Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (17 page)

The question of genre and “operatic form” raised by Atkinson and Downes can be traced to the earliest stages in the collaboration of Gershwin and Heyward. In fact, the issue of recitatives was their principal source of artistic disagreement. As early as November 12, 1933, when he sent the first scene, Heyward offered the following suggestion: “I feel more and more that all dialogue should be spoken. It is fast moving, and we will cut it to the bone, but this will give the opera speed and tempo.”
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Gershwin differed strongly and overruled his librettist.

For the first decades of its history a critical consensus supported Heyward’s original conviction. In his review of the Theatre Guild production in 1935 Virgil Thomson writes critically of Gershwin’s recitative as “vocally uneasy and dramatically cumbersome” and concludes that “it would have been better if he had stuck to [spoken dialogue] … all the time.”
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Part of Thomson’s subsequent praise in 1941 for the Cheryl Crawford revival in Maplewood, New Jersey, can be attributed to her practice “of eliminating, where possible, the embarrassment due to Gershwin’s incredibly amateurish way of writing recitative.”
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Vernon Duke—like Gershwin a hybrid classical-popular composer but unlike Gershwin a man sharply divided between his two artistic personalities, Duke and Dukelsky—was similarly critical. In their pre-compositional discussions about
Porgy and Bess
he recalled that “George was still under the sway of the Wagnerian formula,” which Duke believed to be “anti-theatrical,” and wrote somewhat smugly that “it is generally acknowledged that the separate numbers are superior to the somewhat amorphous stretches of music that hold them together,” that is, the recitatives.
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Less surprisingly, Richard Rodgers, who rarely abandoned the Broadway convention of spoken dialogue, also believed that Gershwin had made “a mistake in
writing
Porgy and Bess
as an opera.”
²²
According to Rodgers, “the
recitative
device was an unfamiliar and difficult one for Broadway audiences, and it didn’t sustain the story.” Consequently, it was only “when Cheryl Crawford revived it later as a musical play that it gained such overwhelming success and universal acceptance.”
²³
More recently, Gershwin biographer Charles Schwartz concurred with the above-mentioned composers that the Crawford revival “vindicated” Heyward’s original conception of the work, “for as he had argued, Gershwin’s recitatives impeded the pacing of the original production.”
²⁴

In addition to his controversial decision to give his work operatic form by connecting his musical numbers with recitatives, the composer had the audacity to load his score with hit songs, which makes the distinction between aria and recitative more glaring than in most hitless operatic works (see the list of scenes and songs in the online website). Clearly this issue was a sensitive one for Gershwin, who felt the need to publicly defend the presence of songs in
Porgy and Bess
:

It is true that I have written songs for “Porgy and Bess.” I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs. In “Porgy and Bess” I realized I was writing an opera for the theatre and without songs it could be neither of the theatre nor entertaining from my viewpoint. But songs are entirely within the operatic tradition. Many of the most successful operas of the past have had songs. Nearly all of Verdi’s operas contain what are known as “song hits.” “Carmen” [then performed with Ernest Guiraud’s added recitatives] is almost a collection of song hits.
²⁵

In his overview of Gershwin’s posthumous reputation Richard Crawford offers an insightful summary of several seemingly insurmountable criticisms that made Gershwin so defensive about inserting popular songs in a serious work that in the composer’s words “used sustained symphonic music to unify entire scenes.”
²⁶
Crawford writes:

We see Gershwin as a great natural talent, to be sure, but technically suspect, and working in a commercial realm quite separate from the neighborhood in which true art is created. So there sits Gershwin, as Virgil Thomson once wrote, “between two stools,” vastly appealing to the mass audience and hence a bit raffish, not quite deserving of serious academic scrutiny: a man without a category.
²⁷

