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players. Like Schoenberg in his early atonal period, Varèse broke down
language and form into a stream of sensations, but he offered few
compensating spells of lyricism. His jagged thematic gestures, battering pulses,
and brightly screaming chords seem to have no emotional cords tied to them,
no history, no future.
An unexpected thing happened when Varèse offered his ultraviolent music to
the public: the public liked it. Or at least was diverted by it. Leopold Stokowski, a
conductor of insatiable curiosity and impeccable showmanship, presented
Amériques with his deluxe Philadelphia Orchestra in 1926, and the following
year he programmed the equally formidable Arcana. Those concerts took place
at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall. There was much
delighted press coverage of the New York Fire Department siren that appeared
in the percussion section of Amériques. Cartoonists had a field day. Varèse
acquired a patina of society glamour, becoming, in Oja’s phrase, the “matinee
idol of modernism.” In fact, in a delightful twist of fate, the moodily handsome
composer had already been cast in bit parts in several silent movies, including
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which he plays a nobleman who kills his wife with a
poisoned ring.
Even bigger headlines greeted George Antheil, a native of Trenton, New
Jersey, who made it his mission to become the next Stravinsky, or failing that,
the next Ornstein. Antheil first won fame in postwar Paris, presenting works with
such titles as Airplane Sonata and Sonata Sauvage. Ezra Pound, James Joyce,
and other modernist writers admired him, although Stravinsky was
unimpressed. One concert occasioned a Rite-style riot at the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées, although it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for
the benefit of the film director Marcel L’Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene
for his thriller L’Inhumaine.
In 1927 Antheil brought his act to Carnegie Hall, offering a program that
managed to be jazzy and ultra-modern in equal measure: first, W. C. Handy’s
orchestra played A Jazz Symphony in front of a painting of a Negro couple
dancing the Charleston, the man grabbing the woman’s buttocks; then ten
pianos, industrial-size electric fans, a siren, and assorted other noisemakers
were rolled onstage for the Ballet mécanique, which aped Les Noces. Halfway
through the latter piece, the composer-critic Deems Taylor caused universal
merriment when he attached a handkerchief to the top of his cane and waved it
in a gesture of surrender. “Expected Riots Peter Out at George Antheil
Concert—Sensation Fails to Materialize” was the headline in one paper the next
day. Antheil ended up making a living in Hollywood, writing scores for, among
other films, Cecil B. De-Mille’s The Plainsman and The Buccaneer.
A gap had opened up between the ideal of modernism as the antithesis of mass
culture and the reality of America as a marketplace in which absolutely anything
could be bought and sold. Carl Ruggles, the most severe of the ultra-moderns,
was tormented by that contradiction. He produced a limited number of works,
each of them having the hardness and coarseness of granitic rock. His
orchestral masterpiece, Sun-Treader, is one of the most tautly argued atonal
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works in the literature, as propulsive as Beethoven’s Fifth. If Varèse is like early
Stravinsky with the folk motifs removed, Ruggles is like Ives without the tunes.
Ruggles and Varèse joined ranks in founding the International Composers’
Guild, which aimed to present difficult music without commercial restrictions.
When someone happily observed that one of the concerts had drawn a full
house, Ruggles accused his own organization of “catering to the public.” As so
often in the modernist saga, revolutionary impulses went hand in hand with
intolerance and resentment. Ruggles and Varèse muttered between themselves
about the consumerism and vulgarity that were ruining American culture, for
which they tended to blame the Jews and the Negroes.
Notwithstanding the obnoxious racial views of the founders, the International
Composers’ Guild did make possible a rare breakthrough for a black composer.
William Grant Still, a native of Mississippi who moved back and forth between
classical activities and a day job at Okeh Records, studied for a time with
Varèse, and his song cycle Levee Land appeared on an ICG program in 1926.
