George Gershwin - Porgy and Bess (Analysis)

In Catfish Row, private stories share a courtyard, a community of voices, and the danger of the sea. 

i Work Information

Composer:

George Gershwin (1898–1937)

Title:

Porgy and Bess

Year of composition:

1934–1935; collaboration on the project began in 1933

First performance:

30 September 1935, Colonial Theatre, Boston

Genre:

Opera; American folk opera

Musical Period:

Twentieth-century American music; operatic writing engaging with jazz, blues, and spirituals

Structure:

Three acts, nine scenes

Duration:

approx. 160–190 minutes of music, depending on version and cuts

Instrumentation:

Soloists, chorus, and orchestra; additional spoken roles

Libretto and lyrics:

Libretto by DuBose Heyward; lyrics by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin; based on Porgy, the play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward

New York premiere:

10 October 1935, Alvin Theatre; Theatre Guild; staged by Rouben Mamoulian, conducted by Alexander Smallens

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George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is a three-act opera about a precarious love affair set within the daily life of an African American community. “Summertime” is first sung by Clara to her baby. When the melody returns in Bess’s voice in Act III, the child’s parents have been lost in the hurricane. The music is unchanged, but its meaning has deepened. That is why songs familiar far beyond the opera house carry a musical memory within the drama that a collection of excerpts cannot fully convey.

The three-act opera was first performed in Boston on 30 September 1935, before opening in New York on 10 October. DuBose Heyward based the libretto on his 1925 novel Porgy and the play he developed with Dorothy Heyward. The lyrics are by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. These distinctions matter: the work emerged through the collaboration of a dramatist, a composer steeped in American song, a lyricist, and performers whose contribution helped turn the written parts into a theatrical world.

That world is Catfish Row, a fictional courtyard community in Charleston, South Carolina. Porgy, a disabled beggar, shelters Bess after her partner Crown kills a man and flees. Their developing relationship is threatened by Crown’s coercion, Bess’s drug dependency, and Sportin’ Life’s manipulation. Around them, fishermen go to work, neighbours raise burial money, vendors call their wares, and women gather to pray. The community has its own daily rhythms, rather than existing solely to observe the central couple.

Gershwin’s description American folk opera identifies a creative ambition, not a documentary collection of traditional music. He composed his own melodies in dialogue with spirituals, blues, jazz, and popular song, placing them within scenes shaped by arias, duets, recitative, chorus, and sustained orchestral writing. Opera already had an American history. The distinctive achievement here lies in the particular dramatic work these musical languages are made to do.

The opera also represents Black life through the work of white authors, and its language and characterisation have prompted substantial criticism. Gershwin’s visit to the Charleston area in summer 1934 and his encounters with Gullah culture do not turn the score into ethnography. Its musical achievement, its opportunities for Black performers, and the limitations of its representation belong within the same discussion. Listening attentively requires room for all three.

Movements / Structure

The original design comprises three acts and nine scenes. Modern productions sometimes arrange the evening in two parts with one interval; that presentation should be distinguished from the opera’s underlying architecture. This discussion follows the full operatic sequence rather than a later adaptation with spoken dialogue. Running times vary considerably with cuts.

Act	Scenes and action	Musical function
I — 2 scenes	The courtyard and Robbins’s murder; the gathering for his burial.	Piano and lullaby lead to communal mourning; Bess finds shelter with Porgy.
II — 4 scenes	Catfish Row; the Kittiwah picnic; Bess’s illness; shelter during the hurricane.	Lyrical intimacy is tested by Crown and Sportin’ Life; the chorus assumes a larger dramatic scale.
III — 3 scenes	Mourning and Crown’s death; interrogation and Bess’s manipulation; Porgy’s return and departure.	The lullaby changes singers; music leads from loss to a decision to search, without guaranteeing its outcome.