Somewhat related to the problems of genre definition is another controversy surrounding
Porgy and Bess
: how to determine an authentic performing version. To place this debate in perspective it may be helpful to recall the difficulties in establishing a text for
Show Boat
(discussed in
chapter 2
). Since Kern and Hammerstein themselves revised their work nineteen years after its original Broadway run for the 1946 Broadway revival, it is arguable that this later version represents the final intentions of the creators. Despite its claim to legitimacy, however, revisionists such as John McGlinn rejected the 1946 version as an impure mutation of original authorial intent. Further, the Houston Opera (1983), McGlinn (1988), and Prince (for the 1994 Broadway revival) restored material that had been discarded—presumably with the consent of the Kern and Hammerstein estates—in the pre-Broadway tryouts. The appearance of the dropped “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” in the first published vocal score provides fuel for the idea that Kern really wanted this music in the show but capitulated to external pressures. Other reinsertions were not supported by equally compelling evidence.

The authenticity problems associated with
Porgy and Bess
(and many European operas in the core repertory) differ from those posed by the performance history of
Show Boat
. For example, in contrast to the
Show Boat
score, which was published four months into the original Broadway run, by which time the cuts had been stabilized, the
Porgy and Bess
vocal score was published as a rehearsal score prior to the Boston tryouts on September 30, 1935, and therefore includes most of the music that was later cut in the Boston tryouts. Thus the Gershwin score, unlike the first published
Show Boat
score (with the exception of “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’”), is not a score that accurately represents what New York audiences actually heard on opening night ten days later. Thanks to the work of Charles Hamm it is now possible to reconstruct what audiences did hear on the opening night of
Porgy and Bess
(October 10, 1935) down to the last measure.
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But the question remains: Were these cuts made for artistic or for practical or commercial considerations?

Hamm argues that “most cuts made for apparently practical reasons were of passages already questioned on artistic grounds,” and that “the composer’s mastery of technique, his critical judgment, his imagination, and his taste come as much in play in the process of final revisions as in the first stages of composition.” In addition to the relatively modest “cuts to tighten dialogue or action,” “cuts of repeated material mostly made before the opening in Boston,” and “cuts to shorten the opera,” the openings of three scenes were greatly reduced. By the time
Porgy and Bess
reached New York, only
twenty measures of Jazzbo Brown’s music remained before “Summertime” (and even these were eliminated a few days later), and the “six prayers” that opened act II, scene 4 were removed (though a far shorter reprise could still be heard at the end of the scene). More than two hundred measures from act III, scene 3, had also been discarded, including much of the trio portion of “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess.”

An examination of one deleted portion, Porgy’s “Buzzard Song” from act II, scene 1, might help to shed light on the complex issues of “authenticity” and the relative virtues of “absolute completeness.”
²⁹
As in the play
Porgy
by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, upon which the opera libretto is based (rather than on the novel
Porgy
), the libretto draft that DuBose sent to George on February 6, 1934, concludes this scene with the appearance of a buzzard.
³⁰
In the play, the fact that the buzzard lights over Porgy’s door represents the end of the protagonist’s newly acquired happiness and peace of mind with Bess and prompts the final stage direction of the scene, “Porgy sits looking up at the bird with an expression of hopelessness as the curtain falls.”
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The text of the “Buzzard Song” in the libretto shows Porgy’s superstitious response to and fear of the buzzard, but in keeping with his attempt to be more upbeat in his adaptation from play to opera, Heyward presents a triumphant protagonist who reminds the buzzard that a former Porgy, decaying with loneliness, “don’t live here no mo.’”
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Because he is no longer lonely, the Porgy in the first draft of Heyward’s libretto revels in his victory over superstition and loneliness: “There’s two folks livin’ in dis shelter / Eatin,’ sleepin,’ singin,’ prayin.’ / Ain’t no such thing as loneliness, / An’ Porgy’s young again.”
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Several pages earlier in the libretto manuscript George wrote the words “Buzzard Song.” The song cue appears shortly after the arrival of the bird in the scene and Porgy’s observation that “once de buzzard fold his wing an’ light over yo’ house, all yo’ happiness done dead.”
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By placing the “Buzzard Song” earlier in the scene, Gershwin paved the way for the following duet between Porgy and Bess, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” a subsequent addition.