Designed as a vehicle for the Harlem musical-theater star Florence Mills, Levee
Land unfolds on two distinct but ingeniously coordinated tiers of activity: while
the singer delivers vocal lines in classic blues style, the orchestra surrounds her
with a seething, discordant harmonic field, including polytonal chords similar to
those that Ives used in Three Places in New England. Five years later, Still’s
Afro-American Symphony had its premiere at the Rochester Philharmonic, and
a black composer finally found a place of respect in classical America.
Virgil Thomson was a movement unto himself. A fastidious Harvard graduate
with a Kansas City background, he moved through diverse spheres of modern
music without becoming beholden to any of them. From 1925 until 1940 he was
based in Paris, where he absorbed lessons from Stravinsky, Les Six, and,
especially, Erik Satie. Thomson’s destiny was to produce the American
counterpart to Satie’s deceptive naïveté. Where Satie used cabaret melodies
and vaudeville dances, Thomson filled his scores with stock Americana—
Sunday-school hymns, village-square marches, lazy waltzes suitable for a
bandstand on a summer evening.
Thomson’s aesthetic had something in common with that of Ives, but it lacked
the chaotic, visionary element; America passed by at a dreamy distance. In
Paris, the gregarious young composer befriended several leading modernist
artists, and in 1927 he began collaborating with Gertrude Stein, another refugee
from the heartland. Something lovely happened when Thomson’s calculatedly
simplified music was joined to Stein’s calculatedly obscure images. Each half of
the equation drew out unexpected qualities in the other—sensual strangeness
in the music, elegiac warmth in the words.
In the Stein-Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, there is no plot as
such, only a succession of tableaux depicting in borderline-
incomprehensible language the lives of Spanish saints:
To know to know to love her so
Four saints prepare for saints.
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It makes it well fish.
Four saints it makes it well fish …
In Thomson’s settings, such riddles become disarmingly concrete and
everyday, as if they have been sung by schoolchildren for time out of mind. The
harmonies are straight out of a basic textbook—John Cage, in a study of
Thomson’s music, counted 111 tonic-dominant progressions—but they are
treated with an intellectual detachment that recalls Cubist sculpture and
surrealist collage.
Four Saints had its first extended production in 1934, not in a salon or an opera
house but on Broadway. What got everyone’s attention on opening night was
that the cast was entirely African-American. Thomson didn’t conceive the score
with black performers in mind; only in 1933, after seeing the black entertainer
Jimmy Daniels perform at a Harlem club, did he decide to give his work a
“Negro” veneer. Perhaps because of its exotic racial allure, Four Saints turned
out to be a surprise hit, running for sixty performances. Sophisticated city
dwellers went around singing such improbable tunes as “Pigeons on the Grass
Alas.” In The New Yorker, James Thurber penned a deadpan critique: “Pigeons
are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing
to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them
and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or
isn’t that fine, either.” Yet, like Antheil before him, Thomson discovered that a
spasm of press coverage was insufficient to launch a career. Once the Four
Saints fad was over, he found to his dismay that he couldn’t even get the score
published. As a last resort he started writing music criticism to keep his name in
front of the public.
In retrospect, Thomson’s decision to use an all-black cast seems more a
commercial calculation than a musical necessity. Some of the composer’s
explanatory comments were condescending, bordering on racist. “Negroes
objectify themselves very easily,” he later explained. “They live on the surface of
their consciousness.” African-American singers could make sense of Stein’s
nonsensical texts, Thomson stated, because they did not understand that they
made no sense. Anthony Tommasini, Thomson’s biographer, writes: “Thomson
gave black artists an unprecedented opportunity to topple stereotypes and
portray Spanish saints in what would be an elegant and historic production.
However, the fact of their color was used to sully, in a sense, the rarefied white
world of opera.” No wonder Four Saints failed to resonate more deeply with a
public that was falling seriously in love with African-American music. Perhaps
Thomson was the one living on the surface of his consciousness.
