Summertime

ACT I (1935–36)

ON FEBRUARY 19, 1934, less than ten days after Gershwin returned to New York from his concert tour, he stepped into a National Broadcasting Company (NBC) radio studio to preside over the first of a series of programs called Music by Gershwin, to be aired from 7:30 to 7:45 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays. Experienced showman that he was, Gershwin brought firm priorities to his role as a radio host and performer: “informality and balance.” The first was “something that only public reaction can convince us we are getting,” he knew, but musical balance was a practical necessity. “When I set out to build a program,” he explained in an interview, “Finus Farr, a writer from the William Esty agency, and Edward Byron, the agency production man, drop up to my apartment. I run over a few of the tunes on the piano. Then we’ll pick out one of my songs for discussion. Farr very quietly pulls a notebook out of his pocket and starts to [ask] questions about the ‘birth’ of the song.” Taking “Liza” as an example, Gershwin offers the exchange that might follow:

FARR:	What show was “Liza” in?
GG:	It was in Flo Ziegfeld’s production of “Show Girl.”
FARR:	Did it take you very long to write it?
GG:	No indeed. It was the greatest rush job I’ve ever had on a musical score.
FARR:	A rush job in writing music—what do you mean?
GG:	Well, you see I was working on another show for Mr. Ziegfeld when he suddenly decided to drop that one and produce “Show Girl” immediately.
FARR:	That’s a funny thing to do, isn’t it?
GG:	Ziegfeld often did those things. He called me down to his office one day and said, “George I’m going to produce J. P. McEvoy’s ‘Show Girl’ and you must write the score for it!”
FARR:	But that’s an almost impossible request, isn’t it?

The conversation continues until Farr declares, “Thanks—I’ve got the dope. You just tell it on the radio the way you told me about it, and it’ll be good, informal continuity.”

Once a song had been settled on, an overture was chosen for the in-studio orchestra of twenty-five, conducted by Louis Katzman. To complement the featured song, the orchestra played something by a fellow composer; this was followed by another Gershwin song, without much commentary. Then, having also settled on a featured song for the next broadcast, he and the orchestra would play a few bars of that in the manner of a movie trailer. At the “dress” rehearsal, with all the commercials added, the show was timed. “It generally runs a minute or two over, so we must go back over the music, page by page, cutting here and there. . . . I’ll cut my own stuff, but I never touch the other fellow’s.” The sponsor left such decisions in his hands, making Gershwin the only performer in radio who bore the ultimate responsibility for each program.1

The new job, beginning in February and continuing until June, earned Gershwin a weekly salary of $2,000. As he wrote George Pallay, the sponsor was “the only kind of firm that I would work for—three guesses!—it’s a laxative concern! I knew I would make the grade.”2 Once Porgy and Bess took the stage Heyward wryly acknowledged the role of the “laxative concern” (a chewing gum called Feenamint) in providing Gershwin the economic means to work on its score. “And with the authentic medicine-man flair,” he explained, “the manufacturer distributed his information in an irresistible wrapper of Gershwin hits, with the composer at the piano. There is, I imagine, a worse fate than that which derives from use of a laxative gum. And, anyhow, we felt that the end justified the means, and that they also served who only sat and waited.”3

Once Music by Gershwin was launched, the composer’s artistic focus on the opera took hold in earnest. After reading the script for Act II, he wrote Heyward, on February 26:

I really think you are doing a magnificent job with the new libretto and I hope I can match it musically. I have begun composing music for the First Act and I am starting with the songs and spirituals first. I am hoping you will find some time to come up North and live at my apartment—if it is convenient for you—so we can work together on some of the spirituals for Scene 2, Act I. Perhaps when the weather grows a little warmer you will find time to do this. I cannot leave New York to go South as I am tied up with the radio until June 1st.4

But before receiving this letter, Heyward had fired off one of his own: “Swell show, George, but what the hell is the news about PORGY!!!!” His patience was wearing thin, and his plea for action reflected a longstanding anxiety that the physical distance dividing the collaborators would work against the regional spirit he had intended for the opera. Approaching the age of fifty and never robust in health, with a wife and a young child, Heyward had maintained something of the comfortable standard of living that his earlier success had made possible—most recently with the help of screenwriting jobs in Hollywood—but he worried that progress on his opera could founder for lack of a committed composer. Two quick visits to Charleston were insufficient to acquaint anyone with the local culture, he felt.

