Porgy and Bess: 71 Years Old

Porgy and Bess opened in New York City, 71 years ago today.

American Heritage notes:

Set in Catfish Row, a mythical black slum in Charleston, South Carolina, Gershwin’s opera tells the story of a crippled beggar and the woman he falls in love with. Both Gershwin, born in 1898, and his Porgy and Bess collaborator, DuBose Heyward, were deeply enamored of black culture. A Charleston businessman turned writer, Heyward wrote the novel Porgy in 1925, drawing his characters sympathetically but not without stereotyping. As for Gershwin, not only was he steeped in the white pop tunes of Tin Pan Alley and the classical music he had studied as a teenager, but before he was 20 he had sought out many of the best black musicians in New York City, men like the bandleader James Reese Europe and the pianists James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts—and listened hard. When he was still a teenager, writes his biographer Joan Peyser, his piano playing had “a drive and syncopation then unknown to white players. Gershwin appropriated this from the blacks, ingested it until it was his own, and transformed it into his songs”—and into the orchestral works he began writing in the 1920s.

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