“Jazz is not America,” Varèse said in 1928. “It’s a negro product, exploited by
the Jews.” Racist animus aside, the claim is not far off the mark: much of the
music that white audiences of the twenties would have considered “jazz” came
from the pens of Jewish composers. Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving
Berlin, and Richard Rodgers all came from Central European, Eastern
European, and Russian Jewish backgrounds, and all made prolific use of
African-American material. Scholars have tracked the surprising ways in which
the modes and syncopations of Eastern European klezmer music and of
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African-American music overlap. Pace Varèse, the music of Kern and Gershwin
was American precisely because it mixed cultures—and genres—in a creatively
indiscriminate way.
Jewish Americans’ identification with black music might have had something to
do with inherited memories of European suffering. Old Testament metaphors
appear all through the African-American spirituals: “Tell ole Pharaoh / Let my
people go,” “Ezekiel saw de wheel of time / Wheel in de middle of a wheel,”
“Deep river, my home is over Jordan.” The composer Constant Lambert, in his
1934 book Music Ho!, was among the first to discuss what he called a “link
between the exiled and persecuted Jews and the exiled and persecuted
Negroes.” Such racial essentialism easily turns ugly: Lambert goes on to say
that the Jews had “stolen the Negroes’ thunder,” that they had robbed African-
American material of its pure, primitive energy and endowed it with fake
sophistication. African-Americans sometimes implied the same thing: Scott
Joplin persisted in thinking that Irving Berlin had stolen “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” from Treemonisha, and William Grant Still accused Gershwin of
plagiarism. But these squabbles obscure the reality of the New York scene in
the twenties and thirties—that Jewish, African-American, and even Caucasian
composers were working shoulder to shoulder, trading ideas, borrowing
themes, plundering the past, and feeding off the present.
When Kern’s Show Boat opened at Ziegfeld’s opulent new theater in New York,
in December 1927, the audience was stunned into silence by the opening
chorus, which was perilously far removed from the dancing girls and witty
repartee for which Ziegfeld shows were famed. As the curtain rises, the
showboat Cotton Blossom is stage left; stage right, black stevedores are
loading bales of hay and singing, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi / Niggers
all work while de white man play.” If, as Marva Griffin Carter says, Will Marion
Cook’s musicals made “confrontational jabs” at white listeners back at the turn
of the century, Kern and his librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, delivered a slap in
the face.
Even riskier is a sequence set at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. A
group of threateningly attired black singers perform a deepest-Africa number
called “In Dahomey”—the very name of Will Marion Cook’s pioneering
musical—and then reveal that they hail from Avenue A in New York. Frederick
Douglass had complained that the organizers of the exposition imported African
performers to “act the monkey”; Hammerstein’s libretto spells out clearly how
black culture was being used to satisfy white audiences’ thirst for the exotic.
If these themes had been fleshed out more fully, Show Boat might have
become a masterwork of social satire as well as a bewitching piece of theater.
But, as the scholar Raymond Knapp points out, the creators could hardly
address such an incendiary subject while they were keeping their black
characters in subsidiary roles, on the margins of the drama. African-American
suffering becomes a sort of background decor, an ambience of heartbreak.
Whatever its failings as a study in race relations, Show Boat provided a grand
aerial view of the American musical scene. The first thing you hear is a blaring,
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minatory minor chord out of Verdi or Puccini. That operatic gesture quickly
fades away into a rapid montage of popular styles: Tin Pan Alley melody, mass-
market blues, banjo strummings, Gilbert and Sullivan ditties, Sousa marches,
vaudeville patter, and hoochie-coochie music. The one song from Show Boat
that everyone knows is, of course, “Ol’ Man River,” and they know it because of
the way Paul Robeson sang it. Show Boat was not only the first major American
musical but the first musical in which black performers were given showstopping
moments. Robeson became, in effect, the co-composer of the song,
transforming a resigned, melancholy number into a vessel of spiritual might. In
later years he changed the lyric “Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ scared of dyin’” to “I
must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.”
Humbly putting his music in the service of such august voices, Kern let white
Americans know that there was more to black music than bouncing
syncopation. Coursing under the zesty surface of Show Boat is the power of the
blues.
“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise,” George Gershwin said,
explaining the origins of
Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue.
