It Ain't Necessarily So

"First of all, Toni Morrison, who wrote the libretto based on her novel, Beloved, and I were aware, from the start, that while we admired Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," we wanted to create a work that portrayed African Americans more as they see themselves. This, of course, has everything to do with language."

Well, maybe. But the quote at the very beginning of his notes opens up all kinds of avenues of comparison between "Margaret Garner" and "Porgy and Bess," and I am primed to make such a comparison, because in the last couple of weeks, I have been immersing myself in "Porgy and Bess" as I prepare a long essay on it for a new Harvard anthology, a critical anthology, whatever they’re calling it, of American literature, a word they take rather loosely to mean almost any manifestation of culture.

In any case, the first comment that one could make about Danielpour's remarks is that it's not just language. Maybe it's more language now, but when the opera came out, the opera "Porgy and Bess" came out in 1935, all kinds of people, perhaps most prominently, W.E.B. Dubois and Duke Ellington, took exception to it. So did a number of white critics, claiming it was an inauthentic portrayal of black life, because it was not written by black people. Ellington's famous phrase, which he slightly disavowed later, that the opera was full of "lamp-black Negroisms" referred just as much, if not more, to the music as it did to the libretto or the language. It is true, however, that in recent years, the music of "Porgy and Bess" has become so embedded in our culture. Some people can't make the distinction between Gershwin's score, entirely composed by himself, and traditional spirituals, but, in any case, "Summertime" is often perceived to be a traditional song, which it's not. And soon enough after these initial criticisms, the music of "Porgy and Bess" became so much of a jazz standard. Ellington himself recorded a record based on its themes and tunes, and of course, the most famous one was Miles Davis' version, which Bill Evans arranged, and which Wynton Marsalis is going to re-create this fall as part of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

But many black intellectuals, not all, but many black intellectuals continued to reject the libretto, which they considered full of racist stereotypes, focusing on degraded people, prostitutes, drug addicts, murderers, et cetera, in Catfish Row. Now, is that fair? I have to say, right from the start, that as a white person, it's difficult for me to answer fully the painful complaints of blacks, who, laboring under the memory of the slavery experience of black people, obviously are much more sensitive to stereotypes. Nonetheless, if you look at the genesis of "Porgy and Bess" historically, it's very hard to perceive it as racist. DuBose Heyward, who was a white aristocrat, albeit impoverished when his father lost his job when DuBose was four, was a white aristocrat from Charleston, but he had closely observed Charleston blacks and the Gullah Island culture from which many of them came. And even though, when you read the original "Porgy" novel, which was written in 1925, or the play, which he and his wife, Dorothy cobbled together for Broadway in 1927, which was an enormous success, a modern-day reader is a little shocked by the thickness of the dialog, which sounds two notches up or down from Amos and Andy. And yet, I'm sure it was a good faith effort to capture how people actually spoke in those days. And it seems a little shortsighted not to see the nobility and sympathy that Heyward saw in these characters, and felt for them. At the time, it was certainly perceived by most people as such, quite apart from, I'm talking now of the novel and then the play, not even the opera yet, it was perceived as a true step forward for the evolution of a genuine Southern literature dealing with black people, and for that matter, for the employment of black people on Broadway.

Gershwin's music is as much indebted, in his efforts to write an opera as opposed to a musical, to Verismo opera as it is to anything ethnically black. For example, in that sense, it's an interesting contrast with Virgil Thomson's "Four Saints in Three Acts," another all-black cast opera, which, although written in the late twenties, came out in 1934, it isn't any more authentically black, less so, probably, than Gershwin's "Porgy," but it is an avant-garde experimentation, one, I might add, that I love. It has its own kind of authenticity.

