The Best Musical Ever Made That You'll Never See

Back in 1959, when I was all of 13, Samuel Goldwyn produced a mega-movie version of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. The casting was sensational. Sidney Poitier was Porgy, Dorothy Dandridge played Bess, Sammy Davis, Jr. was terrificl as Sportin' Life ("It Ain't Necessarily So"), Brock Peters was the villainous Crown  (two years later he was equally effective as the victim of a racist accusation of rape in "To Kill a Mickingbird"), Pearl Bailey had the large secondary role of Maria, and an actress as lovely and talented as Diahann Carroll relegated to the minor part of Clara. Goldwyn didn't stint, either on production details or music. He dubbed the actors who couldn't sing (Poitier, Peters, and, surprisingly Dorothea Dandridge, who could sing, but whose voice wasn't right for Bess). and gave the responsibility for musical supervision and orchestration to Andre Previn, then at the height of his reputation as a film composer and arranger. The sets were lavish but spot on, not overblown in the manner of musicals a decade or so later.

I was fairly impressionable, then as now, so much so that the movie overwhelmed me. I have never forgotten it, particularly Sidney Poitier as Porgy. It was a superb performance, even in the details. A little vignette from early in the film is still with me. Porgy is playing craps with the other guys and rolls a three, a hard point. The other players laugh. Porgy/Poitier picks up the dice, cradles them, and  croons to them, eyes half-closed -

Dey is the mornin' and the evenin' stars,

An' jes you watch 'em rise and shine,

for this poor beggar.

which of course they do - a gorgeous recitative by Gershwin, and the audience knows right then just how much poetry dwells in this man's soul. Poitier did the scene beautifully.

I bought the LP shortly afterward, which became a staple of our household. I think the picture made one appearance on national television in the early 60's. But if you want to see this movie masterpiece on DVD or even VHS, or hear the soundtrack . . . . forget it. Neither the film nor the soundtrack has been released since that one television showing. Neither has ever been released to home viewing, either on tape or DVD. The soundtrack has never been issued on cd. If you want to hear the performances I'm so enthusiastic about, you'll have to track down one of the ancient vinyl records. There is no digital version, nor is there likely to be at any time in the near future. 

So why is that? 

For years I thought the problem was the racial presentation, which was dignified, but realistic, as to the poverty and squalor of Catfish Row - a little off-putting in terms of how these matters came to be viewed in the 60's and beyond.  My understanding is that Sidney Poitier, who was a committed activist, agonized over accepting the role. I could not disagree more strongly with his reservations. His 'Porgy' epitomized a strong, gentle masculinity in a way that completely transcended race, as much a paradigm and model as Gary Cooper's lawman in 'High Noon' or - in a negative sense - Sean Connery's James Bond. It also exhibited a model of unconditional love of unmatched beauty and tenderness, in the form of Porgy's devotion to Bess. (You learn as you go through life that is a much greater blessing to be able to bestow such feelings on another than to receive them. But that's a subject for another day.) So holding back the movie for reasons of racial sensitivity seemed to me to be political correctness taken to unmatched level of absurdity.

However, it turns out that my naive assumption was dead wrong. Racial attitudes, good or bad, have nothing to do with the withholding of the film. The actual reasons have to do with artistic integrity - and it is here that the tale begins.  

The problem is evidently the extreme unhappiness the representatives of the estates of George and Ira Gerhswin, and the novelist Dubose Heyward, have with the deviations in the movie from the opera as staged. Just to note one obvious change, Goldwyn eliminated nearly all of the operatic recitative in favor of spoken dialog. The arias are removed from the orchstral context and boldly staged as numbers., The work is presented as a musical, not an opera.

If these were the reasons for the Gershwin discontent, they seemed to me in all candor to be somewhat churlish. Porgy and Bess was presented on Broadway as a musical in the mid-40's. The famous songs are frequently recorded by all performers of all styles in varied (and sometimes very bad) arrangements. So why an insistence on musical purity with this one particular movie? It was not until I read Alex Ross's immensely entertaining account of Twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise, that I came to a glimmer of - well, if not entirely sympathy, at least understanding.

Ross did not confine his narrative to the classical tradition, but included popular music as well, and included quite a bit about Gershwin. In particular, he recounted the European trip Gershwin took in 1928, in which he met all the German modernists, including Alban Berg, heard Berg's ultra modern opera Wozzeck, and was mightily impressed. Ross then remarks that the influence of this modernism can be heard throughout Porgy.

Though I am no musicologist, I found this observation incredible. The soundtrack recording that I knew so well certainly is a long, long way from modern opera. Although I possessed several recordings of Porgy and Bess as opera, I was not really familiar with any of them. I decided to become acquainted with the operatic version, choosing Simon Rattle's Glyndebourne Festival Recording.

