31

PORGY AND BESS,

ACT II

THE SECOND ACT CURTAIN rises on the denizens of Catfish Row going about their morning business as the orchestra takes up the “normal activity” leitmotif from Act I. Jake and his fishing crew, preparing to head for the blackfish banks, mend their nets while singing about the journey that awaits them. Their song takes a verse-and-refrain form, with the captain singing major-mode verses (“It take a long pull to get there, HUH!”) and the crew joining him in the minor-mode refrains (“But I’ll anchor in de Promise’ Lan’ ”). As the song ends, a woman calls down from her second-floor window to remind the fishermen that it’s a special day, with a parade at ten and a picnic to follow.

Porgy, keeping tabs on the neighbors’ doings from his window, takes this moment to sing a song about himself—an occasion missing from Heyward’s original libretto, but one that materialized when Ira, George, and Heyward met in George’s apartment on East 72nd Street (where he had moved from his Riverside penthouse in the spring of 1933), during one of the librettist’s visits to New York, which seem to have begun in April 1934.1 According to Ira, the song idea came from George, who wanted to give Porgy a chance to sing something “lighter and gayer” than what he had been assigned in Act I. A little improvising at the piano led to

a few preliminary chords and in less than a minute a well-rounded, cheerful melody. “Something like that,” he said. Both DuBose and I had the same reaction: “That’s it! Don’t look any further.” “You really think so?” and, luckily, he recaptured it and played it again. A title popped into my mind. (This was one out of only three or four times in my career that a possible title hit me on first hearing a tune. Usually I sweat for days.) “ ‘I got plenty o’ nuthin’,’ ” I said tentatively.

It took only a moment for the “balance line” to occur to him: “An’ nuthin’s plenty for me.”2

Ira’s readiness to draft a lyric for George’s melody followed naturally from the brothers’ usual way of working. This time, though, it drew an unexpected response from Heyward. In Ira’s account, he said:

“Ira, would you mind if I tried my hand at it? So far everything I’ve done has been set by George and I’ve never written words to music. If it’s all right with you I’d love to take the tune along with me to Charleston.” I think we discussed generally the mood and even arrived at a couple of lines. Two weeks later DuBose sent me a version that had many usable lines; many, however, looked good on paper but were awkward when sung. . . . So on this song I did have to do a bit of “polishing.” All in all, I’d consider this a 50–50 collaborative effort.3

Porgy’s joyful “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” hinting at Act I’s craps game and marked “Moderato con gioja (Banjo Song)” in the score, reveals how a month with Bess has improved his disposition. Neighbors, singing in chordal harmony, marvel at how Porgy has grown friendlier and less likely to find their children a nuisance. The song is about familiar things, whether they exist in nature (the sun, the stars, the ocean) or flow from his inner consciousness (his God, his woman, his song). The musical fundamentals seem straightforward, yet Gershwin stretches the phrase structure unpredictably, offering a harmonic plan that visits remote tonal regions, bringing a glow of discovery to the testament of a reflective, solitary man.

The God-fearing community of Catfish Row includes two characters—the stevedore Crown and the bootlegger Sporting Life—who may be judged villains, for different reasons. Crown’s outsized strength and appetites have fostered impulsiveness and a lack of restraint; his fellow workers on the Charleston docks give him a wide berth. In contrast, Sporting Life, a peddler of alcohol who deals drugs on the side, is a calculating strategist; he operates, socially and professionally, on the margins. As the opera begins, both men are focused on Bess: Crown because she has been his woman for years and he wants things to stay that way, and Sporting Life because, aspiring to a grander style of life, he sees Bess as the key to his pimping aspirations. From the opera’s first scene through its penultimate one, he seeks to corrupt Bess, whose weakness for “happy dust” makes her vulnerable.