Act I introduces the community and allows Porgy and Bess’s relationship to begin. In Act II, the changing settings—the courtyard, the picnic, Bess’s sickroom, and the hurricane shelter—test that relationship in different ways. Act III concentrates on the consequences. Daily life continues when Porgy comes home, yet Bess’s absence changes both his experience of the courtyard and our own.

Musical Analysis

The central question is how an opera containing so many memorable, independent songs sustains a larger dramatic argument. Its coherence depends on returning material, orchestral connections, and the changing relationship between individual voices and the community. At one moment the music grants a character a private span of time; at another it draws that person back into the shared life of the courtyard.

Act I — Courtyard, Lullaby, and Mourning

The opera does not open directly with “Summertime.” A vigorous orchestral introduction leads into the episode with Jasbo Brown at the piano. Strong rhythmic articulation, displaced accents, and dance establish a place where music belongs to daily activity. The piano has a specific theatrical role: Jasbo plays, and people respond to his playing. Clara’s lullaby then changes the scale of attention. Public, physical energy gives way to a mother caring for her child.

“Summertime” unfolds through a readily grasped melodic contour and phrases that allow the singer to sustain and colour individual words. Its minor colouring tempers the ease promised by the text. Repetition and the accompaniment’s measured movement offer steadiness without removing the undertow of melancholy. Within the scene, the lullaby is an action: Clara is reassuring a particular child in circumstances whose insecurity the audience will soon discover.

Jake, Clara’s husband, follows with “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” Its sharper rhythmic delivery and the other men’s responses turn an intimate family moment into public teasing. Two contrasting kinds of song illuminate the same household. Meanwhile, the dice game creates another centre of activity. Rather than introducing its characters through a neat sequence of portraits, the opening scene lets several kinds of social behaviour occupy the courtyard together.

When Crown and Bess arrive, the dice game turns violent. Crown kills Robbins and flees, leaving Bess to face the hostility of her neighbours. Against that rejection, Porgy’s offer of shelter becomes an important dramatic act. The music changes with the situation: regular song patterns give way to interruptions, brief reactions, and increasing orchestral tension. The courtyard where a lullaby and dancing were heard has become a place of fear.

In Scene 2, the neighbours gather around Robbins’s body and raise money for his burial. His widow Serena sings “My Man’s Gone Now.” Wide melodic leaps, sustained climaxes, and insistent repetitions lift her lament beyond the rhythms of ordinary speech. The chorus responds to her solitary voice, placing individual grief within a communal expression reminiscent of spirituals.

The scene also brings police questioning and Peter’s detention as a witness. The white officials’ speech breaks into the inhabitants’ sung world. This is a particular choice in the opera’s theatrical language, rather than a general alternation between dialogue and songs. By the act’s close, Bess’s participation in the neighbours’ religious expression suggests a possible place within the community. The distance between the isolated woman of the first scene and the participant in the second has begun to narrow.

Act II — Intimacy under Pressure

Act II returns to the world of work. In “It Takes a Long Pull to Get There,” the steady pulse and the group’s responses give an audible shape to the fishermen’s coordinated effort. Porgy’s “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’” then brings his private happiness into that shared world. Its recurring rhythmic patterns and memorable melody express his delight in having Bess with him.

Porgy declares himself happy despite having almost nothing. This is one man’s happiness at a particular moment, however, not a general celebration of poverty. Work, money, and bargaining remain part of life in Catfish Row, even in Frazier’s comic sale of a supposed divorce to Bess. Heard within that world, the song becomes more personal and less easily mistaken for a statement about the whole community.

In “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” longer melodic spans and broader breathing create a different experience of time. The voices exchange assurances and find increasing musical closeness, while the accompaniment lets them inhabit their shared moment. That lyrical fullness has a practical dramatic purpose. We must hear what the couple has established if later threats are to register as the possible loss of something substantial. The duet can succeed in concert; in the opera, it becomes a measure of the intimacy at stake.

