IF THERE WAS ANY DOUBT about the New York public’s anticipation of Porgy and Bess, it was addressed by an article that appeared in the Times on October 1, 1935, headlined “Gershwin’s Opera Makes Boston Hit”:
Both musically and theatrically, George Gershwin’s and the Theatre Guild’s new folk opera, “Porgy and Bess,” which had its first performance at the Colonial here this evening, was an event. An audience which assembled, uncertain whether they should find a heavy operatic work or something more closely resembling musical comedy, discovered a form of entertainment which stands midway between the two. The immediate response was one of enthusiasm that grew rather than diminished as the evening progressed.
“An extremely approving audience” had made its way to the Colonial Theatre for the premiere, observed an anonymous reviewer for the Boston Globe, and “only a few minutes were required to bring waves of spontaneous handclapping, and a phenomenon rare in the theatre: repeated cries of ‘Bravo!’ ”1 In the Christian Science Monitor, L. A. Sloper credited Mamoulian with “welding music, drama, art and dance movement as to enhance the effect of each and to give a single harmonious effect to the whole. . . . This production may point the way to a correlation of the arts, dreamed of by Wagner but never realized by him or by any of his successors. The theater has refused to come to the opera. Perhaps the opera must come to the theater.”2
Perhaps no Boston reviewer made a more arresting claim for the opera’s impact as a theatrical work, though, than Elliot Norton, drama critic of the Post. Porgy and Bess struck him as
an effort to transfuse vital, black blood into the somewhat hardened arteries of conventional opera, with the idea that the public at large might like to see that there is life in the lovely old lady. It is an impressive demonstration. There is life there, all right. On the stage of the Colonial the lady sat up, opened her eyes, smiled and capered gaily. . . . The way in which [actors] have been instructed, directed, molded into a vast, responsive unit is little short of thrilling.3
Warren Storey Smith, the Post’s music critic, took what he judged to be Gershwin’s varying musical styles as a sign of artistic immaturity. On the other hand, he had nothing but praise for the performance, which in fact he ascribed more to the singers’ ethnicity than to their artistry.4
The Porgy and Bess that opened in New York on October 10, shortened somewhat from the Boston version, made the Alvin Theatre the focus of a true sense of occasion. New York’s critical brain trust, music and drama critics alike, turned out en masse. Pieces were written too for the next Sunday’s papers and, in the days to come, for weekly journals like Time and Newsweek, plus extended articles for such monthly publications as Stage and Theatre Arts. Beyond this chorus of critical judgments, both Heyward and Gershwin wrote about their opera while it was brand-new. Heyward’s statement appeared as a lengthy, engaging tale in Stage magazine, tracing how the endeavor had unfolded, and registering admiration for his collaborator’s gift for transposing the musical practices of a southern American culture to the operatic stage.5 As noted, George Gershwin’s piece for the New York Times was the composer’s statement of the elements and properties of Porgy and Bess.6
Brooks Atkinson, drama critic for the Times, reported that even as he wrote his own review, the paper’s music critic, Olin Downes, was “beetling his brow in the adjoining cubicle,” the sound of “his typewriter clatter” carrying “an authoritative ring.”7 “Let it be said at once,” announced Atkinson, “that Mr. Gershwin has contributed something glorious to the spirit of the Heywards’ community legend,” for music has brought a “glow of personal feeling” to a play short on that quality. Downes judged the operatic Gershwin as good as ever at inventing melodies, crediting him with “an instinctive appreciation of the melodic glides and nuances of Negro song, and an equally personal tendency toward rich and exotic harmony.” Indeed, Downes was too close a listener and too conscientious a thinker to share Warren Storey Smith’s view that an opera composer who “mixes styles” has committed an artistic misdeed. Rather,
Here and there flashes of real contrapuntal ingenuity combine themes in a manner apposite to the grouping and action of the characters on the stage. In ensemble pieces rhythmical and contrapuntal devices work well. Harmonic admixtures of Stravinsky and Puccini are obvious but not particularly disconcerting. . . . [Gershwin] makes effective use of “spirituals,” not only by harmony sometimes “modal” but by the dramatic combination of the massed voices and the wild exhortations of individual singers. . . . The prayer of Serena for Bess is eloquent, original and the most poetical passage in the whole work.8
W. J. Henderson, music critic of the Sun, perceived that Porgy and Bess broke new ground that deserved recognition as belonging to a true “folk opera”:
Mr. Gershwin is at his best when he is writing songs with a touch of jazz in them, with ragtime rhythms, harmonies that sting, choruses which echo the “shout,” the camp meeting hymn and the spiritual. The high level of the jazz rhythm is reached with Porgy’s song in the first scene of the second act, “I got plenty o’ nuttin.” This was without question the “song hit” of the night.9
And Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune was also impressed and moved. A decade earlier, he had resisted the spell that the Rhapsody in Blue cast over many of his colleagues, but now he had no doubt of Porgy and Bess’s impact on theatergoers:
When last night’s audience, at the close of Act II, broke into an outburst of applause elicited by the frenzy of the terrified gathering of Negroes shrinking from the storm, praying, shouting, swaying, moaning, beseeching “Captain Jesus,” their voices rising on the crest of an infuriated orchestra above the shriek and tumult of the hurricane, it was evident that Mr. Gershwin, in the finest pages of his score, had given us something suspiciously like an authentic folk-opera in an unmistakably American vein.10
Gilman perceived that up to now Gershwin had “written nothing even remotely approaching the choral passages in this work, the music of anguish and supplication and despair and faith. Here there is music of a dramatic passion and intensity and power which set the climactic passages of the opera in a new organic continuity with the emotional patterns of the play.” He took less kindly, however, to such “sure-fire rubbish” as the love duets “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “I Loves You, Porgy.”
