Terry Blain explains how the popular American songwriter came to compose his country’s first great opera, and finds the best recordings
The work
The year was 1926, and it had been a busy day for George Gershwin. His new musical comedy Oh, Kay! was in rehearsal, and when the composer went to bed that evening he reached for some light reading material to lull himself to sleep. Instead he picked up Porgy, a recently published novel by the American writer DuBose Heyward.
Heyward’s wife Dorothy reported that, far from dozing off swiftly, Gershwin ‘read himself wide awake’ that night, gripped by her husband’s dark, gritty tale of African American life in the tenements of Charleston, South Carolina. By four in the morning, Gershwin knew the story was ideal for an opera, and dashed off a letter to Heyward suggesting a meeting.
Little came of that initial contact. For one thing, the Heywards were already adapting Porgy as a play, for production on Broadway a year later. And Gershwin himself was wary of an immediate collaboration. ‘He said it would be a couple of years before he would be prepared technically to compose an opera,’ DuBose Heyward recalled later.
In fact, it would be a full seven years before Gershwin and Heyward finally turned their attention to making an opera out of Porgy when, in October 1933, the pair signed a contract with the Theatre Guild of New York to write the piece, and Heyward started fashioning a libretto from his novel.
By any standards, the subject-matter of the new opera was controversial. Murder, race issues, domestic violence, prostitution and substance abuse all feature in Porgy and Bess. Additionally, Gershwin insisted on an all-black cast, a stipulation much more radical for the white-dominated world of 1930s opera than it would be today. Yet Gershwin had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve in presenting Heyward’s story of a crippled beggar who finds temporary solace with Bess, a marginalised woman struggling to free herself from her controlling lover, Crown, and drug dependency. By writing what he called a ‘folk opera’, Gershwin intended to ‘appeal to the many rather than to the cultured few’ and to put on stage the ‘100 per cent dramatic intensity in addition to humour’ that he found in Heyward’s novel.
To that end, Gershwin made a five-week trip to Folly Island near Charleston, living in a beachside shack and mixing with the native Gullah people. Intent on soaking up their way of l