In the wake of “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” Sporting Life wanders into Maria’s establishment, sits down at a table, and pours white powder into the palm of his hand. When Maria grabs his hand and blows the powder away, an infuriated Sporting Life responds with “What you t’ink you doin’? Dat stuff cos’ money.” But Maria warns him, “I ain’ say nuttin’, no matter how drunk you get dese boys ’roun here on rotgut whiskey, but nobody ain’ goin’ peddle happy dust ’roun’ my shop.” Meanwhile, Frazier, a lawyer who works the Catfish Row district of Charleston, shows up at Porgy’s door looking for business. Porgy learns that the idea of a “divorce” from Crown appeals to Bess, and he stands ready to foot the bill. But when a bystander proclaims that Bess “ain’ never marry!” the lawyer explains that that complication will demand a higher fee: “it take expert, to divorce woman what ain’t marry.” By the time the transaction is over, Porgy has bought an official-looking document, Bess has a divorce in writing, and the people of Catfish Row have enjoyed bantering with Frazier in a call-and-response interchange.

Now a white Charlestonian, Mr. Archdale, appears on the scene, wanting to restore honey man Peter’s freedom by paying his bail money. But as he explains his mission to Porgy, a buzzard flies low across the stage, terrifying neighbors who have gathered to hear the white man’s news. Porgy identifies the carrion-eating bird as a herald of trouble: “Once de buzzard fold his wing an’ light over yo’ house,” he tells the visitor, “all yo’ happiness done dead.” Taking charge of the situation, Porgy, in an extended aria with support from the chorus, commands the menacing creature not to land on his house (“Buzzard, keep on flyin’ over”), and the bird flies off. The presence of two such dissimilar arias in the same scene—the exuberant banjo song and the somber, acerbic buzzard song—testifies to the human scope of the character of Porgy.4

As the people scatter to their rooms to prepare for the day’s parade and picnic, Sporting Life sidles up to Bess, to a seven-note triplet statement heard earlier in Maria’s shop, and offers her a sample of the drug he is sure she craves. But “I’s through with that stuff,” she protests as he grasps for her hand. At this moment, Porgy reaches out of his hiding place nearby to grab Sporting Life by the wrist, and the two men scuffle briefly. Managing to pull loose, the peddler marvels, “Gawd, what a grip for a piece of a man!” He leaves Bess with a chilling thought before sauntering off in the direction of the picnic: “Yo’ men frien’s come an’ they go, but remember ole Sportin’ Life an’ de happy dus’ here all along.”

This episode touches on an element of the opera’s story that, while significant, is hardly reckoned with: Porgy’s difficulty in walking. We know from Act I that Porgy rides in a goat cart and that stairs are an obstacle for him. Moreover, the current scene gives no hint that he has considered attending the picnic, his disability apparently making such a journey impossible. Yet Porgy’s skirmish with Sporting Life reveals physical strength to balance the weakness of his impaired physique. Todd Duncan, who originated the role, recalled the physical demands it imposed. His Porgy, relying on hands and arms to pull the rest of him around, would surely have convinced audience members that a man unable to walk easily could have developed compensating strengths in his arms and hands, enough to make him a physical force to be reckoned with.5

Dressed to the nines and with baskets full of food, the people of Catfish Row will soon make their way to the ferryboat that will take them to Kittiwah Island for a picnic sponsored by a church-based lodge. But Porgy and Bess are not inclined to join the celebration. He has just learned that, with Bess in his life, the sight of a buzzard hovering over his room no longer terrifies him. And she, having given full voice to her loathing for Sporting Life’s plot for her future, and now “divorced” from Crown, is free to dwell on the emotional world that she and her liberator have fashioned. The orchestral return of Porgy’s “night time, day time” melody from the opera’s opening scene, on a stage just emptied of everybody else, sets up a duet in which, for the first time, these lovers are able to translate their feelings for each other into an extended song.

“Bess, you is my woman now, you is, you is!” Porgy sings, in the heart of his baritone range, blending calm with energy through downward octave leaps to balance the rising ones. The lovers’ song moves through time with the ebb and flow of an aria—a natural pace for a sweeping legato melody laced with blue notes, and sung with openhearted sincerity. The melody of Bess’s response in kind repeats Porgy’s opening section, and her music addresses his isolation, too. If his physical handicap keeps him from the picnic, then she’ll stay there with him.6 And Bess follows that pronouncement with a full-voiced “Porgy, I’s yo’ woman now, / I’s yours forever.” And then, in the gentlest of voices, she affirms her constancy in two bars of chanted eighth notes (“Mornin’ time an’ evenin’ time . . .”), which Porgy echoes note for note. Their ultimate promise to each other seals the pledge in octaves: “From dis minute I’m tellin’ you, / I keep dis vow.”