The anonymous review that appeared in Time magazine on October 21 made a confident claim for the opera’s accessibility: “Negroes were assembled who knew no stuffy traditions, had true feeling for rhythm. Mamoulian’s hand was particularly evident in the big mass groupings, in the way he kept the action in pace with the music. The Negroes in prayer suggested an entire down-trodden race. . . . Porgy and Bess is not ‘grand,’ is not intended for the musical few. . . . Laymen left [the] folk opera humming with satisfaction.”11 A piece in the weekly Musical America by its editor, A. Walter Kramer, closed with an expression of gratitude for Gershwin from “all who have been awaiting just such an effort by an American composer”:
With Porgy and Bess he has expressed himself in the terms of a story taken from the life of his own times, in a section of his country, and has pointed the way for other composers to follow. American opera must not be legendary, it must not be anything but illustrative of American life. Porgy and Bess meets that requirement in its libretto. George Gershwin has fulfilled it superbly in his music.12
As critics in Boston and New York weighed in, friends and acquaintances sent congratulations to the composer by telegraph and mail. One telegram that Gershwin loved especially, according to his brother, arrived from a pair of cast members on the day of the Boston opening: “MAY THE CURTAIN FALL WITH THE BANG OF SUCCESS FOR YOU AS THE SUN RISES IN THE SUNSHINE OF YOUR SMILE BUCK AND BUBBLES.”13 A letter from Richard Rodgers, not known for emotional displays, must have pleased and gratified his fellow composer for the stage. Before the opera went into production, Gershwin had previewed some of its numbers at the piano for his colleague, and Rodgers lost no time in conveying his response to the whole work the day after it opened:
If you ever got a sincere letter in your life, this is it, and it’s a pretty difficult one to write. There’s no sense in my telling you how beautiful your score is; you know that. But I can tell you that I sat there transfixed for three hours. I’ve loved the tunes ever since you played them for us here one night but I never thought I’d sit in a theatre and feel my throat being stopped up time after time. Let them never say that Mr. Gershwin can’t be tender; you kicked hell out of me, for one. I won’t dribble on. I just want you to know that one of us is very happy this morning over your success last night. Yours sincerely, Dick14
Further into its run the new opera was assessed in the November–December issue of Modern Music, a forum for contemporary American composers, by Virgil Thomson, whose Four Saints in Three Acts, with a black cast, had created a stir during the preceding year.15 While Thomson found the “astonishingly fine” melodic invention in Porgy and Bess “abundant and indefatigable,” he found the results weakened by “being tied up with” harmonies from Tin Pan Alley which, to his way of thinking, limited Gershwin’s expressive resources. And he missed a crucial distinction in the opera’s treatment of race when he wrote that whenever Gershwin “has to get on with the play he uses spoken dialogue,” and that “it would have been better if he had stuck to that all the time.” He seems unaware too that the white characters in the opera never sing, while the black characters both sing and speak.16 Nevertheless, to this composer-critic “the exciting thing is that after all those years the writing of music is still not a routine thing” to Gershwin. Fancying Porgy and Bess as “a real live baby, all warm and dripping and friendly,” Thomson likened Gershwin’s composition to its hero, “who didn’t have a leg to stand on but who had some radiance in his face and a good deal of love in his heart.”