Gershwin grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, that superheated
melting pot where Russian, Eastern European, Yiddish, African-American, and
mainstream American cultures intermingled. He experienced what he called his
“flashing revelation” in the schoolyard of P.S. 25; in the middle of playing ball
with other kids, he was stopped cold by the sound of a fellow student playing
Dvořák’s
Epitomizing the Jazz Age in every
pore of his suave being, Gershwin was the ultimate phenomenon in early-
twentieth-century American music, the man in whom all the discordant
tendencies of the era achieved sweet harmony.
Humoresque. There is a poignant historical symmetry here, because
Dvořák had based his Humoresque on the American Plantation Dances
Life on the Lower East Side could be tough for a middle-class kid who liked to
play the piano. Gershwin’s early biographers, wanting to establish their
subject’s all-American credentials, emphasized his boisterous, mildly delinquent
escapades—roller-skating, skipping school, joining street brawls, dabbling in
petty burglary. Gershwin stumbled into music by accident, it was said, and
never had to work particularly hard. In fact, the boy spent endless hours
practicing, and attended dozens of recitals at Cooper Union, Aeolian Hall, and
the Wanamaker Auditorium (in the same department store where Strauss
conducted his music in 1904). Gershwin’s childhood scrapbooks, which can be
seen in the music collection at the Library of Congress, are stuffed with pictures
of favorite pianists and composers, pasted up where other boys might have
featured sports heroes or pinup girls.
of his
young student Maurice Arnold, one of those would-be black composers who
had dropped from sight.
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Gershwin’s first significant teacher was Charles Hambitzer, who introduced him
to the music of Debussy and Ravel and possibly to the early works of
Schoenberg. Later came a thorough course of theory with the Hungarian émigré
Edward Kilenyi, who told Gershwin that he had a better chance of winning an
audience if he made his name in the popular arena rather than in the academic
realm of composition. (Kilenyi, too, was familiar with Schoenberg, and
apparently schooled Gershwin in the teachings of Harmonielehre.)
Early Gershwin classics like “The Man I Love,” “’S Wonderful,” and “Fascinating
Rhythm” trumpet the new sophistication of American popular song. Often, a
simple repeating figure plays out against a cooler, more complex harmonic
background. In “’S Wonderful” the chorus melody consists simply of a falling
third heard three times, followed by a falling fifth, spelling out a common chord.
Nothing could be simpler—or, potentially, duller. It’s a mere signal, like a ditty
that plays when subway doors are closing. The wonderfulness is in the
harmonization: that inert third becomes the pivot for a graceful merry-go-round
of major, minor, dominant-seventh, and diminished-seventh chords.
While still a
teenager, Gershwin began working as a pianist at Remick’s publishing
company, and with the help of Will Vodery, Ziegfeld’s African-American
arranger, he got some jobs on Broadway. His first songwriting success—what
would remain his biggest hit, in terms of millions of copies sold—came in 1919,
when the blackface singer Al Jolson took up the young composer’s rollicking
pseudo-Southern number “Swanee.”
“Fascinating Rhythm” is a study in aural sleight of hand. Over a foursquare
beat, the melody unfolds in three helter-skelter phrases, each made up of six
eighth notes plus an eighth-note rest. The fact that each phrase falls one eighth
note short of a complete bar means that the vocal keeps slipping ahead of the
main beat; four extra pulses are needed to make up the difference. So a string
of thirty-two pulses is divided into three sets of seven and one set of eleven.
Gershwin made his first serious foray into black music in 1922, with the
vaudeville opera Blue Monday Blues. Set on 135th Street in Harlem, this brief
one-acter tells of a woman who shoots the man who’s done her wrong, or so
she thinks. The arias lack the verve of the best Gershwin tunes, awkwardly
shuffling among the conventions of European operetta, Yiddish musical theater,
and black musicals like Cook’s In Dahomey.