Preparations for the church picnic on Kittiwah Island return attention to the group. Porgy stays behind while Bess joins the excursion. On the island, Sportin’ Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” turns irreverent treatment of biblical stories into a performance within the performance. Syncopation, returning phrases, and exchanges with the crowd demonstrate his ability to command attention. His rhythmic ease is attractive, while Serena’s disapproval reminds us that this entertainment takes place within a community governed partly by religious expectations.

The scene changes when Crown emerges from hiding. Bess tries to leave with the departing group, but he forces her to remain. The music’s heightened pressure must be understood alongside that coercion. A description in which Bess simply yields to temptation erases the unequal power of the encounter. Her relationship with Porgy is being threatened by more than an uncomplicated choice between two men.

Back in Catfish Row, Bess is ill. Serena’s prayer, the vendors’ cries, and the ongoing courtyard activity place her fever within a daily life that continues around her. Each passing vendor has a distinct melodic profile and manner of delivery, creating a sense of depth through voices that enter and recede. When Bess tells Porgy she fears Crown’s return, “I Loves You, Porgy” becomes a request for protection. Its more restrained lyricism differs from the confidence of their earlier duet.

The hurricane warning bell enlarges the danger beyond the couple. In Scene 4 the neighbours shelter in Serena’s room as the storm rages outside. Choral prayer, insistent repetition, and accumulating orchestral energy bring human voices into contact with an overwhelming external threat. Listen to how a phrase that might sound settled on its own becomes anxious when other entries and the pressure of the orchestra gather around it.

Crown enters and sets a provocative song against the prayers. Conflict emerges through competing forms of musical behaviour within one room. When Clara sees Jake’s overturned boat, she entrusts her child to Bess and runs into the storm. Crown follows to help. The act ends before the consequences of these actions are known. The chorus has enlarged the musical scale, yet attention remains fixed on a few people beyond the shelter.

Act III — What a Returning Melody Remembers

After the hurricane, the women mourn Jake and Clara, and Crown is also presumed dead. Bess now sings “Summertime” to the orphaned child. The melody is familiar, but the listener knows something that was unknown at the beginning: the mother who first sang it will not return. Repetition connects those moments without requiring a new musical explanation of loss. It also reveals Bess’s capacity for care, extending her character beyond the men’s competing claims upon her.

Crown returns secretly, and Porgy kills him. This removes one threat while creating further consequences. In the following scene, the women resist police questioning by providing Serena with an alibi. Their coordinated musical responses meet the officials’ spoken demands. Ensemble writing becomes an expression of practical solidarity: the inhabitants organise themselves to limit the power being exercised over them. Between the celebrated songs, this encounter reveals how actively the community participates in the drama.

Porgy is taken away to identify Crown’s body, a demand he finds terrifying and resists. His absence gives Sportin’ Life access to Bess. In “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,” a supple, appealing musical manner accompanies the promise of escape. The familiar glamour of American song acquires a disturbing function. Sportin’ Life combines the attractiveness of his proposal with drugs and the fear that Porgy will never return. We hear the persuasion while seeing how it is constructed.

When Porgy comes back a week later, his good spirits encounter his neighbours’ discomfort. He distributes gifts, calls for Bess, and gradually discovers she has left. Waiting for a voice that does not answer changes the courtyard’s acoustic meaning: the familiar place now contains an absence. “Oh, Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess?” gives the discovery time and emotional weight. The opera allows him to experience the loss before moving towards his final decision.

The closing “Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way” carries Porgy from lament into movement. Choral support and greater tonal decisiveness can create a powerful sense of uplift. The plot supplies no assurance that he will find Bess. Musical resolution exceeds narrative certainty, allowing hope to remain present without undoing the events that preceded it.

The complete 2002 Lincoln Center production offers a continuous route through the opera, placing its familiar songs within the scenes that surround them.