At this point the lodge band invades the scene, and the people of Catfish Row pour onto the stage on their way to the picnic. An exuberant number, “Oh, I Can’t Sit Down!,” dwells on the high spirits of a picnic day, when decorum yields to self-expression, filled with singing, dancing, and more. Maria approaches with a huge basket and, learning to her surprise that Bess will stay behind with Porgy, insists that she join the crowd headed to the ferry and the picnic. When Porgy supports that plan, Bess concurs and bids him a tender farewell. Secure in his woman’s word, he reprises the final portion of his song of satisfaction, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” as she departs.

Act II, scene 2 opens on Kittiwah Island with an explosion of African-style drumming, joined soon by other instrumental sounds and cries of revelry. Then, in a spirit of shameless sacrilege, Sporting Life assumes the pose of a preacher exhorting his “congregation” with a tuneful sermon about the improbability of familiar Bible stories. “It Ain’t Necessarily So” proves to be the opera’s only song based on a leitmotif: a seven-note, blues-tinged triplet gesture introduced in Act II, scene 1. That motive is first heard when Sporting Life, sitting in Maria’s eatery, prepares a dose of happy dust that the irate proprietor swats away. And it returns a bit later to mark his failed offer of the drug to Bess—observed by Porgy, whose physical intervention scares the peddler off. Both incidents end with rebukes, outing the peddler as a dealer of fakery. And now the motive becomes the beginning of a song centered on Sporting Life’s preoccupation with truth and falsehood.7

Supported by a pervasive cross rhythm between the triplet vocal melody and the duple “boom-chuck” of the accompaniment, Sporting Life’s song supports the fake preacher’s contrarian stance in both sound and meaning. Indeed, by proclaiming Bible stories seen through a skeptic’s eye, he transforms the picnickers into a complicit congregation, joining him in a spirited call-and-response rejection of Old Testament lore. There was the youthful “Li’l David,” he begins, armed only with a slingshot yet miraculously felling the gigantic Goliath, who lay “down and dieth.” Doubtful too, the preacher continues, is the tale of Jonah, who “lived in de whale”—making his home in “dat fish’s abdómen.” And finally there was Methuselah, said to have survived to the age of 900, although “who calls dat livin’ when no gal’ll give in / To no man what’s nine hundred years?” “It Ain’t Necessarily So” stands out in the opera too as a solo turn, or “specialty,” in which a star performer puts signature skills on display. Indeed, Sporting Life’s time in the spotlight leads into dancing moves, as a musical comedy number will do, but it’s interrupted by an irate Serena Robbins, who has her own sermon to deliver.8

As Serena’s denunciation of Sporting Life’s blasphemy pours forth, the ferry’s warning whistle sounds, marking the end of the revelry. But when Bess starts toward the ferry, a whistle from the bushes distracts her. She sees that the signal has come from none other than Crown, whose lurching leitmotif now resounds in the orchestra’s lower reaches. Having spent the last month hiding on the island, he has waited out the picnic for a chance to talk to Bess. Soon, he informs her, he plans to leave the island and head for Catfish Row to spirit her away on a riverboat bound for Savannah, where they can start a new life together. In the exchange that follows, one of the opera’s most dramatic and eventful, the formidable Crown does his best to restart their relationship. But Bess’s weeks with Porgy have made her a changed woman. Treating Bess with kindness and love, Porgy has won her heart. Indeed, given that she—that very morning—has embraced in song the role of Porgy’s woman, Bess must now explain her change of heart to a formidable, increasingly resentful ex-lover.

Over the orchestra’s statement of Porgy’s motive, Bess declares her discovery of a new way of life. But when she reaffirms her determination to leave the island without him, Crown responds with disbelief: “You tellin’ me dat you’d rather have dat cripple dan Crown?” Bess’s plea to let her return only hardens Crown’s resolve. As the orchestra begins a driving accompaniment for a melody to be sung “pleadingly with expression and rhythm,” she is reduced to begging. “What you want wid Bess?” are the words Heyward gives her for this confrontation, and for them Gershwin invented a syncopated, disjunct, asymmetrical melody veering between major and minor: a tonal thrust fashioned, it seems, on the brink of panic. Bess’s driving expression of despair is a song that features neither poetic meter nor a rhyme scheme, and Crown rejects her appeals through vocal counterpoint to her plea. As the ferry prepares to leave the island, Bess tries to escape, but Crown holds her in a firm embrace, and she lacks the strength to resist either his physical dominance or the erotic rush his touch has always awakened “deep inside” her. As the scene on the island draws to a close, it seems questionable that Porgy and Bess can survive as a couple in the wake of this encounter.