Curious about what the European moderns and Manhattan ultra-moderns were
up to, Gershwin regularly attended International Composers’ Guild concerts and
other new-music events. In 1922 he heard the adventurous Canadian mezzo-
soprano Eva Gauthier sing Ravel and Stravinsky, and in February 1923 he
showed up at the American premiere of Schoenberg’s
The show had a whiff of minstrelsy
about it: white singers performed in blackface, and Paul Whiteman’s smooth-
timbred jazz orchestra provided something other than an authentic Harlem
sound. But Gershwin was learning as he went along, experimenting
simultaneously with opulent vocal lines in the operatic mode and with
rhythmically pliable melodic lines that imitated stride piano and the blues.
Pierrot lunaire. That
November, Gershwin made his official “highbrow” debut, accompanying
Gauthier in contemporary songs by Kern, Berlin, and himself. He delighted the
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crowd—and showed off his classical knowledge—by inserting a phrase from
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade
Gershwin now received a commission to write an orchestral work for Whiteman,
who was preparing a program titled “An Experiment in Modern Music” for
Aeolian Hall. The bandleader, who had played viola in the Denver and San
Francisco symphonies, made it his mission to give jazz a quasi-classical
respectability. The stated aim of the “Experiment,” which took place at Aeolian
Hall on February 12, 1924, was to show “the tremendous strides which have
been made in popular music from the day of the discordant Jazz, which sprang
into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really
melodious music of today.” The evening began with the raucous glissandos of
“Livery Stable Blues,” and ended, oddly, with Elgar’s
into “Do It Again.”
Pomp and Circumstance
Planted in the middle, with one foot in the kitchen and one foot in the salon, was
March No. 1. If, as Deems Taylor said in his review, the participants were
engaged in the project of bringing jazz “out of the kitchen,” evidently jazz ended
up on the veranda, drinking Madeira and smoking cigars.
Rhapsody in Blue.
A neat ambiguity becomes apparent: sometimes the lowered seventh is heard
as a pitch-bending blue note, and sometimes it is interpreted as part of a
straitlaced dominant-seventh chord, which has the effect of kicking the harmony
into a neighboring key. The
The score famously begins with a languid trill on the clarinet,
which turns into an equally languid upward scale, which then becomes a super-
elegant and not at all raucous glissando. Having reached the topmost B-flat, the
clarinet then saunters through a lightly syncopated melody, leaning heavily on
the lowered seventh note of the scale. The tune dances down the same
staircase that the opening scale shimmied up, ending on the F with which the
piece began—a typical Gershwin symmetry.
Rhapsody
When the last chord sounded, delirium ensued. In the audience at Aeolian Hall
were such classical celebrities as Stokowski, Leopold Godowsky, Jascha
Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, and Rachmaninov himself, and they were practically
unanimous in acclaiming Gershwin as the new white hope, so to speak, of
American music. And when Gershwin went to Europe four years later, he met
more high-level admirers: Stravinsky, Ravel, four of Les Six, Prokofiev, Weill,
Schoenberg, and Berg. No American composer had ever gained such
international notice.
plays out as a dizzying sequence of
modulations; the Rachmani-novian love theme at the center of the work ends up
being in the key of E, a tritone away from the home B-flat. That theme, too, is
strewn with extraneous blue notes, which give Rachmaninov a certain finger-
snapping informality while propelling the harmony through a second string of
modulations back to the point of departure.
Of the modern European masters, Berg fascinated Gershwin most. The
legendary meeting between the two composers in Vienna—the one at which
Berg said, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music”—perhaps gave Gershwin a glimpse
of something new, of a deeper synthesis than what he had achieved to date. On
the train from Vienna to Paris, he studied the score of the Lyric Suite, and at
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various parties held in his honor in Paris he had the Kolisch Quartet play the
work several more times, no doubt to the puzzlement of the flapper crowds.
Back in New York, Gershwin hung an autographed photo of Berg in a corner of
his apartment, alongside a picture of the boxer Jack Dempsey and a punching
bag.
