Porgy and Bess

Summertime

Porgy and Bess is an opera, first performed in 1935, with music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward.

It was based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy and the play of the same name as the opera which he co-wrote with his wife Dorothy Heyward.

All three works deal with African American life in the fictitious Catfish Row (based on the real-life Cabbage Row) in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.

Originally conceived by Gershwin as an “American folk opera”, Porgy and Bess premiered in New York in the fall of 1935 and featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers—a daring and visionary artistic choice at the time. Gershwin chose African American Eva Jessye as the choral director for the opera. Incorporating a wealth of blues and jazz idioms into the classical art form of opera, Gershwin considered it his finest work.

The work was not widely accepted in the United States as a legitimate opera until 1976, when the Houston Grand Opera production of Gershwin’s complete score established it as an artistic triumph.

Nine years later the Metropolitan Opera gave their first performance of the work. This production was also broadcast as part of the Met’s ongoing Saturday afternoon series of live radio broadcasts.

The work is now considered part of the standard operatic repertoire and is regularly performed internationally. Despite this success, the opera has been controversial; some critics from the outset have considered it a racist portrayal of African Americans.

Summertime is by far the best-known piece from the work, and countless interpretations of this and other individual numbers have also been recorded and performed. The second best-known number is It Ain’t Necessarily So. The opera is admired for Gershwin’s innovative synthesis of European orchestral techniques with American jazz and folk music idioms.

Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a crippled black man living in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin’ Life, the drug dealer.

Where the earlier novel and stage-play differ, the opera generally follows the stage-play.

The belief that Porgy and Bess was racist gained strength with the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. As these movements advanced, Porgy and Bess was seen as more and more out of date.

When the play was revived in the 1960s, social critic and African-American educator Harold Cruse called it, “The most incongruous, contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World.”

On July 14, 1993, the United States Postal Service recognized the opera’s cultural significance by issuing a commemorative 29-cent postage stamp, and in 2001 Porgy and Bess was proclaimed the official opera of the State of South Carolina.