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

the opening of scene 3. Before we see Bess, however, we hear Jake’s melody and a reprise of “It Take a Long Pull to Get There.” In a passage cut from the New York production Bess sings “Eighteen mile to Kittiwah, eighteen mile to trabble,” a musical line that might be interpreted as another of the many transformations of Porgy’s central theme. Like Porgy’s theme (Example 4.1a), it is encompassed within a perfect fifth and contains a prominent descending minor third (at the end of its second measure). It also reuses the syncopated rhythm of Porgy’s loneliness (on “trabble”) and combines this rhythm with the half-step interval that dominated the “Buzzard Song” (Examples 4.1c and 4.1d).

Bess’s recitative also shows the influence of Sporting Life with its glaring and ominous augmented fourth (A-D) (the same sound as the diminished fifth (G-D) in Example 4.2). When she returns to this phrase moments later with the words, “Oh, there’s a rattle snake in dem bushes,” one can imagine the devilish and serpentine Sporting Life lurking in the bushes as well. After Bess sings this brief passage she collapses and Porgy sings his first words of the scene, “I think dat may-be she goin’ to sleep now,” an easily perceptible transformation of his central theme untarnished by any intrusion of Sporting Life. The devil is taking a nap and Bess will recover.

Serena prays on Bess’s behalf and in answer to these prayers Catfish Row comes back to life with Jake’s theme and the music of street vendors hawking their wares.85 We know that Bess has recovered when we hear the orchestra play the opening of her theme (unsupported by harmony), and her conversation with Porgy is underscored by the continuation of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” In their conversation Porgy tells Bess that he knows she has “been with Crown” on Kittiwah Island, because “Gawd give cripple to understan’ many thing he ain’ give strong men.” Bess, too, understands many things about herself, including the fact that when Crown comes for her, she will be incapable of resisting him. When, near the end of “I Loves You Porgy,” she sings, “If you kin keep me I wants to stay here wid you forever.—/ I got my man” (Example 4.4), she uses the rhythm of “They pass by singin’” (Example 4.1b) to plead with Porgy to keep her safe from a man who possesses a harmful power over her.

Although Bess survives her illness and is able to express her love for Porgy once again, the moment of hope that concluded “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” has vanished forever (along with the key of F major reserved for their brief moment of bliss). With her realization that the irresistible Crown, who was conspicuously absent in the earlier scene, now represents a menace to her future happiness with Porgy and that she is now unworthy of the man she loves, Bess has been rendered incapable of defusing Porgy’s loneliness. Gershwin conveys this dramatic point simply and effectively when he gives Bess a new melody that is rhythmically identical to Porgy’s loneliness theme. Bess has now become so overwhelmed by Porgy’s loneliness that its rhythm has become a consuming obsession for her as well. She cannot sing anything else, despite Porgy’s assurances of a better life and a sturdy statement of Porgy’s central theme to conclude their duet.86

Later, in act III, scene 2, Sporting Life mocks the hero (who is about to lose the love of his life) by singing the short-long rhythm of Porgy’s loneliness themes (Examples 4.1b and c) no less than four times in the first six measures of his “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York.” But it is Bess’s fatalistic sense of defeat in act II, scene 3, rather than Sporting Life’s powers of mockery and seduction that enables us to understand why she is so easily persuaded she belongs in New York rather than in Catfish Row.

We will meet Ira Gershwin again five years after Porgy and Bess as Kurt Weill’s lyricist for Lady in the Dark (see chapter 7). For the first two of these years, George was only able to compose a pair of film scores, Shall We Dance (1936) and A Damsel in Distress (1937), and start a third, The Goldwyn Follies, which was completed by Vernon Duke after Gershwin’s sudden death of a brain tumor in July 1937.

Assessments on the relative merits of Gershwin’s twenty musicals and one opera continue to vary, even among music historians. For example, while H. Wiley Hitchcock concludes that Porgy and Bess was “a more pretentious but hardly more artistically successful contribution” than Gershwin’s musical comedies and political satires, Hamm writes unreservedly that Gershwin’s opera “is the greatest nationalistic opera of the century, not only of America but of the world.”87 Unfortunately, from Gershwin’s time to ours, the comedies and satires have seldom been revived in anything approaching their original state, even though nearly all contain one or more songs of lasting popularity and extraordinary musical, lyrical, and dramatic merit. In contrast, Gershwin’s sole surviving opera, a work that began its career on Broadway, has, despite its pretensions and attendant artistic and political controversies, long since demonstrated a stage worthiness matched only by the memorability of its tunes.

CHAPTER FIVE

ON YOUR TOES AND PAL JOEY

Dance Gets into the Act and “Sweet Water from a Foul Well”

The historic collaboration of Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895–1943) began inauspiciously, shortly after their first meeting in 1919, when one of their first songs, “Any Old Place with You,” was interpolated into a Broadway show. Hart was twenty-four and Rodgers only seventeen. The next year the new partners produced the first of three varsity shows at Columbia University and placed seven interpolated songs in a modestly successful Sigmund Romberg musical, The Poor Little Ritz Girl. After five years of failures and frustrations (Rodgers was on the verge of quitting show business to become