A lot of ink has been spilled about "Porgy," as to whether it's an opera and a musical, even going so far as to mount productions that, against Gershwin's wishes, replaced his complex, orchestrally accompanied recitative with dialog in the musical tradition. However, when you see it as part of a long and evolving dialog in American culture of the last fifty to seventy five years between opera and the musical, and how so many people have approached this hybrid form from the operatic side, i.e. Virgil Thomson, or the musical side, i.e. Stephen Sondheim, "Porgy" becomes a true milestone, a true classic, in the sense that it has embedded itself in our culture, but also generated a whole conversation between merging art forms.

"Margaret Garner" is another piece of work. The actual opera dates back a few years to the Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit, and it's played in regional companies a couple of times, and has now appeared at the City Opera in a stripped-down and highly effective new staging. Now, Toni Morrison is black. Richard Danielpour, however, is no more black than George Gershwin was. And perhaps that's why Danielpour concentrates on the authenticity of "Margaret Garner" compared to "Porgy," which, as he said, has everything to do with the language. Now, there's no question that Morrison's libretto portrays blacks as they see themselves, once again, to quote Danielpour. But, it's an idealized version. It's highfalutin. Even though the acting is extraordinary in the City Opera production, the language is often grand, noble, approaching cardboard stereotypes. The caricatures, the racist caricatures, are of the white people, once again, maybe how blacks see themselves and their world. In particularly, the overseer Casey is just a sort of snake-like villain with absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever. The story is stripped down for the opera, and concentrates on the events that lead up to Margaret Garner, a slave who finally escapes with her husband, who's been sent off to another plantation, and then is caught by the overseer of the plantation, the owner of the plantation, and kills her two children rather than to allow them to continue in a life of slavery. Ironically, of course, this all takes place in 1861, on the eve of the abolition of slavery, but nonetheless, she does it, and the opera is an attempt to portray this act of murder of her children, and to build up the situation where one can understand and sympathize why the character has done this.

However, Danielpour has freighted this opera with music that, although it serves the drama, especially in the last twenty minutes, and is truly a gripping experience in that the opera house, the New York State Theater was full when I saw it. There were many black people in the audience, and most of us, myself included, were moved by it and gave it a big ovation at the end. However, what this calls to mind, to me, is another issue. Whether or not Richard Danielpour, who is a respected, widely performed American composer, is authentically black, of course it isn't. And it's less so than Gershwin. Is it going to last in the way that Gershwin's music for "Porgy and Bess" has lasted? Clearly not. And what this begins to bring to mind is a whole other set of issues relating to Paul Kellogg, the soon to retire general director of the New York City Opera, and his aesthetic, and the aesthetic that is shared by a number of American opera directors, such as David Gockley, long of Houston, now of San Francisco. What Margaret Garner reminded me of was Jake Heggie's "Dead Man Walking," another extraordinarily powerful story in which bland, illustrative music serves the drama, in the sense that someone in the opera house is gripped by it, but doesn't make any kind of musical statement that is likely to last in the same way that "Porgy" has lasted.

Kellogg and Gockley have won reputations for putting on a lot of new work. But the new work has been of the sort that typifies modern American opera today. In the wake of the surrealist, off-putting, dissonant music of a previous generation, composers are reaching out to audiences, some people might say pandering to them. And yet, they don't dare go the whole way and return to big, hummable, singable tunes. As I was doing the research for "Porgy," I couldn't get "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin" out of my head. There is nothing that I can really get into my head in Danielpour's score.

Gerard Mortier, the Flemish director, once of Brussels, then of Salzburg, then of the Ruhr Triennale, now of Paris, who, amusingly and improbably, is going to be Kellogg's successor, brings an entirely different sensibility. I doubt that he will do much in the direction of authentic black opera, unless he's lead there by Peter Sellars, one of his favorites. But he's likely to oversee creations which may not be as immediately accessible as Danielpour's, but which might last longer in our consciousness.

"Margaret Garner," in my opinion, and I have been wrong, will not survive in the repertory. "Porgy and Bess," which is flawed, which is controversial, which keeps appearing in new versions with different cuts and different orchestrations and different forms of recitative, has survived, and will continue to survive.

 — John Rockwell