This turned into something of a revelation, as the accuracy of Ross's insight became instantly apparent - and with it, a perception of the possible rationale for the objections of the Gershwin estate to Goldwyn's presentation. You don't have to listen to the operatic Porgy and Bess for ten minutes to realize that it is no folk opera. The orchestral texture shows directly and unambiguously the influence of the European modernists that Gershwin visited and respected. Individual passages, excerpted and stripped of lyric and dramatic context, could be presented as samples from Wozzeck or Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtensk (which debuted in 1935 at the Met, two years before Porgy, and which Gershwin must have heard.) At the very least, it's a long, long way from the musical idiom of the movie.

In this YouTube age, I can demonstrate exactly what I mean.  In the story, Bess turns to Porgy when Crown, the brute that she is with, flees for his life after murdering  one of the other players in that crap game I mentioned. To her surpose, she discovers a surpassing gentleness of a kind she had never experienced, falls deeply in love, and gains acceptance into from the other residents of Catfish Row. She accompanies the church goers to a social outing on an island, on which Crown is unfortunately hiding. He kidnaps her, and subjects her to several days of physical and sexual abuse. Finally, she escapes and stumbles back to Catfish Row, feverish, more dead than alive. Porgy nurses her tenderly back to health. The duet linked below takes place at that point in the drama. The first link is to the movie version. Here it is (without apologies for the scratches and static - this music has never been released digitally and the vinyl albums available are closing in on 50 years of age):

15 I Luvs You, Porgy

Reminding one and all that I am not a musicologist, I'll do my best. The selection begins with a figure the lower register evocative of the first declaration of love of Porgy and Bess. Woodwinds then play a reminiscence of Bess's savage duet with Crown (another great piece), echoed by the violins, but without any strength, evoking Bess's feeble, helpless state. The figure is continued by the entire string section, then a pale, wan figure woodwind indicates the ordeal she has been through. A violin then takes up the signature theme from the first, great declaration of love between the two ("Bess, You Is My Woman Now"). The melody is carried forward by a subtle arrangement in the strings, and then a modulation brings the piece to the point at which Bess enters, with one of the most beautiful vocal lines George Gershwin or anyone else ever wrote. The highest praise that can be given to Ira Gershwin is that his lyric does justice to the melody.

Great stuff, but compare now the way in which Gershwin himself orchestrated the same moment, this from the recording I mentioned:

Download 20 I Wants to Stay Here

No lush orchestral prelude here - the core of the duet arises after ordinary recitative. As for the orchestration, I'm not even going to try. Suffice it to say that if you listen to the orchestral texture without reference to the vocal line, the echoes of Berg, Shostakovich, and the rest of the 20th Century lads are not too hard to hear - and this in a comparatively lyrical part of the score. The whole affect of the authentic setting is far more spare and less emotional than the motion picture soundtrack. Whatever may be said of preferences and comparisons - we'll get to those in a second - whatever is in the movie ain't Gershwin - at lest, not 100 percent, true and true, undiluted Gershwin.  

Which may account for why the estates of George and Ira Gershwin, and Dubose Heyward, have blocked release of the film.

But which does not necessarily answer the question of which version is superior. I suppose if authenticity were to be adopted as a knee-jerk reflexive criteria, the operatic version wins without a murmur. But hold the phone for a second. The orchestrator and arranger of the soundtrack was Andre Previn, perhaps not a Gershwin, but arguably even a better musician technically than George Gershwin, and then at the top of his cinematic game. To my way of thinking, his arrangement has distilled the essence of the large emotions in play, Bess's helpless desperation and Porgy's protectiveness, far more effectively than the operatic score. There is a place for interpretation in the musical universe. That's why interpreters exist. Andre Previn would certainly not be the first who understood the essence of a composition better than the original composer.

Perhaps it's simply a matter of performance. Whether it's Andre Previn or the singers (probably both), the soundtrack seems to me to be warmer and more natural than the opera. I don't know the name of the singer who dubbed Bess, but the Porgy is Robert McFerrin (as a point of trivial interest, the father of the 'don't worry, be happy' composer/singer) who is nothing less than superb, as the emotional tone moves from reassurance to anger (at Crown) to unconditional love. The opera seems to be somewhat stilted in comparison.

Or maybe it's simple familiarity. I heard the soundtrack first, that's the one I prefer. That's the way it usually happens.

 The ultimate bottom line in my view has nothing to do with preferences or authenticity or any high falutin aesthetic theory. The bottom line to me is that Goldwyn's Porgy and Bess is a tremendously effective movie that has quite a bit to say about the human condition. I wish the Gershwin estates would relent. The movie deserves to be seen - and heard.