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 of Four Saints, wrote a thoroughly incoherent review for Modern Music in which he proposed that Gershwin was “not a very serious composer” who had nonetheless produced an important work: “Gershwin does not even know what an opera is; and yet Porgy and Bess is an opera and it has power and vigor.” Thomson was, in fact, paying Gershwin a compliment—the highest that he could offer to a composer who lacked the correct credentials and could never be considered “one of us.”
Gershwin’s racial ambiguities, his miscegenating mixture of Western European, African-American, and Russian-Jewish materials, also caused trouble. The black singers were generally overjoyed by what Gershwin had written for them; J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s brother, who sang the part of Lawyer Frazier in the premiere, went so far as to describe the composer as the “Abraham Lincoln of Negro music.” African-American critics were more cautious, though generally positive. A few commentators on the political left attacked what they perceived to be white exploitation of black material. Unexpectedly, Duke Ellington, who seldom had a bad word to say about anyone, led the critique. “Grand music and a swell play,” Ellington was quoted as saying, but “it does not use the Negro musical idiom. It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.” As it turned out, some of Ellington’s remarks had been fabricated by an over eager Marxist journalist, although in a subsequent clarification Ellington stated once more that Porgy was not a true Negro opera.
Thomson picked up on this leftist critique of Porgy when he wrote, “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.” In the end, the racial debate around Porgy (was it a real Negro opera?) bled into the aesthetic debate (was it an opera at all?). Thomson concluded thus: “I don’t mind his being a light composer and I don’t mind his trying to be a serious one. But I do mind his falling between two stools.”
Falling between two stools was, in fact, the essence of Gershwin’s genius. He led at all times a double life: as music-theater professional and concert composer, as highbrow artist and lowbrow entertainer, as all-American kid and immigrants’ son, as white man and “white Negro.” Porgy performed the monumental feat of reconciling the rigidity of Western notated music with the African-American principle of improvised variation. In the end, Gershwin re united two sides of the composer’s job that should never have been separated to begin with, and he came as close as any composer of the day—his chief rival was Kurt Weill—to the all-devouring, high-low art of Mozart and Verdi.
Tragically, Gershwin did not live to fulfill his entire vision. Not long before his sudden death in 1937, of a brain tumor, he told his sister: “I don’t feel I’ve really scratched the surface of what I want to do.”
The Duke
The Harlem Renaissance, insofar as W. E. B. Du Bois and others defined it, aspired to create an African-American version of “high culture.” By the early thirties, that mission was becoming more difficult to sustain. A terrible riot in 1935 exposed the misery and rage behind the illusion of an upwardly mobile black culture.
As Paul Allen Anderson explains in his book Deep River, a split opened between the original leaders of the Renaissance and younger artists such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who disavowed what Hughes called the “Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” and sought a less status-conscious, less politely affirmative definition of black culture. Du Bois and his colleagues had dreamed, in Anderson’s words, of a “hybridic fusion” of African-American, mainstream-American, and European ideas. Alain Locke, in his musical commentaries, remained suspicious of commercial jazz and saved his highest praise for the symphonies of William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price. By contrast, the young rebel Hughes—whose great-uncle John Mercer Langston had been a good friend of Will Marion Cook’s father—celebrated the authenticity of “hot” jazz and rural blues. “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,” Hughes wrote, in a widely quoted 1926 essay, “and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
The split between the Harlem Renaissance elders and the new radical Negroes formed the backdrop for Duke Ellington’s career. Like Gershwin, Ellington had a flair for ambivalence. He partook of Du Bois and Locke’s cosmopolitanism, their rhetoric of uplift and transcendence. Yet he also adopted Hughes’s slogans of resistance and subversion.
There’s a wonderful scene in a 1944 New Yorker profile in which Ellington is shown deflating the expectations of an Icelandic music student who tries to nudge him toward the “classical,” “genius” category. The student keeps peppering the master with questions about Bach, and, before answering, Ellington makes an elaborate show of unwrapping a pork chop that he has stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he says, taking a bite from the chop, “both write with individual performers in mind.” With that pork-chop maneuver, Ellington put distance between himself and the European conception of genius, though without rejecting it entirely. Another time he addressed the issue head-on: “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.”
Black musicians had to work fast and hard to escape appropriation. The great early jazz records, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens onward, show an art form developing at blinding speed. As the composer Olly Wilson has said, jazz composers compensated for the limitations of the three-or four-minute track by exploiting a “heterogeneous sound ideal”: multiple rhythms, call-and-response patterns, and diverse timbres conspire to create “a high density of musical events within a relatively short musical time frame.” Albert Murray writes in his classic book Stomping the Blues: “The
