Volume 25 Issue 3 - November 2019

REAR VIEW
MIRROR
Controversially
Uncontroversial
Porgy and Bess
at the Met
ROBERT HARRIS
I
love Porgy and Bess. I’ve loved it ever since I first
heard the Leontyne Price/William Warfield RCA
recording of excerpts from the opera in the mid-60s.
The moment I hear that first octave gliss announcing the
overture, and that thrilling Stravinsky-like syncopated
ostinato that begins the score, I’m lost. And I don’t regain
myself until the strange, half-apologetic sixth chord that
ends the opera has sounded, after Porgy has demanded
of the Catfish Row residents that they “Bring my goat!”
(Stephen Sondheim claims to love this line) and Porgy is
on his way to find Bess in New York.
Basically, the beauty of the music simply dissolves everything I want
to think and decide and judge and insist about Porgy and Bess. It all just
gets lost in the overwhelming sense of joy I have in simply listening to the
music, in an exalted state of thankful wonder, again and again and again.
So perhaps I’m the last person who can adequately work his way
through all the remarkably thorny issues that still surround, or should
continue to surround this masterpiece. I say “should” because I’ve
been more than a little amazed at how little controversy has attended
the Metropolitan Opera’s current production of Porgy. In 2019, in the
middle of the era of #BlackLivesMatter, the Met has chosen to open its
season with a production of an opera about black people completely
written by white men, that portrays its characters as drug-addled,
sexually voracious, verbally primitive stereotypes, mired in poverty and
superstition, one step removed from minstrelsy, and no one seems to
mind. Granted, the Met is performing the strange 2012 hybrid version of
the opera, “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” which sands down some of
the sharper racial edges of the piece (Porgy is given a dignified crutch,
and thus doesn’t have to wheel around on those depressing, ridiculous
carts from the local moving company that are featured in most productions),
but the basic outline of the piece in its banal racial literalism, is
still deeply in evidence. And everyone’s okay with that, it seems.
And maybe that’s a good thing.
The opposite was the case in 1959, when the movie version of
Porgy and Bess premiered. The reaction to the film was so negative
that it has been permanently removed from circulation, Sovietstyle.
Watching the elegant Sidney Poitier and the glorious Dorothy
Dandridge debase and prostitute themselves to the worst racial stereotypes
imaginable, in the years just before the civil rights era, was too
much to bear. Why watching Eric Owens as Porgy and Angel Blue as
Bess do more or less the same thing in 2019 on the Met stage is not, is
fascinating to contemplate.
My own feeling is that, in 1959, those distorted images of black
America were too painful because they were too real, too close to the
surface, too close to the actual attitudes many white Americans still
harboured about their black co-citizens. The discomfort is seeing
these stereotypes appallingly splayed over a major Hollywood screen,
with the stamp of approval such a treatment implied, was too stark.
In 2019, audiences, black and white, seem to feel quite differently,
even as another major institution – the Metropolitan Opera – gives
its nod of approval to the piece. And that’s because we have different
models for black manhood and womanhood in the America of the 21st
century. Not every black woman needs be a sultry Bess or a mammylike
Clara. Black women can be Michelle Obama, Oprah, Toni
Morrison, Serena Williams. Black men needn’t follow the trajectory
of the crippled Porgy or the equally damaged Crown. Black men are
Barack Obama, LeBron James, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Jay-Z. Porgy and Bess
doesn’t offend or alarm black America as much anymore – perhaps –
because black America isn’t afraid of those stereotypes anymore. The
reality of a different black American life has rendered them impotent.
Maybe.
And yet, the fact remains that Porgy and Bess, the opera, is still a
depressingly literal treatment of black America closer to the world of
slavery than the world of #BlackLivesMatter. Porgy is still a problem,
I think. Imagine a contemporary black composer and black librettist
sitting down today to write an opera on black American themes. How
likely is it they would come up with Porgy and Bess? Not likely at all.
Then why should we revive it, and allow its old-fashioned reality to
colour our contemporary lives? For all its beauty, Porgy still sits there
with its dialects, and stereotypes, and problems.
There is one way out. We could just assign Porgy to the period piece
bin, and avoid its troubling aspects that way – recognize its great
strengths as a piece of music, but chalk up its theatrical two-dimensionality
to the oddities of the past, as we do with many other works
of art. Put it on from time time to time; accept its limitations; declare
November 2019 thewholenote.com