European impressions bubbled up in the balletic tone poem An American in
Paris, which Gershwin sketched during his 1928 tour and finished back home. If
the Rhapsody had been predictable in form, alternating between plush tunes
and busy transitional sections, An American in Paris
Gershwin had little left to learn, yet he still felt insecure about his education, and
asked for advice and lessons from almost every accredited composer he met.
Supposedly, he once approached Stravinsky, who asked after Gershwin’s
salary—$100,000 to $200,000—and then said, “In that case, I should study with
you.” (Alas, the story is probably legend: the same anecdote was told about
Gershwin and Ravel.) As Howard Pollack shows in his authoritative biography,
Gershwin kept trying to perfect his technique even after he had achieved fame.
In 1932 he embarked on a new course of study with the émigré Russian
composer-theorist Joseph Schillinger, who had created a system for
symmetrically organizing rhythms, chords, and scales. Gershwin’s notebooks
from his sessions with Schillinger show him writing in multiple modes and
deriving richly dissonant chords from the harmonic series.
showed a more confident
use of a larger structure; the tunes undergo kaleidoscopic development and are
stacked up in wickedly dissonant polytonal combinations. Yet the musical
surface is kept shiningly clear, so that the listener can follow each jazz aria as it
darts through the melee.
Since the time of “Swanee” and Blue Monday Blues, Gershwin had been
navigating among diatonic, blues, klezmerish, whole-tone, and chromatic
scales. Now he had a coherent method with which to work—a grid on which he
could plot large-scale designs. In those same notebooks, Porgy and Bess
The idea of writing a full-scale opera had preoccupied Gershwin for years. The
arts patron Otto Kahn—chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, prime
mover of Jazz Age culture, old friend of Richard Strauss’s—spurred him on,
inviting him to write a “jazz grand opera” for the Met. Gershwin concluded,
however, that the Met’s staff singers could never master the idiom; a true jazz
opera could be sung only by a black cast.
began to take shape.
DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy had long interested Gershwin as a subject.
After a long delay related to questions of rights, he set to work on the opera in
early 1934. The story is of a crippled beggar with an indomitable urge to make
his dreams come true. He falls in love with Bess, who returns his love but is
prey to the affections and manipulations of other men. The story ends on a note
of mingled hope and dread: Bess goes off to New York with the drug-dealing
ne’er-do-well Sportin’ Life, and Porgy resolves to follow. Gershwin later said that
he liked the story because of its mix of humor and drama; it allowed him to shift
between Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers and vocal-symphonic writing
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in the style of Wozzeck. Although his aim was to “appeal to the many rather
than to the cultured few,” the work far exceeded the average Broadway revue in
ambition. Gershwin spent eighteen months writing it, notating every note of the
final orchestral score in his own hand, as he felt compelled to prove when
journalists came calling.
Porgy begins with an introductory orchestral and choral explosion in which
Gershwin shows off what he has learned from his experiments in modern
music. First comes a typical rhapsodic flourish, an upward scale followed by a
trill. This gives way to a hard-driving two-chord ostinato, which sounds like a
honky-tonk version of the quivering alternation of chords at the end of Wozzeck.
The orchestra then drops out and the ostinato is carried on by an out-of-tune
barroom piano—a feat of crosscutting that imitates the tavern scene in
Wozzeck.
The texture then subsides toward a summery, humid kind of stillness. A new
ostinato gets under way, one of alternating half-diminished sevenths, recalling
Next comes a great crescendo: the chorus launches into a
neoprimitivist chant of “Da-doo-da” while the orchestra adds layer upon layer of
dissonant harmony. The climax brings shrill harmonic complexes of seven or
eight notes, split between a G dominant seventh in the bass and C-sharp-major
arpeggios in the treble. Gershwin probably assembled this music from overtone
rows, as he had done in his Schillinger notebooks.
Wozzeck
The entire score is structured around such fusions of complexity and simplicity,
although the simple always wins out in the end. In his notebooks Gershwin
wrote down some rules that would never have sufficed for Berg: “Melodic.