When scene 3 opens on predawn Catfish Row a week later, Jake and his crew, preparing to set out for the blackfish banks, sing a stanza of the work song “It Take a Long Pull to Get There.” The sound of a troubled female voice issues from Porgy’s room: “Take yo’ hands off me, I say”—the voice of Bess, to which Serena Robbins may be heard responding that “she still out of her head.” Peter the honey man, just released from jail, learns from Maria that Bess got lost on the island after the picnic and missed the ferry, and it took two days for her to find a way back to Catfish Row. Porgy adds that she has been in a delirium since her return. With Porgy’s encouragement, Serena sinks to her knees and, in a long, emotive stretch of recitative addressed to “Doctor Jesus,” pleads that He “cas’ de devil” out of Bess’s “afflicted” soul.

Through the hours after Serena’s prayer over Bess, she and Porgy wait, hoping that the widow’s plea has broken the spell. As they linger, street hawkers of local delicacies pass by, peddling their wares: a woman with a distinctive “strawberry” call, a crabmonger, and Peter, who’s got “honey from the comb” to sell.

Later that afternoon, after the church clock strikes the time, Bess is heard offstage singing, “Porgy, Porgy, dat you there ain’ it?” He responds to the sound of her awakening with a quiet “Thank Gawd.” Bess makes her way onto the stage as the orchestra picks up in the background the theme of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” To a lightly textured melody, Porgy helps to fill the gaps in her memory of recent events. When he describes Bess’s state upon her return from the island—she was unable to even recognize him—the orchestra dwells on the melody for the words “you mus’ laugh an’ sing an’ dance for two instead of one” from their love duet, a theme that taps into Bess’s shame at having betrayed Porgy. But he brushes that concern aside, telling her that “I know you been with Crown,” citing his cripple’s intuition. “He’s comin’ for me when de cotton come to town,” she admits, adding that she has agreed to join him when he arrives. When Porgy replies, “If you wants to go to Crown, dat’s for you to say,” Bess begins the opera’s second love duet: “I Loves You, Porgy.” She wants to stay with him, she explains, but she cannot resist the erotic power of Crown’s embraces.

The F-major melody to which Bess sings her confession is unlike any that Gershwin had yet invented. Based on a five-note motive built from melodic thirds and shaped into archlike gestures, it suggests a character who, facing a crisis, still manages to choose her words and music with restraint and precision. Porgy’s response intones a question in recitative mode: “If dere warn’t no Crown, Bess, if dere was only jus’ you an’ Porgy, what den?” Returning to the first section’s music with “I loves you, Porgy,” she then begs him to protect her:

If you kin keep me,

I wants to stay here

Wid you forever,

An’ I’ll be glad.

Porgy resolves that, when Crown comes to carry her away, “that’s my business.” The duet closes in triumph with a driving repeat of Bess’s “I loves you, Porgy.” By the time it ends, not only have the lovers’ commitments been reaffirmed, but Porgy, in effect, has promised Bess a future without Crown.

After Bess and Porgy leave the stage, Clara hovers at the waterfront waiting for Jake and his crew to return. She senses a storm waiting, “holdin’ its breath,” and “list’nin’ for dat hurricane bell.” In Act I, scene 2, the people had gathered in Serena Robbins’s room to mourn the outcome of a violent deed. And now, in the second act’s fourth scene, they have again gathered there, this time to cope with terror. A standard beginning for a scene like this one could be a songful plea to the Almighty, but Gershwin instead composed a choral prayer that, with barely a hint of tuneful melody, preserves some individuality among the supplicants. As a four-part chorus hums pairs of open fourths, six soloists simultaneously sing their own unmeasured prayer, directed (from top to bottom) to “O Heavenly Father,” “Oh, Doctor Jesus,” “Professor Jesus,” “Oh, Lawd above,” “Oh, Captain Jesus,” and “Oh, Father.” To catch the details would require superhuman aural acuity, for no one voice can be singled out, except perhaps at the very beginning. Rather, the words and voices of the soloists disappear immediately into the babble until just before the end of this unique prayer, when everyone joins in an emphatic, harmonized outcry: “Lawd, hab mercy.”

