Gershwin's Porgy and Bess
I would've killed to know what the black couple in my box were thinking as we watched the Met Opera's production of "Porgy and Bess". Where the crowd was mostly white, and the pit was pretty much all white, the only colored representation came from the stage, whose first act began with nearly 10 minutes of black actors rolling dice, almost as if they came from a "Chapelle Show" skit.
"Porgy and Bess" is almost unfair to our modern sensibility towards race. In a climate that hungers for people of color to represent themselves in fiction and is cautious over appropriation, "Porgy and Bess" is written by white people but depicts black people living on Catfish Row singing about cotton and drinking gin, while the pit plays jazz-inspired music to their dancing. One can go over the criticisms the show has gathered over the years: there have been concerns over "Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms", the play as "the most incongruous, contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World", Grace Bumbry saying "I thought it beneath me ..."
But the reason our sensibility is not unfair towards it, but it is unfair towards us, is that "Porgy and Bess" is just really, really, transcendentally beautiful, to the point where it's impossible to dismiss. On a piece of paper, it sounds like the most racist thing ever (next to actual black-face, which is surprisingly also not that racist given the legacy of artists like Al Jolson). Black performers singing and speaking in dialect? All of them in poverty and arguing over their faults? The female lead is abused by her somewhat-boyfriend somehat-husband and addicted to crack, and the male lead walks around on crutches making his living primarily by begging? If Twitter had existed in the 30s, they would have had a field day.
"Porgy and Bess" proves a basic principle in art: sincerity and genius can overcome anything, even any rulebook on racism. It's why people make art in the first place, else everything devolves into one big sarcastic loop with precious little valuation. It's one thing to break down "Porgy and Bess" in a referential way, but when you're actually in a show, listening to the music, watching the actors' performances and the choreography, it really is a high honor, perhaps the highest honor, opera has given to jazz music, has given to the black voice, and certainly not appropriation.
Opera is not necessarily the place for the most heroic of characters. Look no further than Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro", which contains some of the most beautiful music put to human ears - the male characters are a barber, a cross-dresser, and an adulterer and rapist of a count. Needless to say, "Figaro" is a lot of buffoonery, which makes "Porgy and Bess" look like, I dunno, "War and Peace". I suppose one could argue "Figaro" is a comedy, but that's a little detail when compared to the show's overall fame.
Furthering the comparison to other operas, there is a heavy theme of fate recurring throughout the story, not unlike a Wagnerian opera. The theme begins with the the dice game and Robbins' saucer funeral - men invoke the gods for luck and happiness because of their goodness, not regardless. It is notable that Crown defies any concept of justice, believing that he himself is the sole agent of right and wrong, and he is the "villain" in the story, as his own lusts threatens the community's virtues.
I'd also argue that "Porgy and Bess" is thoroughly modern and has a different take on the hero's story. Porgy is heroic, though he does not look like a hero - a cripple and a beggar, he is accepted by the community because of his decency and relative innocence. Sure, Porgy claims he is innocent because he is a cripple, having never known a woman, but clearly when he takes Bess in he doesn't take advantage of her, dominate her, or take to other vices like drinking. It's Porgy's outstanding moral clarity that distinguishes him from the others, more than physical strength or cleverness, which is not that different from Leopold Bloom in "Ulysses". Even outside of the modern style, Porgy's arc is not dissimilar to that of the male lead in an early opera - Orpheus of Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo" is also a huge failure by the end of the play. At least Porgy shouts triumphantly to the residents of Catfish Row to "Get [his] cart!" at the end of the show, as he no longer sees himself as a defenseless object, while Orpheus... well, we know the myth.
If the Gershwins or Heyward treated the subject ironically they would have been, excuse my French, Fucked. Could you imagine if Jake said something along the lines of, "For people like us..."? For the inhabitants of Catfish Row there is no other world, and there is no other people to emulate than their neighbors. In that sense it hardly matters if they're black, since that's who they are and they're very consistent about it too. If the play veered in the direction of actually commenting on the status of blacks in the world, then we'd be having a very different historical analysis of "Porgy and Bess". Because the Gershwins were so sincere about producing a play with black characters portrayed by black actors, you judge the story as a story rather than as a message.
Enough about the story - the music is, dare I say it, magical. Jazz is peculiarly equipped to describe daily activities - whereas classical music heightens things, there is a notably gentle, fluid nature to jazz. Whereas the piano accompanies the quick witticisms of "The Marriage of Figaro" best, for "Porgy and Bess" dialogue is accompanied by wind instruments, which are most able to heighten the smaller moments of the opera and give the more dramatic ones a fiery temper, as if the small breezes of wind can immediately become tempests by the magician's wand.
"Summertime" and "A Woman is a Sometime Thing" are great arias. Yes, yes, I know the latter aria's mere title would provoke furor, but firstly that is how some men think, and secondly, though the title would make you think so, it is not an objectification of women: it's a commentary on gender relations in the first place. If you really think about it, yes, while the men say "A woman is a sometime thing", the men need the women, surely, and the women in the opera often are the moral conscience of the story. This is a perfect aria for the beginning of the play, where the writer needs to establish the moral quandary of the play; "Porgy and Bess's" is a social quandary by nature.
Do we even need to speak for "Bess, You Is My Woman" or "I Loves You Porgy"? The latter is so famous that not one prominent black artist, not two, but three of the most famous female musicians have covered it: Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie fucking Holliday. Singing "I Loves You Porgy" is enough to cover one in tears; it is so honest, so brutal, so unflinching in its introspection, and just so empathetic, because who has not had the same darkness in Bess's mind cover them at times? And yes, "Bess, You Is My Woman's" title looks bad, but it's sung by Porgy, not out of possessiveness but out of a deep personal, emotional need, saying that he needs Bess to put color into his life and that he needs Bess to be happy and free. It's a really touching aria.
Then there are the frequent invocations to God and the references to gospel music; I'm not going to touch on those in too much detail, as I'm not too familiar with that convention of music. But it's a great tool for "Porgy and Bess". The exciting, happy moments resemble bebop; the slower, more sentimental moments turn to the orchestral jazz of Ellington; the truly dramatic moments, where the whole community is affected, resemble spirituals.
It's simply a wonderful opera, one which I don't think it hurts people to see just once. When people read about it, one can't help but think awful things already. But the opera is much like the character Porgy himself: once you dig deeper, you find there is something genuinely admirable in it.
The couple actually quite liked the show.
The writing of real professionals is more enjoyable - I found this review by Joseph Horowitz to be incredibly insightful, as well as the program notes handed out by the Met Opera written by Helen Greenwald which, I should note, is also like a whoring brochure the Met gives out to its audience, full of advertisements to pointless crap like Lexus and Hermes, not detracting from Greenwald's excellent scholarship of course.