Nothing neutral. Utter simplicity. Directness.”
again—Marie’s song of “Eia popeia” to her child. Gershwin even uses
his chords for the same scenic purpose, to accompany a mother’s soothing
lullaby. If the kid from the Lower East Side seems in danger of losing himself in
European arcana, there is no reason to worry. We are listening to one of the
best-loved melodies of the twentieth century: “Summertime, and the living is
easy …”
What sets Porgy apart from every classical theater work of the time is that the
score invites considerable freedom of interpretation. Once the chords of
“Summertime” start rocking, they become a steady-state environment in which a
gifted performer can move around at will. She can bend pitches, add
ornaments, shift the line up and down. Billie Holiday and Sidney Bechet made
“Summertime” their own; Miles Davis, on his Porgy and Bess
Glowing with confidence, Gershwin offered
album of 1958,
actually discarded Gershwin’s chords and kept only the melody. The same
freedom of expression is permitted in the opera’s other set pieces, such as
“Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” and “It Ain’t
Necessarily So.” When, at the premiere, John W. Bubbles sang the last-named
number with devil-may-care pizzazz, he irritated the trained singers in the cast,
but Gershwin defended him.
Porgy to the public in the fall of
1935. To his surprise—he was accustomed to being loved—it met with critical
opposition and commercial disappointment. Porgy ran on Broadway for 124
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performances, a large number by operatic standards but not enough to recoup
expenses. People had trouble deciding whether Gershwin had written an opera
or a musical show: some theatergoers complained that the orchestral passages
and turbulent recitatives got in the way of the hit numbers, while classical-music
intellectuals found the showstoppers bewildering. There was fuss over how the
work should be labeled—“opera,” “folk opera,” “musical,” or something else.
Virgil Thomson, smarting over the disappearance of Four Saints, wrote a
thoroughly incoherent review for Modern Music in which he proposed that
Gershwin was “not a very serious composer” who had nonetheless produced an
important work: “Gershwin does not even know what an opera is; and yet Porgy
and Bess
Gershwin’s racial ambiguities, his miscegenating mixture of Western European,
African-American, and Russian-Jewish materials, also caused trouble. The
black singers were generally overjoyed by what Gershwin had written for them;
J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s brother, who sang the part of
Lawyer Frazier in the premiere, went so far as to describe the composer as the
“Abraham Lincoln of Negro music.” African-American critics were more
cautious, though generally positive. A few commentators on the political left
attacked what they perceived to be white exploitation of black material.
Unexpectedly, Duke Ellington, who seldom had a bad word to say about
anyone, led the critique. “Grand music and a swell play,” Ellington was quoted
as saying, but “it does not use the Negro musical idiom. It was not the music of
Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.” As it turned out, some of Ellington’s
remarks had been fabricated by an overeager Marxist journalist, although in a
subsequent clarification Ellington stated once more that
is an opera and it has power and vigor.” Thomson was, in fact, paying
Gershwin a compliment—the highest that he could offer to a composer who
lacked the correct credentials and could never be considered “one of us.”
Porgy
Thomson picked up on this leftist critique of
was not a true
Negro opera.
Porgy when he wrote, “Folk-lore
subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question
is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in
1935.” In the end, the racial debate around Porgy
Falling between two stools was, in fact, the essence of Gershwin’s genius. He
led at all times a double life: as music-theater professional and concert
composer, as highbrow artist and lowbrow entertainer, as all-American kid and
immigrants’ son, as white man and “white Negro.”
(was it a real Negro opera?)
bled into the aesthetic debate (was it an opera at all?). Thomson concluded
thus: “I don’t mind his being a light composer and I don’t mind his trying to be a
serious one. But I do mind his falling between two stools.”
Porgy performed the
monumental feat of reconciling the rigidity of Western notated music with the
African-American principle of improvised variation. In the end, Gershwin
reunited two sides of the composer’s job that should never have been
separated to begin with, and he came as close as any composer of the day—
his chief rival was Kurt Weill—to the all-devouring, high-low art of Mozart and
Verdi.