I am naturally disappointed that you have tied yourself up so long in New York. I believe that if you had gotten down for a reasonably long stay and gotten deep into the sources here you would have done a bigger job. I am not criticizing your decision. I know well what an enormously advantageous arrangement the radio is, and I know, also, how this tour of yours and the broadcasts are rolling up publicity that will be good business for us when the show opens, only I am disappointed. There is so much more here than you have yet gotten hold of.5

But the collaborators did finally meet in New York in mid-April, and with Ira joining them, they settled into an effective, congenial partnership.

Included in the opening pages of the script Heyward had sent Gershwin after the contract was signed were lyrics for two songs: the lullaby “Summertime,” sung by Clara, the community’s young mother figure; and “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing,” delivered by her husband Jake, captain of a fishing boat, and his crew. Gershwin made it his first order of business to compose songs to fit those verses. As he and Heyward had agreed, his task was to assign most of the script to one of three kinds of musical material: songs, with melodies that could stand alone; thematic material, which offered recognizable melody and was often linked to a character, a mood, an incident—or even a leitmotif; and recitative, to carry the story forward. It is no surprise that Gershwin started with songs. “I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs,” he wrote soon after Porgy and Bess opened in New York. Having composed many dozens of songs for stage characters in a wide variety of situations, he had no reason to doubt that he could do the same for a drama whose characters sang instead of speaking.

No strategic decision Gershwin made was more important than the one to compose all the opera’s music himself. Porgy the play had been fitted with authentic Negro spirituals, but Gershwin, rather than accepting the built-in appeal and cultural cover that folk material could bestow, insisted on the music being “all of one piece.” The folk expression he fashioned for Porgy and Bess was determined not by its sources but by the character and style that Gershwin decided to impart to it.6

In June and July, while the radio program was on vacation, Gershwin made an extended trip to South Carolina—to Folly Beach, near Charleston and close to Heyward’s Folly Island vacation home, where he moved into a cottage with his valet Paul Mueller and cousin Henry Botkin. There, “bare and black above the waist”—according to a New York newspaper—and with a two-inch beard, he and Heyward spent most afternoons together working on music and lyrics for Act I, as well as attending church services and revival meetings that enabled Gershwin to partake of “the philosophy behind the southern Negro’s life” expressed in their music. Sometimes music from Gershwin’s rented piano drew “a group of Negroes” to gather “in front of his cottage and beat the sand with their feet.” Gershwin explained to the reporter that all of the opera’s singing would fall to the “Negroes,” for whom “a song expresses an outlet for joy and a valve for sorrow.” The opera’s few white characters, “more civilized” but “more unemotional” too, would speak their lines. By the end of a five-week stay, the score for the first act was composed.7

SET IN the recent past in Catfish Row, an African American neighborhood near the Charleston waterfront, Porgy and Bess begins with a burst of energized sound from the orchestra—a high trill followed by eccentrically accented sixteenth notes, with prominent xylophone. The curtain rises on a darkened stage that proves to be the room of one Jasbo Brown who, seated at the piano, is playing a “low-down blues,” evoking a climate of restrained eroticism, a facet of life in Catfish Row. Dancers, belonging to a general ambience that grounds the story in the life of a community, sing vocables in response to a persistent melodic call from the piano.8 Their singing fades gradually as the lights dim on Jasbo—and grow brighter elsewhere to show Clara rocking her baby, to the string music leading into her lullaby.

The song “Summertime” reveals Catfish Row at its most peaceful. It was also a landmark for each of the opera’s creators: for Heyward, a published poet, it marked his debut as a song lyricist; for Gershwin, it offered a chance to fit music to words rather than the other way around. And the persuasive result of their collaboration reflects the affinity that drew them to one another’s work in the first place.

