Volume 25 Issue 3 - November 2019

its racial anachronisms to be as painless as the voodoo/witchery of
the black Ulrica in the Boston-set version of Verdi’s A Masked Ball.
But that would be a terrible mistake. Porgy and Bess is a great
masterpiece of music, one of the greatest, and it needs productions
which match the universality of the score. It’s interesting to note
that at a time, from the 1950s to the present day, when productions
inevitably provoked intense questions and controversy, there was
one version where this was not the case. That was the production
of Porgy produced in South Africa in 2006, set in the Soweto of the
1970s. That production spoke to its African audience powerfully and
immediately, its caricatures in an American context deeply resonant
in a South African one. There’s something extremely important to be
learned from this success. Porgy may actually be ahead of its time,
not behind it. If there was ever an opera that begged for a regietheater
version, Porgy and Bess is it – a production that blows away the
fog of literalism which settles like a horrible blanket of racist tropes
on every Catfish Row setting, no matter how stylized or “dignified” it
may be; a production that recognizes that, deep at the heart of Porgy
and Bess, are archetypes both of and transcending black America
– the crippled hero, the hyper-sexualized woman, the ultra-violent
alpha male – that still ring true, whether we like them or not, and
have universal significance.
And then there is that sprawling, massive, insanely ambitious score,
a work of Western art in the end, but so American, so completely
American in its bones, with its black accents, its popular idioms,
its desire for European artistic status, its mixture of black culture
and Jewish-American existential dread, a work uneasily at home
in settings as diverse as Harlem, Tin Pan Alley, La Scala, Broadway,
and the gospel churches of the South, but comfortable in none. We
value Porgy and Bess because of its music, a score of which George
famously said “The music is so beautiful, I can’t believe I wrote it.” No
boast, that, merely an acknowledgment of the mystery of the creative
process, an acknowledgment that, I note with respect, has been many
times recognized by the greatest black American musical artists of
the last 60 years, despite Porgy’s contradictions. The great performances
of numbers from Porgy and Bess are still by Billie Holiday, Nina
Simone, Miles Davis. They heard in the score American greatness.
Porgy and Bess, the opera, is still waiting for the unclouded stage
realization that lets that greatness shine.
Robert Harris is a writer and broadcaster on music in all its
forms. He is the former classical music critic of the Globe and
Mail and the author of the Stratford Lectures and Song of a Nation:
The Untold Story of O Canada.
Price and Warfield
in the RCA Porgy
Angel Blue, who plays Bess in the Met’s current production of
Porgy and Bess, seen here as Mimi, with Atalla Ayan as Rodolfo, in the
Canadian Opera Company’s production of La Boheme, April 2019.
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thewholenote.com November 2019