George Gershwin Gets His Due

By Michael Walsh

George Gershwin maintained that Porgy and Bess was a real opera, not a glorified Broadway musical, but until recently, few believed him. Early productions generally truncated his ample (more than three hours) score, cut down its lush orchestration and substituted spoken dialogue for the recitatives. But there has been growing interest in an authentic Porgy, beginning with the Houston Grand Opera's 1976 production and followed by an even more opulent version seen at New York's Radio City Music Hall two years ago. Last week, 50 years after its premiere, Porgy came all the way uptown to the Metropolitan Opera. At last, the work's operatic pretensions have been fairly and thoroughly tested. And you know what? Gershwin was almost right.

Already Porgy is the hottest ticket in town; all 16 scheduled performances were sold out even before the opening. The piece's unique claim to be the American national opera is partly responsible, of course, as is the curiosity value associated with any first. But the Met delivers the goods: in the hands of a major conductor like James Levine, Porgy and Bess emerges as something ; richer than the overblown musical comedy it once appeared to be. Although many singers have used Porgy as a springboard to fame (Leontyne Price, for example, in 1952), the Met production reveals it as essentially a choral opera. It is in choruses like Gone, Gone, Gone and Headin' for the Promise' Lan' and the extraordinary Oh, Doctor Jesus, in which six independent musical lines, notated without bars, move freely against a hummed background, that the voice and soul of the residents of Catfish Row are heard. Porgy is their story, and the celebrated songs like Bess, You Is My Woman Now are only fancy melodic finery. At the Met, the all-black chorus, assembled and trained by David Stivender and Lloyd Walser, steals the show.

The soloists are not nearly as strong. Soprano Grace Bumbry's shrill, edgy Bess fails to communicate either that lady's sultry eroticism or her ambiguous moral nature. Better is Bass-Baritone Simon Estes' dignified, sympathetic Porgy, though his voice is not as robust as it should be. (Injured during the dress rehearsal, he played the crippled hero on real crutches.) Individual honors go to Mezzo-Soprano Florence Quivar as the soulful Serena and the dashing Gregg Baker as the villainous Crown. The production, designed and directed by Robert O'Hearn and Nathaniel Merrill, is handsome, if not as spectacular as Douglas W. Schmidt's Radio City triumph. Arthur Mitchell, director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, assisted Merrill with the vivid fights and crowd scenes and staged the dances, underscoring the slice-of-life vigor that is the opera's chief asset.

And, alas, its liability. Gershwin lacked a sense of structure, and too often Porgy is nothing but a series of vignettes: here comes the honey man, there goes the strawberry seller, stopping the action cold. Musically, the composer settles for a reprise when new material is clearly called for: Summertime, that delicious throwaway, comes back three times. And, surely, the jaunty tune of A Red-Headed Woman is more appropriate to the suave Sportin' Life than to the macho Crown.

In Porgy, Gershwin attempted a synthesis of the drama and romance of Carmen and the beauty of Die Meistersinger. What he got is closer to Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov: a grand but flawed epic with a strong national identity. But with the Met production, Porgy emerges as a real American opera, if not quite the elusive national ideal.