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Category Archives: opera

Language in Porgy and Bess: The Challenge of Representing Gullah

Following Heather L. Hodges’s fantastic guest post about the Gullah Geechee culture that the Gershwins and Heywards portray in Porgy and Bess, we turn to one of the opera’s most contended aspects: its treatment of the Gullah language. In this post, our managing editor, Andrew S. Kohler, explores how the work’s text came to be so far removed from Gullah, and how future performances may approach the inconsistent libretto so as to give Gullah culture and language the respect they are due. The language of Porgy and Bess is a far cry from that of the Gullah community of Charleston […]

“I Heard the Angels Singing”: Listening to Gullah Geechee People Who Inspired Porgy and Bess

 To kick off our new series, The Past and Present of Porgy and Bess, we’re pleased to welcome guest contributor and expert on Gullah Geechee culture, Heather L. Hodges. In this post, Heather tells the deeply researched story of a staged Gullah Geechee musical performance that George Gershwin heard during his 1934 trip to South Carolina. She explains that understanding Gullah Geechee musical traditions and learning about the people who have kept them alive is critical to how audiences, producers, and performers approach Porgy and Bess today.    Biographies of George Gershwin and historical accounts of the composition of Porgy […]

Introducing a New Series: The Past and Future of Porgy and Bess

Despite being among the most prominent operas of the twentieth century, and perhaps the Gershwin brothers’ most monumental achievement, Porgy and Bess occupies an uneasy place in US musical history. In this series, Managing Editor Andrew S. Kohler, Ph.D. and blog team leader Kai West explore the opera’s complex and at times problematic representations of race, gender, disability, and class, connecting Porgy and Bess to today’s conversations about social justice. The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (1935), a collaboration with DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, contains many of the Gershwins’ most beloved numbers: “My Man’s Gone Now,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” […]

Jazz Opera? Problems of Genre in Blue Monday

While it was never particularly successful, George Gershwin’s 1922 one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday played an important role in bridging the gap between his popular style and classical compositions. This post—the final installment of our three-part series devoted to Blue Monday—explores just what a “jazz-opera” might be and delves deeper into the cultural implications of these stylistic elements in Gershwin’s work. Content Warning: This post contains a quotation of an offensive racial slur. As discussed in the initial post of this series, George Gershwin’s Blue Monday was cut from the George White Scandals of 1922 after opening night. Still, this short […]

The Persistence of a Flop: Revivals and Re-imaginings of Blue Monday

While it was never particularly successful, George Gershwin’s 1922 one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday played an important role in bridging the gap between his popular style and classical compositions. This post—the second in a three-part series devoted to Blue Monday—chronicles various efforts to revive and record the piece since its brief stint on Broadway, and examines the ways these productions dealt with the racially and culturally offensive aspects of the show. Content Warning: This post contains a quotation of an offensive racial slur. George Gershwin composed his one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday for the George White Scandals of 1922, but it was […]

Blue Monday: A Compositional Crossroads

While it was never particularly successful, George Gershwin’s 1922 one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday played an important role in bridging the gap between his popular style and classical compositions. This post—the first of a three-part series devoted to Blue Monday—delves into the creation and short life of the work and explores its place in Gershwin’s compositional development. At the peak of his career, George Gershwin was a versatile and successful composer of movie scores, popular songs, musicals, and concert pieces. But the fifteen-year-old boy who dropped out of school to be a song-plugger didn’t become an opera composer overnight. While the […]

Farewells, Photographs, and Affections: A letter from Ira to DuBose

  After George Gershwin’s death, Ira writes a letter to DuBose Heyward passing along his and George’s respect and affection for the author.  Take a look at Ira’s letter of August 2, 1937, to DuBose, held at the South Carolina Historical Society. By Frances Sobolak By the middle of 1937, just shy of two years after the premiere of Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s growing brain tumor, undetected at the time, was causing him severe headaches and fainting spells. On July 11, after having fallen into a coma two days before, George underwent extensive brain surgery—but the 38-year-old composer passed […]

Dear Dorothy

Check out this letter from George Gershwin to Dorothy Heyward! It offers us a window into the working relationships between George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, and literary couple Dorothy and DuBose Heyward. The famous collaboration between the Gershwins and librettist DuBose Heyward resulted in the creation of one of the best known American operas, Porgy and Bess, whose production forged lasting professional and personal relationships between the three men. George, Ira, and DuBose regularly kept in touch, exchanging new lyrics, novel-to-stage adjustments, and production ideas. DuBose’s wife Dorothy Heyward, herself a playwright, was also a part of this circle and frequently […]

Spotlight on DuBose Heyward

DuBose Heyward was at the forefront of Southern literature in the early twentieth century. His novel Porgy contributed to the growing conversation about African Americans in American literature and theater. George Gershwin had been actively seeking an opera libretto when Heyward’s Porgy caught his eye. Frances Sobolak is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan pursuing a Linguistics major and Music minor. She joined The Gershwin Initiative team in the fall of her sophomore year through the university’s undergraduate research opportunity program. In the early twentieth century, poets in Charleston, South Carolina, pioneered a literary renaissance where a group […]