Born on March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France; died on December 28, 1937, in Paris, France.
Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture
Arranged by Robert Russell Bennett
Simple Gifts
At the River
The Dodger
The Little Horses
Zion's Walls
I Bought Me A Cat
Composed: 1934–35; Symphonic Picture arranged: 1942
Estimated length: 25 minutes
To close the evening, Slatkin wanted a work with immediate recognition. Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture sums up the program’s central themes: the meeting of concert music and popular entertainment, the search for a distinctly American voice, and the complicated question of whose experiences that voice represents. George Gershwin discovered DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy in 1926 and read it through the night.
Set in Catfish Row, a fictional Black waterfront community modeled on tenements in Heyward’s native Charleston, the story centers on Porgy, a disabled beggar, and Bess, who is trying to escape the violent Crown and the influence of the drug dealer Sportin’ Life. Porgy offers Bess shelter, and the two fall in love, but their fragile happiness is destroyed when Crown returns, and Porgy kills him. While Porgy is detained by the police, Sportin’ Life persuades Bess to leave for New York; the opera ends with Porgy setting out to find her.
Gershwin immediately recognized the story’s potential for the American opera he had long wanted to compose. He admired its combination of “100 percent dramatic intensity” and comedic energy, arguing that an American opera without humor could not “run the gamut of American expression.” Nearly a decade passed before Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway in 1935. By then, Gershwin had spent years moving between Broadway and the concert hall and exploring how blues, jazz, popular song, and European operatic traditions might coexist.
At the height of his success, he set aside almost two years for the project and spent time on Folly Island near Charleston, absorbing the musical life of the region’s Gullah communities. Although he incorporated such local sounds as street vendors’ cries, he decided not to quote existing spirituals or blues songs. “I wanted the music to be all of one piece,” he explained. Familiar numbers such as “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” therefore belong to a continuous musical world shaped around the characters and the community of Catfish Row.
Porgy and Bess has generated persistent debate over its representation of African-American life. Gershwin insisted on an all-Black cast and created substantial operatic roles for Black singers at a time when the nation’s leading opera houses largely excluded them. Yet its portrait of Black life was created by a white Southern novelist and a white Jewish-American composer, a tension that has continued to shape the work’s reception.
The music first became widely known not through the complete opera but through songs and arrangements extracted from it. Gershwin prepared his own orchestral suite, later titled Catfish Row, but it fell out of circulation after his early death in 1937. Robert Russell Bennett, a friend of Gershwin and one of Broadway’s leading orchestrators, later assembled the more familiar Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture. Bennett brings together highlights from the score in a continuous orchestral sequence that moves freely through the drama.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The Symphonic Picture sets the scene in Catfish Row at the outset with the cries of the Strawberry Woman and the Crab Man as they peddle their goods, then veers into the third-act mourning music for those believed lost in the hurricane before doubling back to the bustling music that opens the opera. Among the familiar numbers Bennett draws into the sequence are Gershwin’s immortal “Summertime,” first encountered in the opera as Clara’s hushed lullaby; Porgy’s buoyant “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’”; Gershwin’s depiction of the terrifying hurricane; the expansive love music of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”; and the sly rhythmic swagger of Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
The sequence culminates in the forward-driving “Oh Lord, I’m on My Way,” associated with Porgy’s decision to leave Catfish Row and search for Bess. He has no assurance that he will find Bess; the optimistic energy comes from his decision to set out anyway.
Scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 percussionists, piano, and strings.
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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