced by the man she is with at the time (Porgy, Crown, or Sporting Life). Although Bess certainly holds her own musically, the two songs that she sings to her men, “What You Want Wid Bess?” (to Crown) and “I Loves You Porgy” (to Porgy) (Example 4.4), bear striking melodic or rhythmic resemblances to Porgy’s themes, the former a paraphrase of Porgy’s central theme (Example 4.1a) and the latter a new melody that uses the rhythms of “They pass by singin’” (Example 4.1b). When she sings “Summertime” to Clara’s orphaned baby in act III, scene 1, Bess demonstrates her hard-won acceptance into the Catfish Row community by singing one of their songs.

Example 4.4. “I Loves You Porgy”

It is not surprising, then, that Bess’s weaknesses and chameleon-like nature as a character have caused writers to overlook (with good reason) that Gershwin did in fact associate a specific theme with his heroine, albeit privately and ultimately unrecognizably. We know this only from Heyward’s original libretto typescript, which he sent to Gershwin, where on page 2–17 Gershwin indicated in a handwritten notation that a “Bess theme” should accompany the words sung by Bess, “Porgy, I hates to go an’ leave you all alone.”82 At this point in the genesis of the work the idea of a love duet between the principals, the future “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”—which does not have a counterpart in the play Porgy—may have been an embryo in Gershwin’s mind but it had not yet been hatched.

Earlier it was noted that the eventual insertion of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” was the most substantial alteration to Heyward’s typescript for this scene. Perhaps it is possible to conjecture, after all, even without the benefit of Gershwin’s handwritten notes, that the principal tune of this famous duet (even if Porgy sings it) might belong to Bess (Example 4.5).83 And of course it is reasonable (and egalitarian) that Bess, who is capable at this point in the drama of dispelling Porgy’s loneliness, deserves her own theme, especially since she is deprived of a solo aria in act III, scene 3. Surely it is significant that her opening intervals consists mainly of consonant major thirds and sixths and that her principal minor third is gently completed by an intervening step, just as Bess fills in the gap of Porgy’s lonely existence. Interestingly, Bess’s theme also figures prominently in the orchestra in the opera’s final scene, act III, scene 3, when Porgy inquires for Bess upon his return from jail and she is not there to sing her theme. In the last moments of the opera Bess’s theme—again presented in the orchestra in her absence—connects with Porgy’s own central theme for the first time to seal their fate.84

Example 4.5. Bess’s theme (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”)

Act II, scene 1, provides abundant evidence of Gershwin’s skill in making dramatic connections and distinctions through his use of musical signatures or leitmotivs. Once he has shown, for example, that Bess’s theme and the Catfish Row songs can at least temporarily transform Porgy’s loneliness into hope, Gershwin’s motivic transformations reveal a great deal about the meaning and significance of future dramatic events. One such scene, act II, scene 3, which takes place one week after Bess left Porgy to join the Catfish Row picnic on Kittiwah Island, offers a particularly vivid demonstration of Gershwin’s ability to establish dramatic meaning through motivic transformation and paraphrase.

For the week that followed Bess’s meeting with Crown on the island in the previous scene (act II, scene 2), Bess was “out of her head” back in Catfish Row. She remains in precarious condition at