Shortly before
Porgy and Bess
premiered in New York, the “Buzzard Song” was among the deletions agreed to by Gershwin and director Rouben Mamoulian. There is general agreement among various first- and secondhand explanations for this cut. Mamoulian, in his 1938 tribute to Gershwin, wrote that “no matter how well he loved a musical passage or an aria (like the Buzzard Song in
Porgy and Bess
for instance), he would cut it out without hesitation if that improved the performance as a whole.”
³⁵
According to Edith Garson’s completion of Isaac Goldberg’s 1931 Gershwin biography, the composer agreed to this particular cut for practical reasons: “In fact,
during the Boston run, it was George who insisted on cutting fifteen minutes from one section, saying to Ira, ‘You won’t have a Porgy by the time we reach New York. No one can sing that much, eight performances a week.’”
³⁶
David Ewen writes that “Porgy’s effective ‘Buzzard Song’ and other of his passages were removed at George’s suggestion.”
³⁷
Edward Jablonski explains, “Unlike recent productions of Porgy and Bess, the 1935 production had but one Porgy. So ‘Buzzard Song’ was among the first cut, in order to provide [Todd] Duncan with a chance to breathe between songs.”
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There is little doubt that Heyward and the brothers Gershwin (mainly, of course, George) agreed to relocate the buzzard number prior to the composition of the short score that served as the foundation of the published piano-vocal version used in rehearsal. It can also be determined that those most involved in the production, particularly the composer and the director, agreed to cut the “Buzzard Song,” perhaps on the eve of the New York premiere. Presumably the cut was made primarily for the practical reason that the opera was forty-five minutes too long and that Porgy already had two big numbers in this scene.

But the buzzard would light again with remarkable tenacity. Even during the initial run of the Broadway
Porgy and Bess
, the discarded “Buzzard Song” would appear among the first recorded excerpts from the opera. It was ironic that the singer on the recording—Lawrence Tibbett—was white. According to Gershwin, Tibbett was the likely candidate for a Metropolitan Opera production rather than the original Porgy, Todd Duncan.
³⁹
Duncan himself sang the “Buzzard Song” along with “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (with Marguerite Chapman) in the Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts organized by Merle Armitage in February 1937, and he included it along with other excerpts for a recording released in 1942.
⁴⁰

The “Buzzard Song” was also one of the few items cut from the Boston tryouts to resurface on the first nearly complete
Porgy
recording (and first published libretto in English) in 1951 produced by Goddard Lieberson and conducted by Lehman Engel, with Lawrence Winters and Camilla Williams singing the title roles.
⁴¹
And the song was among those portions reinstated for the Blevins Davis-Robert Breen revival that premiered in Dallas in 1952 and toured Europe later that year.
⁴²
But in 1952 the buzzard did not appear until the final scene of the opera, perhaps to symbolize Porgy’s bad luck in losing Bess.
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Does the “Buzzard Song” belong in future productions of
Porgy and Bess
? The central practical issue that led to its original omission was not really its length (less than four minutes, including the recitative with the lawyer Archdale) but the strain on Porgy’s voice. Does this mean that if
several Porgys had been available or if the Broadway equivalent of Lauritz Melchior had surfaced, the composer might have fought for its inclusion? Not necessarily.

The artistic aspects are naturally more problematic than the practical ones. Can we interpret Gershwin’s remarks in 1935—“The reason I did not submit this work to the usual sponsors of opera in America was that I hoped to have developed something in American music that would appeal to the many rather than to the cultured few”—to justify the removal of forty-five expendable minutes?
⁴⁴
What are present-day audiences to make of Gershwin’s contemporaries, many directly involved in the first production, who without exception concluded that
Porgy and Bess
was better off with the cuts, including that of the “Buzzard Song”?