“Summertime” embodies Gershwin’s claim that the characters in Porgy and Bess sing “folk music,” for both words and music are cast in a convincingly folklike style. Heyward’s text consists of a pair of four-line stanzas, producing a short strophic song with words in a colloquial English that evokes regional African American speech. The imagery is of the bounty of nature, soon to be ripe for the harvesting, and the sanguine mood of a mother with blessings to count:

Summertime, an’ the livin’ is easy,

Fish are jumpin’, an’ the cotton is high.

Oh, yo’ daddy’s rich an’ yo’ ma is good-lookin’,

So hush, little baby, don’t yo’ cry.

For this lyrical structure Gershwin composed a simple four-phrase melody in B minor, the minor mode reinforcing its homespun character, with an orchestral accompaniment that enhances the richness of the harmony. As Clara begins her second stanza, Gershwin’s fondness for varied repetition shines through: she is joined by a female chorus singing two-part harmony (on “ooh”) and a soft countermelody in the violins. With a melody so straightforward and indelible, it is no surprise that “Summertime” returns more than once as the opera unfolds.

In roughly a dozen bars of instrumental music, Gershwin’s orchestra then moves from the domestic side of Catfish Row to the men of the neighborhood, who, as their work week comes to an end, are ready to unwind on a Saturday night with a craps game. The chattering staccato of string music prefigures the buzz of excitement that pervades the contest:

Oh, nobody knows when de Lord is goin’ to call,

It may be in the summer time an’ may be in the fall,

But you got to leave yo’ baby an’ yo’ home an’ all.

Following Heyward’s book, Gershwin sets these lines as a series of solo statements, sung in free rhythm by crapshooters Mingo and Sporting Life. Each solo line prompts a rhythmically flexible choral response, “Roll dem bones, roll!”9 The men’s solemn colloquy is followed by a two-bar melody from the orchestra that Gershwin introduces in order to signify a certain mood, marked “Moderato molto deciso” (relaxed and very decisive).10 By repeating this motive in parallel situations later, Gershwin turns it into a musical marker that all is well in the neighborhood: lives are proceeding as usual in a community whose customary pace accommodates a mix of varied activity.

Essential to the opera’s dramaturgy, too, are leitmotifs linked to particular characters. In the first scene, Porgy, a crippled beggar, and Crown, a formidable stevedore—two men who will vie for the love of Bess—are set up as rivals by the music. Each man makes a conspicuous entrance, and each is announced by a characteristic musical statement—a leitmotif—that accompanies him as the opera proceeds. Porgy appears first, arriving in his goat cart to a leitmotif reflecting stability and dignity, built around the notes of a major triad with a blue third. Here is a member of the community who is obviously held in respect.11

Shortly thereafter, Crown and Bess appear in the distance. From the moment the pair are spotted, Porgy has Bess in his sights. Jake, the fishing-boat captain, suggests that Porgy may be “sof’ on Crown’s Bess,” a charge Porgy brushes aside with a curt denial: “I ain’ nebber swap two words with Bess.” That Porgy sings those words to notes from his own musical mark of identity—the only time his leitmotif is vocalized—seems indication enough that Bess is on his mind.12 But his past experience has shown that no woman he could love could imagine the crippled Porgy as her lover. Gershwin sets the words “When Gawd make cripple, he mean him to be lonely” to thematic material worthy of a man who has overcome much to win respect on Catfish Row. Porgy perceives his physique within the plan of a benevolent, all-powerful God, and Gershwin’s markings—“with free expression” and “colla voce” (with the voice)—give the singer leeway to express the blend of pain, hardship, and acceptance that destiny has imposed on him. He imagines his life as a journey along a “lonesome road,” with steps marked in the orchestra by dissonant quarter notes.

