the clarinet then saunters through a lightly syncopated melody, leaning heavily on the lowered seventh note of the scale. The tune dances down the same staircase that the opening scale shimmied up, ending on the F with which the piece began—a typical Gershwin symmetry.
A neat ambiguity becomes apparent: sometimes the lowered seventh is heard as a pitch-bending blue note, and sometimes it is interpreted as part of a straitlaced dominant-seventh chord, which has the effect of kicking the harmony into a neighboring key. The Rhapsody plays out as a dizzying sequence of modulations; the Rachmaninovian love theme at the center of the work ends up being in the key of E, a tritone away from the home B-flat. That theme, too, is strewn with extraneous blue notes, which give Rachmaninov a certain finger-snapping informality while propelling the harmony through a second string of modulations back to the point of departure.
When the last chord sounded, delirium ensued. In the audience at Aeolian Hall were such classical celebrities as Stokowski, Leopold Godowsky, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, and Rachmaninov himself, and they were practically unanimous in acclaiming Gershwin as the new white hope, so to speak, of American music. And when Gershwin went to Europe four years later, he met more high-level admirers: Stravinsky, Ravel, four of Les Six, Prokofiev, Weill, Schoenberg, and Berg. No American composer had ever gained such international notice.
Of the modern European masters, Berg fascinated Gershwin most. The legendary meeting between the two composers in Vienna—the one at which Berg said, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music”—perhaps gave Gershwin a glimpse of something new, of a deeper synthesis than what he had achieved to date. On the train from Vienna to Paris, he studied the score of the Lyric Suite, and at various parties held in his honor in Paris he had the Kolisch Quartet play the work several more times, no doubt to the puzzlement of the flapper crowds. Back in New York, Gershwin hung an autographed photo of Berg in a corner of his apartment, alongside a picture of the boxer Jack Dempsey and a punching bag.
European impressions bubbled up in the balletic tone poem An American in Paris, which Gershwin sketched during his 1928 tour and finished back home. If the Rhapsody had been predictable in form, alternating between plush tunes and busy transitional sections, An American in Paris showed a more confident use of a larger structure; the tunes undergo kaleidoscopic development and are stacked up in wickedly dissonant polytonal combinations. Yet the musical surface is kept shiningly clear, so that the listener can follow each jazz aria as it darts through the melee.
Gershwin had little left to learn, yet he still felt insecure about his education, and asked for advice and lessons from almost every accredited composer he met. Supposedly, he once approached Stravinsky, who asked after Gershwin’s salary—$100,000 to $200,000—and then said, “In that case, I should study with you.” (Alas, the story is probably legend: the same anecdote was told about Gershwin and Ravel.) As Howard Pollack shows in his authoritative biography, Gershwin kept trying to perfect his technique even after he had achieved fame. In 1932 he embarked on a new course of study with the émigré Russian composer-theorist Joseph Schillinger, who had created a system for symmetrically organiz ing rhythms, chords, and scales. Gershwin’s notebooks from his sessions with Schillinger show him writing in multiple modes and deriving richly dissonant chords from the harmonic series.
Since the time of “Swanee” and Blue Monday Blues, Gershwin had been navigating among diatonic, blues, klezmerish, whole-tone, and chromatic scales. Now he had a coherent method with which to work—a grid on which he could plot large-scale designs. In those same notebooks, Porgy and Bess began to take shape.
The idea of writing a full-scale opera had preoccupied Gershwin for years. The arts patron Otto Kahn—chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, prime mover of Jazz Age culture, old friend of Richard Strauss’s—spurred him on, inviting him to write a “jazz grand opera” for the Met. Gershwin concluded, however, that the Met’s staff singers could never master the idiom; a true jazz opera could be sung only by a black cast.
DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy had long interested Gershwin as a subject. After a long delay related to questions of rights, he set to work on the opera in early 1934. The story is of a crippled beggar with an indomitable urge to make his dreams come true. He falls in love with Bess, who returns his love but is prey to the affections and manipulations of other men. The story ends on a note of mingled hope and dread: Bess goes off to New York with the drug-dealing ne’er-do-well Sportin’ Life, and Porgy resolves to follow. Gershwin later said that he liked the story because of its mix of humor and drama; it allowed him to shift between Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers and vocal-symphonic writing in the style of Wozzeck. Although his aim was to “appeal to the many rather than to the cultured few,” the work far exceeded the average Broadway revue in ambition. Gershwin spent eighteen months writing it, notating every note of the final orchestral score in his own hand, as he felt compelled to prove when journalists came calling.
Porgy begins with an introductory orchestral and choral explosion in which Gershwin shows off what he has learned from his experiments in modern music. First comes a typical rhapsodic flourish, an upward scale followed by a trill. This gives way to a hard-driving two-chord ostinato, which sounds like a honky-tonk version of the quivering alternation of chords at the end of Wozzeck. The orchestra then drops out and the ostinato is carried on by an out-of-tune bar-room piano—a feat of crosscutting that imitates the tavern scene in Wozzeck. Next comes a great crescendo: the chorus launches into a neoprimitivist chant of “Da-doo-da” while the orchestra adds layer upon layer of dissonant harmony. The climax brings shrill harmonic complexes of seven or eight notes, split between a G dominant seventh in the bass and C-sharp-major arpeggios in the treble. Gershwin probably assembled this music from overtone rows, as he had done in his Schillinger notebooks.
The texture then subsides toward a summery, humid kind of stillness. A new ostinato gets under way, one of alternating half-diminished sevenths, recalling Wozzeck again—Marie’s song of “Eia popeia” to her child. Gershwin even uses his chords for the same scenic purpose, to accompany a mother’s soothing lullaby. If the kid from the Lower East Side seems in danger of losing himself in European arcana, there is no reason to worry. We are listening to one of the best-loved melodies of the twentieth century: “Summertime, and the living is easy …”
The entire score is structured around such fusions of complexity and simplicity, although the simple always wins out in the end. In his notebooks Gershwin wrote down some rules that would never have sufficed for Berg: “Melodic. Nothing neutral. Utter simplicity. Directness.”
What sets Porgy apart from every classical theater work of the time is that the score invites considerable freedom of interpretation. Once the chords of “Summertime” start rocking, they become a steady-state environment in which a gifted performer can move around at will. She can bend pitches, add ornaments, shift the line up and down. Billie Holiday and Sidney Bechet made “Summertime” their own; Miles Davis, on his Porgy and Bess album of 1958, actually discarded Gershwin’s chords and kept only the melody. The same freedom of expression is permitted in the opera’s other set pieces, such as “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” When, at the premiere, John W. Bubbles sang the last-named number with devil-may-care pizzazz, he irritated the trained singers in the cast, but Gershwin defended him.
Glowing with confidence, Gershwin offered Porgy to the public in the fall of 1935. To his surprise—he was accustomed to being loved—it met with critical opposition and commercial disappointment. Porgy ran on Broadway for 124 performances, a large number by operatic standards but not enough to recoup expenses. People had trouble deciding whether Gershwin had written an opera or a musical show: some theatergoers complained that the orchestral passages and turbulent recitatives got in the way of the hit numbers, while classical-music intellectuals found the showstoppers bewildering. There was fuss over how the work should be labeled—“opera,” “folk opera,” “musical,” or something else.
Virgil Thomson, smarting over the disappearance
