Gershwin (1898-1937) arr.
Bennett (1894-1981) - Symphonic Picture:
“Porgy and Bess”
It’s
a humbling thought. Were it not for the
fickle finger of fate, much of the music
we love might never have existed. Take,
for example, the piano bought by the Gershwins.
This was intended for the studious Ira,
not the streetwise George. Without that
piano’s timely stimulus, George might well
have ended up a criminal rather than a composer.
It also steered his talents towards Tin
Pan Alley, and thence to Broadway - a career
path that would have confined him to composing
popular ditties, had not fortune intervened
again. That crucial stimulus seemed to awaken
more than mere talent: looking at the “here
today, gone tomorrow” musical machine of
which he was but one cog, he began to envy
the immortality of the “Great Composers”
- and he began to do something about it.
Bit by bit, he learned what he needed to
know.
Whether
by wilful act or happy accident, he “decided”
not simply to emulate those envied predecessors,
but to carve his concert compositions from
the same stuff as his songs: Tin Pan Alley
and all that jazz. It’s tempting to imagine
that his desire to write opera similarly
emerged from his awareness of the disposable
nature of Broadway musicals. However, he’d
been bitten by the opera bug as early as
1922, when he’d scarcely had time to dip
his toes into these waters. Rather, it was
the other way round: if anything his operatic
ambitions influenced his approach to musicals.
Because of the disposable, “do it then bin
it” nature of Broadway musicals, direct
evidence is hard to find. Recently however,
several painstaking reconstructions by Tommy
Krasker have allowed us to hear for ourselves
some of these operatic infusions. Whilst
the pervasive influence of Gilbert and Sullivan
in Strike up the Band is as obvious
as - relatively speaking - it is trivial,
the incursions of a Mozartian influence
into Oh, Kay! is as striking as it
is subtle.
Coincidentally,
it was around the time (1926) of Oh,
Kay! that Gershwin came across DuBose
Heyward's novel Porgy. Gershwin leapt
at it, and Heyward was willing, but nevertheless
the opera was a long time coming, partly
because Heyward first worked with his wife
on a play based on the novel. Rather conveniently
then, the play rather than the novel became
the eventual source of the libretto. Although
the trip to Europe that prompted An American
in Paris also gave Gershwin first-hand
experience of such as Die Meistersinger
and Wozzeck, he nevertheless put
off starting work until he had immersed
himself in further studies of opera - and
spent an entire summer absorbing the musical
idiom of the Afro-Americans of South Carolina.
Ultimately, all this coalesced with his
Broadway experience and prodigious, tuneful
talent. From his imaginative crucible emerged
Porgy and Bess, an undoubted and
wholly original masterpiece. Gershwin had
declared, “If I am successful, it will resemble
a combination of the drama and romance of
Carmen and the beauty of Meistersinger,
if you can imagine that.” If, he
says!
In
the pursuit of maximum authenticity, Gershwin
went so far as to insist that the entire
cast should be black - proper black people
as opposed to “blacked up” white opera singers,
which back then must have caused considerable
practical difficulties. I can imagine the
horror with which Gershwin would have regarded
the furore since raised by certain adherents
to the doctrine of political correctness.
I cannot imagine how anyone could
ban performances of this work on the grounds
that it is “degrading” and “insulting” to
black people - other than, that is, because
Gershwin committed the cardinal sin of being
born a white man (sorry, should I say “IC1
male”?). Do none of these people ever consider
how they “degrade” and “insult” the memory
of a sincere and sympathetic human being,
whose Porgy and Bess encapsulates
a cultural fusion that leaves most of today’s
proponents of “crossover” gasping in its
wake?
Speaking
of his Scènes de Ballet, Stravinsky
reported receiving this telegram: “YOUR
MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL
SUCCESS IF YOU WOULD AUTHORIZE ROBERT RUSSELL
BENNETT RETOUCH ORCHESTRATION STOP BENNETT
ORCHESTRATES EVEN THE WORKS OF COLE PORTER.”
Stravinsky telegraphed back, “SATISFIED
WITH GREAT SUCCESS”. The American musical
theatre culture was based on teamwork, which
meant that “composers” wrote the tunes,
whilst “orchestrators” would lick them into
performing shape. The unlucky sender of
that telegram had laboured under the misapprehension
that Stravinsky would thus leap at the chance
because Bennett was, quite simply, “the
best there was”. A highly skilled composer
who had nevertheless taken time out in the
1920s for “mature study” with Boulanger,
Bennett was involved in some eight Gershwin
stage and screen projects. Nobody, other
than Gershwin himself, was more under the
skin of Gershwin’s style, which almost
explains why Bennett’s symphonic “take”
on Porgy and Bess is far more popular
than Gershwin’s own Catfish Row.
Bennett
opts for a straightforward free fantasia,
creating at once a colourful cavalcade of
melody and an approximate symphonic synopsis
of the operatic scenario by linking the
biggest “hit numbers” in order of appearance,:
Summertime, I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’,
Bess, You is My Woman Now, Oh,
I Can’t Sit Down, There’s a Boat
Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York, It
Ain’t Necessarily So (which ain’t necessarily
in sequence), and the hopeless optimism
of Porgy’s Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way.
.
.
© Paul Serotsky
29, Carr Street,
Kamo,
Whangarei 0101,
Northland,
New Zealand
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