The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess: Rise Up Singing

Aria Code

WQXR & The Metropolitan Opera

Arts, Wnyc, Music Interviews, Music, Wqxr, Performing Arts, Code, Studios, Aria, Opera, Music Commentary, Metropolitan

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The most famous American opera opens with one of the most famous American songs: “Summertime.” The Gershwins’ haunting lullaby from Porgy and Bess is a simple tune with a complex story. In this episode, host Rhiannon Giddens and her guests explore not just the lyrics and music, but how Porgy and Bess came into being and the way it draws on the culture of the Gullah Geechee, descendants of formerly enslaved people living in and around South Carolina. Decoding two arias – "Summertime" and "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" – the show finds uncomfortable contradictions as well as uncanny parallels between the real lives of the Gullah people and the characters onstage. The Guests Soprano Golda Schultz debuted as Clara at the Met earlier this year, her first time singing in the U.S. with a cast full of people of color. She believes that when telling stories from underrepresented groups, they must be told from places of joy and not only areas of pain. Naomi André knows better than most about the complicated racial history of Porgy and Bess. Still, the University of Michigan professor and author of Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement believes the show can be timely, relevant and moving. Victoria Smalls is a Gullah woman who grew up on St. Helena Island off Charleston, South Carolina. She works as the Director of Art, History, and Culture at the Penn Center in South Carolina, an institution dedicated to promoting and preserving African American history and culture. She's also a federal commissioner for the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Bass-baritone Eric Owens was initially reluctant to start singing Porgy, since so many African American singers have a hard time breaking out of that role. But even while reckoning with some of the controversial aspects of the Gershwins' opera, he has now sung the role for a decade and believes it is some of the most beautiful music written in the 20th century.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Yes, there's hardship and there's beauty, there's power, there's spirituality and there's hope.
0:12.0	From WQF's R and the Metropolitan Opera, this is Ariacod. I'm Rianne Giddens.
0:19.0	Her words are saying she wants all this hope for the future. The orchestra is telling us that maybe that's not going to happen.
0:28.0	Every episode, we unpack an area so you can see what's inside.
0:32.0	Today, it's a song you've probably heard a hundred times in all different styles.
0:37.0	Summer time, from the Gershwin's Porgian Bess, by George Gershwin, Dubos and Dorothy Hayward and Ira Gershwin.
0:44.0	We have to start grappling with the kind of stories we want to tell.
0:48.0	This cannot be the only story that we tell about the African American experience.
0:59.0	So, it's a new year and I've got something really big in store for 2020.
1:04.0	I'll be singing the role of Bess in Porgian Bess for the first time back in my hometown at Greensboro Opera in North Carolina.
1:11.0	It's going to be my first professional opera gig in a long time.
1:16.0	So, it's a little, okay, it's a lot scary. All right, I'm just going to be honest with you.
1:21.0	And, you know, I've always had pretty complicated feelings about Porgian Bess.
1:26.0	Porgian Bess came into this world through a stellar creative team, the composer George Gershwin and his brother, the librettist Ira Gershwin,
1:34.0	as well as novelist Dubos Hayward and playwright Dorothy Hayward. Yep, they were married.
1:40.0	Now, it was an all-white team creating a show about Black Life in South Carolina, which raises some important questions for me about race and representation.
1:50.0	And to get to the bottom of them, I think we need to start at the real beginning of the story.
1:55.0	The how we got here on Porgian Bess begins with the gulla, descendants of formerly enslaved people who settled along the southeastern U.S. coast from about Wilmington, North Carolina, on down the St. Augustine, Florida.
2:08.0	A lot of folks ended up buying land around Charleston and the Sea Islands off of South Carolina.
2:15.0	Now, this is where Dubos Hayward enters the picture. He's born and raised in Charleston at the turn of the last century.
2:21.0	He spent some time living down the street from a black tenement community called Cabbage Row.
2:26.0	That community would become the inspiration for Kefish Row, the setting of his best-selling novel, Porgi.
	...

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