If Porgy’s motive projects lyricism and calm, Crown’s is intrusive—conceived, it seems, to interrupt, making Crown the center of attention.13 As he demands a pint of whiskey from the bootlegger Sporting Life and joins the game,14 the bustling music in the string section features clipped, cross-accented, chattering sounds that pause from time to time, as the roller of the dice wishes himself luck. Eloquent in this way is a sequence in which Porgy, chanting with half-closed eyes, envisions the “bones” in his hands as “little stars” rolling “a sun an’ a moon” for “dis poor beggar.” He manages more than one successful roll, leading Crown, who grows increasingly belligerent, to accuse him of cheating. As Crown grabs Porgy’s arm, two familiar themes sound simultaneously in the orchestra: the burst of treble sixteenth notes on which the opening curtain rose, and a restatement of Porgy’s leitmotif. The first is a reminder of Catfish Row’s vitality, and the second proves that this crippled beggar is not intimidated by the formidable Crown. Their brief skirmish is followed by a one-bar anticipation of one of the opera’s signature songs: “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” the “banjo song” in which Porgy will lay out his philosophy of life in Act II.

As the craps game music continues, Crown’s motive recurs from time to time, woven into the musical texture yet always audible. Crown has watched a neighbor named Robbins drink deeply from his (Crown’s) whiskey bottle, and his mistrust grows. When Robbins hastily sweeps up winnings from a victorious roll, Crown seizes his wrist, and the two men start to fight. Now the percolating craps game music turns into fight music, with interjections of Crown’s leitmotif as a reminder of where the aggression has come from. The people of Catfish Row add their voices to the musical mix, imploring the adversaries to stop. With nine different vocal parts in the air, each with its own words and music, plus an orchestra playing its own contrapuntal lines, the score’s musical texture is as complex as anything Gershwin ever composed. No one intervenes, though, and Crown’s strength and weaponry prevail. When his foe falls lifeless to the floor, Serena Robbins screams and throws herself on her husband’s body. Jake shouts, “Jesus, he’s killed him!”

Several characters now face altered conditions. The first to act is Bess, who jolts Crown out of his drunken daze with an order to “wake up and hit it out” before the police arrive. Once Crown is gone, Sporting Life approaches Bess, declaring himself “the only frien’ you got left.” She begs the drug peddler for “a touch of happy dust” to calm her nerves. Then he offers to hide her from the authorities until the two of them can book passage on the next boat from Charleston to New York, where, he assures her, “you an’ me will make a swell team.” Bess rejects the prospect of selling sexual favors to bolster his success in the drug trade, and Sporting Life beats a rapid retreat.

Bess is now alone on a darkened stage with Serena, who hovers over her husband’s body, and Maria, proprietor of the neighborhood cook shop, who now closes up for the evening. With nowhere to spend the night, Bess runs from door to door and finds them all closed to her, as another orchestral return of the fight music reflects her growing anxiety. Reduced finally to begging Maria for a night’s shelter, she is refused on the grounds that she’s caused trouble enough already. Just one possibility remains unexplored, Maria tells her. But it’s Porgy’s room, and he’s not a man inclined to welcome the likes of her. The sound of a police whistle forces Bess toward Porgy’s place. But now the orchestra sends a sweeping lyrical message far removed from the rebuff that Maria has predicted: the poignant music behind Porgy’s testimony that the life of a cripple has made it impossible for him to meet a woman to love. It is no surprise, then, when Porgy’s door swings open to Bess from within.

THE CURTAIN for scene 2 rises on Serena’s room, which is filled with mourners. Robbins’s murder will be noticed by the white authorities, bringing the racially separate cultures of Charleston together onstage. The authorities will need to arrest a suspect, and they will insist that the body be dealt with at once. Thus, the murder carries economic consequences as well as legal and emotional ones. Robbins has left his widow impoverished, and a saucer has been placed on his body, inviting contributions for the cost of his burial.

Serena is scene 2’s central figure. Yet much of the action is carried out by the other residents of Catfish Row, who grieve at their compatriot’s death, donate to his burial fund, pray for his soul, stand with his widow, and rejoice, as the scene ends, in the hope of meeting their comrade again in the Promised Land. Because the neighbors respond collectively to each of these needs, choral music is fundamental to the action. But rather than emphasizing the melody and poetry of rounded compositions, as imported spiritual songs could have done, Gershwin’s choral music here tends toward the episodic, changing character to fit each turn of events. “Where is Brother Robbins?” asks an unnamed soprano from the higher reaches of her voice. The company replies that he’s “gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone,” to a descending melody over a rising bass. Other soloists step forward with memories of Robbins, and each draws a similar response from the chorus, as the rendering of “gone” in seven quarter notes becomes a (varied) melodic refrain in itself.