Where did this choral eruption come from? DuBose Heyward recalled a summer night in 1934, when he introduced Gershwin to a local mode of collective praying that he seems to have drawn upon for this scene. As the two of them approached

a dilapidated cabin that had been taken as a meeting house by a group of Negro Holy Rollers, George caught my arm and held me. The sound that had arrested him was one to which, through long familiarity, I attached no special importance. But now, listening to it with him, and noticing his excitement, I began to catch its extraordinary quality. It consisted of perhaps a dozen voices raised in loud rhythmic prayer. The odd thing about it was that while each had started at a different time, upon a different theme, they formed a clearly defined rhythmic pattern, and that this, with the actual words lost, and the inevitable pounding of the rhythm, produced an effect almost terrifying in its primitive intensity.9

The scene-opening prayer is followed by a unifying spiritual, with Heyward’s words of apocalyptic upheaval:

Oh, de Lawd shake de Heavens an’ de Lawd rock de groun’,

An’ where you goin’ stand, my brudder an my sister,

When de sky come a-tumblin’ down—

Gershwin created a two-part hymn tune (ab) that becomes a refrain of sorts for a scene steeped in drama, religious fervor, and superstition, all attributes he deemed fundamental to African American life. “Oh, de Lawd Shake de Heavens,” sung “religiously” (the score instructs) and with restraint, has a tuneful continuity that makes it an effective background for individual reactions to the storm raging outdoors. Many believe that Judgment Day has arrived. Porgy tries to console Clara, whose husband ventured out of the harbor with his crew more than a day earlier. Serena’s plea for collective prayer draws comment from Sporting Life, who doubts that Judgment Day can truly be at hand. An agitated Clara, baby in arms, peeks through a crack in the shutter, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jake’s boat. During a brief lull, she soothes her child with a second stanza of “Summertime.” With Crown presumably still on the island as giant waves pound its shore, Bess tells her man, “I guess you got me for keeps, Porgy.”

A burst of wind, lightning, and thunder prompts a new spiritual from the chorus: “Oh, Dere’s Somebody Knockin’ at de Do’,” the opera’s only song that had also been sung (with the same general outline) in Porgy the play.10 As the chorus repeats the “Knockin’ ” song, the door is forced open from outside. The result is a shock, registered in the orchestra by the sound of the storm rushing in and the return of a familiar leitmotif. For it is Crown who bursts in, radiating physical strength, the courage of a survivor, and scorn for those who have tried to keep him outside. The sight of Crown is enough to bring about a pause in the continuous singing of hymns. After he approaches Bess to ridicule her choice of a partner, she and Porgy reaffirm their love as the orchestra quotes from “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” Serena warns Crown that his actions risk provoking the wrath of the Almighty, and he responds with a forthright vocal rejoinder, more a proclamation than a song.

Crown’s “A Red-Headed Woman,” which Gershwin sets in an “Allegretto (tempo di Jazz)” (fast [jazz tempo]), shows a bullying character at his most defiant. As the people of Catfish Row beg the Almighty for protection and mercy, Crown looks to the power of sex, his words paying homage to a proverbial seductress who can drive men wild. The energetic, blues-based song, a blend of power and sacrilege, is so provocative that when he repeats the second stanza, the neighbors add a new choral layer, beseeching God either to ignore Crown’s blasphemies or to strike him dead. A scream rings out when, through the shuttered window, Clara spots Jake’s boat upside-down in the river. Handing off her baby to Bess, she rushes out the door. As the orchestra plays agitated music in the background, Bess calls for a man in the house brave enough to join Clara’s search for Jake. Mocking Porgy for failing to heed her call, Crown plunges into the maelstrom. When the door flies open at his exit, the wind blows hard enough to extinguish the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. Act II ends with the sound of the chorus repeating the entire “Doctor Jesus” prayer, now over an orchestral background that includes a continuous wash of storm sounds.