On September 2, 1935, George Gershwin...
signed his name to the completed orchestral score of the opera, Porgy and Bess. The composer called the seven- hundred-page score his masterpiece and never ceased to marvel that he had created it. Many critics consider Porgy and Bess to be the first and finest American opera. In February 1934, George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose and Dorothy Heyward began their collaboration on a libretto, songs, and music for Heyward's novel, Porgy, about the African-American "Gullah" culture of South Carolina. During the summer of 1934, George Gershwin spent several weeks on Folly Island off the coast of Charleston, where the Heywards owned a beach cottage. There, he and Heyward observed customs of the local people and listened to their music. Gershwin joined in their "shouting" which involved rhythms created by hands and feet as accompaniment to the spirituals. The play opened in Boston on September 30 and premiered in New York on October 10, 1935. The cast included Juilliard-trained singers Anne Brown as Bess and Ruby Elzy as Serena, Todd Duncan, a Howard University music professor as Porgy, and vaudevillian John W. Bubbles as Sportin' Life. The songs they sang, including "Summertime," "I've Got Plenty of Nothin'," "Bess, You is My Woman Now," and "It Ain't Necessarily So," have entered the American folk and popular repertoire, but are musically subtle and difficult to render, containing jazz, blues, and folk elements. George Gershwin wrote of his composition, "I think the music is so marvelous, I don't believe I wrote it."
Most reviewers welcomed the opera. One notable exception was composer Virgil Thomson who had collaborated with Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera with an all-black cast. Thomson called Porgy and Bess "crooked folklore and half-way opera." In spite of these sour notes, the opera played to appreciative audiences in Boston and New York.
