The Met’s new production of “Porgy and Bess” is a wonder

By J.F. | NEW YORK

“PORGY AND BESS” is the greatest American opera. You will know at least a couple of its songs, even if you’ve never seen it. “Summertime” began as an aria but has become a jazz standard. So has Bess’s half of the work’s most moving duet, recorded as “I Loves You Porgy”, most notably by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. Miles Davis arranged the opera’s songs for a studio album released in 1958. In this work, George Gershwin, the opera’s composer, combined the ringing clarity of John Sousa, the operatic hummability of Giuseppe Verdi and the rhythmic brilliance of Anton Webern into something new and distinctly, unmistakably American.

But its history is messy. Gershwin called it a “folk opera”. Some deem it more musical than opera, and it has been so staged—most recently in 2012 on Broadway, with a stripped-down score and speech replacing recitative. But the controversy really attaches to its substance. The opera portrays African-American life in Catfish Row, a fictitious tenement in Charleston, South Carolina; yet the composer and one of the lyricists—Ira Gershwin, George’s brother—were white Jews who adapted their opera from a play written by a white southerner, DuBose Heyward, and his Ohio-born, Harvard-educated white wife Dorothy. The accusations of cultural appropriation practically write themselves.

The songs are in dialect. The characters sometimes verge on stereotype (though really no more than in any other opera—a form not known for its psychological complexity). Some African-American composers have been understandably upset that “Porgy and Bess” has been frequently staged while their work has struggled to find an audience. You could forgive any opera company that looked at this cultural minefield and decided to pass. Opera-goers everywhere should be glad that the Metropolitan Opera did not: its new production—the first time the piece has been performed there since 1990—is a triumph.

The story centres on the love between Porgy, a crippled beggar, and the fast and flashy Bess. She initially belongs to Crown, a boastful and murderous hard drinker (played with delightfully looming menace by Alfred Walker, a Met veteran). After Crown kills a man while drunk and absconds, Bess finds first comfort and then, to her surprise, love with Porgy.

Angel Blue is an extraordinary Bess. She veers between brashness and uncertainty, her voice loud and almost harsh when singing with Crown—particularly when they find themselves reunited after a church picnic—but somehow both gentler, stronger and smoother with Porgy, particularly in the beautiful “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” duet. Two bass-baritones share the role of Porgy: Eric Owens, whom your correspondent did not see, and Kevin Short, who inhabited Porgy perfectly. Mr Short imbued him with a rough-hewn, good-humoured decency (though the orchestra did at times overwhelm his voice, which in longer phrasings tended toward thinness at the end).

The production surrounds the two stars with talent. Frederick Ballantine plays Sportin’ Life—the hustler who convinces Bess to come to New York with him at the play’s close, with the help of the “happy dust” to which Bess was once addicted—with a sinuous and snaky charm. And Latonia Moore’s supremely mournful rendition of “My Man’s Gone”, sung with remarkable range after Crown kills her husband, is the first act’s high point.

The chorus structures the opera, providing commentary, reaction and information. In keeping with the Gershwins’ wishes to stage the production with only black actors—a directive imposed to prevent whites from performing in blackface—the Met has hired a brilliant African-American chorus. Camille Brown’s kinetic, imaginative choreography also deserves mention.

To its credit, the Met has embraced the thorny questions that “Porgy and Bess” will always raise. Occasioned by this production, “Black Voices at the Met”, an exhibition limning the history of African-Americans on the company’s stage, will remain on display for the season in the theatre’s Founders Hall. The Met has also announced plans to stage “Fire Shut up in My Bones”, an opera by Terence Blanchard; it will be the first time the Met has ever staged an opera by an African-American composer.

“Porgy and Bess” continues at the Metropolitan Opera until February 15th