Program Notes

These pages contain program notes written for Redwood Symphony. You are free to use the information in your own program notes. If you quote me directly, please attribute it. Thanks!

These notes were edited, amended, and otherwise improved by Eric Kujawsky, Peter Stahl, and Doug Wyatt.

Barbara Heninger

George Gershwin
Porgy and Bess

Porgy and Bess got its start in 1926 when, during tryouts of his musical Oh Kay!, George Gershwin read a novel by DuBose Heyward called Porgy, describing the milieu of the Gullah community in Charleston, South Carolina. Upon reading Heyward's novel, Gershwin contacted the author and proposed they write an opera based on it. Heyward was busy adapting the book for a stage play which ran in 1927, but by 1933 Gershwin had convinced him to work on the opera — after a proposed musical production with Al Jolson had fallen through!

Gershwin visited Heyward in South Carolina several times to find inspiration for his music. He was particularly taken with the traditional "shouting," where chanted spirituals were accompanied by complicated rhythmic patterns beaten out on hands and feet. "I shall never forget the night when, at a Negro meeting on a remote sea-island, George started 'shouting' with them," wrote Heyward. "I think he is probably the only white man in America who could have done it." Gershwin later used this experience to compose the beginning of the storm scene (Act II, Scene 4), when six prayers are sung simultaneously.

After almost two years, Gerswhin finished the orchestrations in September of 1935. The opera premiered in Boston on September 30 and in New York at the Alvin Theatre on October 10, where it ran for 124 performances, then toured from January to March. But it lost its entire $70,000 investment, and critical reaction was mixed. Gershwin continued to perform arrangements of the work in concert, and in 1937 he wrote of trying to convince movie studios to film the work; sadly, he died later that year. Yet the opera survived, with revivals in 1938 and the early 1940s that led to a reassessment of the work. Porgy and Bess had its European premiere in Copenhagen in 1943 (when the Danish underground began transmitting "It Ain‘t Necessarily So" during Nazi broadcasts), while a 1950s production toured America and Europe, launching the career of Leontyne Price. A complete recording of the score was made in 1976 by Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1985 the Metropolitan Opera premiered the piece, followed by a 1988 production at London's Glyndebourne Festival. It took 50 years, but Porgy and Bess had finally arrived.