Fun Facts

Fun Fact
The poet Walt Whitman was a perceptive music critic and frequently found inspiration for his own artwork in music. As early as 1854, he prophesied that a truly “native” American grand opera would require banjos in the orchestra and be written in the dialect of the black South. Both of these characteristics appear in Porgy and Bess.

Fun Fact
From the time of its premiere, critics have debated whether to classify Porgy and Bess as an opera or a musical. This confusion extended even to the editors of the New York Times, who sent their top reviewers for serious music as well as the popular musical theater to the work’s New York premiere on October 10, 1935. The Times printed both critics’ reviews in adjacent columns. Members of the orchestra staked a claim that it was in fact a musical, although they had financial reasons to do so: The wage scale for musical comedies was higher than the scale for opera that they were receiving.

Fun Fact
Gershwin had high hopes that Porgy and Bess would take its place in the pantheon of grand opera. While working on the opera in 1934, he remarked, “The production will be a serious attempt to put into operatic form a purely American theme. If I am successful it will resemble a combination of the drama and romance of Carmen with the beauty of Meistersinger.”

Fun Fact
Porgy and Bess’s “Catfish Row” is a fictional location, but the name is a variation on a real place in Charleston: a tenement house near DuBose Heyward’s home called “Cabbage Row.”

Fun Fact
In 1932, DuBose Heyward was contacted by the film star Al Jolson, who had performed in a radio-play version of Porgy and was hoping to appear in the Gershwins’ forthcoming musical as the title character. Although Jolson is not well known to modern audiences, he was one of the most famous movie stars of the day, and his 1927 film The Jazz Singer is generally regarded as the first “talkie” in history. Heyward approached Gershwin with Jolson’s request, but Gershwin quickly rejected the movie star: Jolson was white, and Gershwin wanted to avoid a blackface opera, instead hoping to stage the opera with an entirely black cast.

Fun Fact
Porgy and Bess’s European premiere took place in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. Although the opera was performed by white singers in blackface makeup, an opera about African Americans and written by a Jew fell far outside the Nazi’s code of “proper” theatrical matter, and the ranking Nazi officer in Denmark filed a formal complaint about the theater. Nevertheless, the show was a smash public success, and Danish radio stations took to following compulsory Nazi propaganda broadcasts with the opera’s hit number “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”

Fun Fact
James Weldon Johnson, author of the poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, both had connections to opera and musical theater. In 1916, the poet James prepared a translation of Enrique Granados’s Spanish-language opera Goyescas for its world premiere at the Met. In 1935, the composer and performer J. Rosamond played Lawyer Frazier in the premiere run of Porgy and Bess.