When I was four years old, my aunt, 17 at the time, was crying that she didn’t have a boyfriend. I innocently said, “I’ll be your boyfriend,” earning me a lot of hugs. It also resulted in hearing a story that was retold a couple of hundred times since by my grandmother and her. I’ve often wondered that if a less noble story had been chosen as a sign of my youthful character, what the effect would have been on my development?
People change and if something gets hammered home that says “Look at what you are and will always be” it could be very hard to move forward. This is the back story in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Its hero, Jean Valjean, is shunned wherever he goes because he carries the Yellow Passport, the sign of a forced-labor criminal. He isn’t allowed to escape the stigma of his past.
I went to see Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess the other night. It was the closing work of the season at the Théâtre de Champs Elysées, my favorite Parisian concert venue. I’ve always liked the songs: “Summertime,” “It Takes a Long Pull to Get There,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “A Woman is a Sometime Thing,” but I’d never seen it in its entirety. Gershwin said his goal was to combine the drama of Bizet’s Carmen with the beauty of Wagner’s The Meistersingers of Nuremburg. I was curious about what impression the full work would give.
I found the opera didn’t have the artistic unity in the same sense as the European masters such as Wagner, Verdi and Puccini. It sounded like a series of songs connected by throwaway connecting material. Furthermore, there was something about it that I found offensive. It seemed like the worst racial stereotyping I could imagine. Blacks are represented as sexually uncontrolled, drug crazed, superstitious, violent overgrown children.
When I got home, I read about the opera. I’d always assumed that everybody loved the piece, but this isn’t the case. For example, the soprano Grace Bumbry, when offered the role of Bess at the Metropolitan Opera by conductor James Levine, said she didn’t like it:
I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.
Gershwin had good intentions when he wrote it. For years it was seen as championing the cause of African-Americans. At the time many Jewish-Americans identified with poor black Americans because they saw a parallel of their own captivity in Egypt. But there isn’t much difference between the images of the black man in Porgy and Bess and those found in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, though the goals were diametrically opposed.
Sitting in the theater, I realized I’d never really focused on the lyrics, for example when Bess tells Porgy she prefers to stay with him than to go alone to a picnic party:
BESS:
Porgy, I's yo' woman now,
I is, I is!
An' I ain't never goin' nowhere 'less you shares de fun.
Dere's no wrinkle on my brow,
No how,
But I ain't goin'! You hear me sayin',
If you ain' goin', wid you I'm stayin'!
That’s an adult talking.
By the time the song “I Got Plenty of Nothing” came around I was wondering when the riot would start. This never occurred, the audience was French which altered the social context of the work, and besides, the subtitles weren’t in patois, but normally conjugated French. Finally, I think that the reputation of the work, and that of Gershwin in general, is so strong that people don’t really consider what’s in front of them, at least the white audience that makes 95 percent of the opera-going public. It’s just seen as quaint and tuneful.
Sitting there, I fantasized what the reaction would be if a black composer wrote something on life in a Jewish ghetto using cliché racial stereotyping and stipulated (as Gershwin did to avoid Blackface versions) that it only be performed by an all-Jewish cast.
The title would be Shmuel and Golda and take place in a Russian Jewish ghetto on Synagogue Street (instead of Catfish Row). The opening number would be “Thank God I’m Not a Woman,” the next “Money Lendin’, Never Spendin,” and then “Oy Vey, What a Tuchus!” and “A Schmuck’s a Schmuck!”
I found a recording of Cab Calloway’s performance of “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
This song—Gershwin said it was inspired by seeing Calloway on stage—is interesting because it references stories from the Old Testament. If you listen closely, you’ll hear, when Calloway starts the scat singing, that he uses Yiddish inflections. He’s making a sly comment—that Porgy and Bess is as much about the Jewish experience of the composer as the Afro-American experience it’s meant to depict.