Porgy and Bess, in their first appearance as a couple, now make their way up the stairs to Serena’s room. The sight of Bess, shepherding the crippled Porgy as he slowly climbs, sparks the widow’s ire, but she accepts Bess’s gift of Porgy’s money. The mourners urge each other to “fill up de saucer till it overflow,” while Porgy launches a prayer to Jesus on Robbins’s behalf. But the abrupt arrival of a detective and two policemen halts the scene’s exuberant musical flow in its tracks. From the widow the authorities discover that, for lack of insurance, Robbins must be “saucer-buried.” From Peter, an elderly honey vendor, they learn that Crown is the killer. From Porgy they can pry loose no information, but after threatening him with jail, they decide instead to jail Peter, the honey man, until Crown turns up. In these exchanges, the white men of the law speak their words into silence, while the black individuals sing theirs, accompanied by an orchestra whose support includes musical gestures related to the characters. Once the police have left with an unhappy Peter in tow, Porgy reflects on the strangeness of a legal system that would leave the husband and father Robbins dead, a killer at large, and the harmless, innocent Peter in captivity. His musings prompt a choral return of “gone, gone, gone,” starting softly but swelling, as a fuller orchestra joins the singers in a passionate transition to Serena’s lamentation: “My Man’s Gone Now.”

Porgy and Bess contains no more desolate statement than this aria, grieving a human loss with perfect economy, in four syllables, four words, and a four-note melodic phrase. Gone is the “comp’ny” of a husband and partner whose steps on the stairs she waits to hear at the end of his work day. Gershwin composed this evocation of a suffering heart around an aaba melody, in a familiar thirty-two-bar framework, each a section starting its lament over lurching, nonlegato drive in the orchestra. After both of the first two a sections, Serena sings a wordless, archlike wail, extending her statements by responding to them herself; and she closes with a long rising glissando that seems the very embodiment of her pain. If Serena is emotionally spent as her aria ends, it is at least partly because Gershwin has built into this tour de force of vocalized tragedy a pause for a performer who has given her all to stop and take a bow.15 He surely knew that this music would create a show-stopping moment.

Now Serena is approached by an undertaker who agrees to see her through so that her husband’s corpse can be properly buried, and the chordal “gone, gone, gone” is heard one last time. But as the mood of Catfish Row hangs in the balance, an assertive female mourner—none other than Bess—seizes the moment, starting a new song in a spirit of hope that had faded when donations in the funeral saucer fell short. Her words portray Robbins’s soul as already safe in the Promised Land, and reunion with him only a train ride away. “Oh the train is at the station, an’ you better get on board, ’cause it’s leavin’ today,” Bess declaims, starting slowly but then picking up speed. Her invitation prompts others to join in, as the music turns the death of Robbins into a shared episode in the life of Catfish Row.

“Leavin’ for the Promise’ Lan’ ” is the opera’s closest number yet to a spiritual with roots in African American oral tradition, but Gershwin’s technical mastery is also on display. The tempo traces the metaphorical journey described in the text, as the train leaves the station, then gains speed gradually and moves forward to a strict clickety-clacking pattern. Once running speed is reached, the riders revel in the momentum, singing out encouragement to “keep that drivin’ wheel a-rollin’, / rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, / rollin’, rollin, let it roll, / Until we meet our brudder in the Promise’ Lan’!” Two distinctive musical emphases—contrapuntal display and train-travel effects—have given rise to an energy that allows Gershwin to end the first act on a note of triumph. And it is Bess, at first a social outcast, who has led the people of Catfish Row from shock and grief into the realm of celebration and hope, through an affirmation of their faith and the power of the music pouring from their hearts.