Writing for Stage magazine, music critic Marcia Davenport began with a warm endorsement of Porgy and Bess’s qualities as “an honest-to-God opera,” which she defined as a “drama in musical form, realizing itself in an indissoluble integration of music, emotion, and thought.” For her, the essential element was Gershwin’s melodic flow, infused with “direct, natural, and spontaneous beauty,” and fueling his music’s “pulsating emotion,” realized through “the equipment of a concientious and commanding composer.” By her lights the wake scene in Act I was one “to glorify any opera”:
Quite aside from the tension built up by inspired grouping, lighting, acting, and direction, the music pours out a wail of mourning, a torrent of despair. It mounts vitally and tensely, its rhythms Negroid, its soaring, minor cadences yearningly Hebraic, to the point where Serena begins to sing “My Man’s Gone Now.” And that is the point where this opera can stand comparison with anything written in many, many years. Forbiddingly difficult, Miss Ruby Elzy sings this dirge in a high-piercing soprano voice that embodies every shade of difference between the black throat and white. The burden is a wail, a minor arpeggio for which the composer’s direction is glissando—something that demands a violin rather than a voice. The singer has it. She distills heartbreak from this extraordinary piece of music.17
In the December issue of Stage, Isaac Goldberg, who had contemplated George Gershwin’s accomplishments in print more analytically and historically than anyone else, ventured that an artistic amalgam so culturally varied could not have been created elsewhere in the world:
A Russian and [an] Armenian had, respectively, prepared the scenery and the production; two Nordics, man and wife, had provided the novel and the play upon which the libretto was based; two Jews, brothers, had joined talents for lyrics and music, the labor of George being, naturally, the most considerable single expenditure of energy that had been brought to bear upon the venture. A cast of Negro singers and actors had interpreted this collaborative inspiration. It was an American symbol.18
The last review considered here appeared in the January 1936 issue of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, a monthly academic publication sponsored by the New York–based National Urban League.19 The author, Francis Hall Johnson, was a composer, violinist, arranger, and the founder and conductor of a choir known for its interpretation of African American folk song. He was also known for his experience in bringing spiritual singing to the Broadway stage, first as arranger and director of music for the 1930–31 The Green Pastures, which enjoyed a 640-performance run, and then as author, composer, and arranger for Run, Little Children, a “Negro Folk Drama” with music that ran for 126 performances in 1933.
In Porgy and Bess, Hall Johnson found a disproportion between unity and variety. The audience, he believed, was “confronted with a series of musical episodes which, even if they do not belong together, could be made to appear as if they do by a better handling of the musical connecting tissue.” Johnson also agreed with a number of New York’s other critics in judging Gershwin’s use of recitative inept. “The Mendelssohn of Elijah or the Strauss of Salomé would be excellent school-masters for Mr. Gershwin in this subject of recitativo. Even better, for his current needs, would have been a perusal of the freer verse-lines of any of the Negro spirituals, wherein the significance of every word is immeasurably heightened by its tonal investiture.” This composer also found Mamoulian’s stage direction unsympathetic at every turn:
Will the time ever come when a colored performer on a Broadway stage can be subtle, quiet or even silent? . . . Must the light revues always be hot, fast and loud, and the serious pieces always profane, hysterical and louder? . . . Why does Clara have to scream the lullaby to her baby in the middle of the noisome courtyard of Catfish Row where only a drunk could sleep? . . . Why does Porgy have to bawl out his contentment, his new-found, inward happiness,—like a young and fiery captain of Hussars brandishing his sword before his men about to rush into battle?
From Hall Johnson’s perspective, the redeeming force in Porgy and Bess was “the intelligent pliability of the large Negro cast,” who were “able to infuse enough of their own natural racial qualities into the proceedings to invest them with a convincing semblance of plausibility.” Johnson cited a basic quality existing in “genuine Negro music,” namely “the quality of utter simplicity—in theme and in style.”
It is only in the singing of large groups of Negroes that a contrapuntal or harmonic complexity may occasionally seem to be present, and this illusion is due to the simple approach of the individual singers. Each sings his part as he feels it. The result is musical because each contrapuntal part keeps constantly in mind the announced theme; it sounds complicated because the creator of each part is not bothering himself at all about the elaborate improvisation his neighbor may be preferring at the same moment. But the fundamental idea of simplicity is still active.
As Johnson saw it, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” proved “so un-Negroid, in thought and structure, that even Bubbles cannot save it.” It was impossible to believe that Sporting Life “could be so entirely liberated from that superstitious awe of Divinity which even the most depraved southern Negro never quite loses.” But nevertheless in two duets—“Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “What You Want Wid Bess”—Gershwin, he believed, caught “a real racial strain.”
But even considering the encumbrances that “American Folk Opera has had to struggle up under,” Johnson, who attended the production four times, ultimately decided that Porgy and Bess had “turned out surprisingly well,” affording “quite adequate fare for the average uncritical audiences without too much interest either in opera or in Negroes.”