Song, Recitative, and Orchestral Continuity

Porgy and Bess contains recognisably shaped musical numbers. Their melodic periods, repetitions, and clear endings help them lodge in the memory. Between them, recitative carries news, negotiation, and conflict through phrases that follow speech more closely. The orchestra connects these different experiences of time and sustains material capable of returning when the situation changes.

Harmony contributes to that differentiation. Clearer melodic surfaces coexist with chromatic connections and denser chords in passages of unease. Added-note sonorities and blues colouring offer different degrees of tension within a largely tonal language. Labelling each such sound “jazz” tells us too little: its dramatic effect depends on rhythm, texture, and its position within the scene.

Cuts therefore change more than duration. Remove transitions, interrogations, and the courtyard’s passing voices, and the opera begins to resemble a song anthology. Retain them, and the melodies’ place within a larger musical and social organisation becomes easier to hear. Charles Hamm’s research on the 1935 production nevertheless establishes an essential qualification: Gershwin approved many early cuts himself. The longest published score cannot simply be equated with the version heard at the first New York performances.

Who Sings, and Who Holds Power?

In the opera’s design, the Black characters have sung roles, while the white figures of authority—the police, the Coroner, and the lawyer Archdale—speak. This boundary between vocal worlds is audible whenever officials enter the courtyard. Spoken demands interrupt the continuity of song, reminding us that these figures can interrogate, detain, and shape the inhabitants’ lives.

Kai West’s recent study examines this contrast as part of the opera’s representation of race relations. It also draws attention to the inhabitants’ responses: music can express fear, but it can support coordinated resistance as well. This is an interpretation of the score, rather than a simple moral division between singing and speech. Archdale, for example, helps secure Peter’s release, while still operating within an unequal social order.

Casting history requires similar care. Giving the principal Black roles to Black performers mattered profoundly at a time of exclusion from major opera stages. That does not mean every role was sung, or that every original performer had an identical musical training. Nor can the participation of outstanding Black artists, by itself, settle objections to the text’s stereotypes. The work’s theatrical history has been shaped by the opportunities it offered and by the resistance of the people who performed it.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

A Performance and the Seats in the House

When George Gershwin began searching for the singer who would create the role of Porgy, Todd Duncan was teaching voice at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Trained in classical music, Duncan was initially hesitant about working with a composer best known for popular songs. In his later account, he recalled wanting to hear the music before agreeing. What he heard persuaded him to accept the part.

His Bess would be Anne Wiggins Brown, who had studied at the Institute of Musical Art and Juilliard; another Juilliard graduate, Ruby Elzy, sang Serena. Eva Jessye prepared the chorus, and Alexander Smallens conducted. The company brought together performers with different professional backgrounds. Their work was to give musical and physical life to Catfish Row, turning people already known from a novel and a play into living characters on the operatic stage.

The opera opened at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on 30 September 1935. Ten days later, on 10 October, Rouben Mamoulian’s production reached the Alvin Theatre in New York. Broadway offered visibility, but it also demanded commercial endurance from a large-scale opera. The New York engagement closed on 25 January 1936 after 124 performances. It did not recover its initial investment; that financial result, however, tells only part of the story of its reception.

The first production then continued on tour. In March 1936 it reached Washington, where the company was scheduled to appear at the National Theatre. A programme preserved by the Library of Congress advertises the engagement for the week beginning Monday 16 March. Duncan was returning to the city where he taught. Yet the theatre presented an obstacle that had nothing to do with the score or the staging: Black people were excluded from its audience.

The contradiction was unmistakable. Black performers had been engaged to sing an opera about an African American community, while Black listeners were denied seats in the auditorium. Duncan and Brown refused to perform under those conditions. Brown later recalled pressure from the Theatre Guild, the production company, to fulfil the engagement. The two principals held to their decision.

The theatre eventually admitted Black and white audience members to those performances together. The singers’ refusal had brought about a specific change: people previously barred from the auditorium could now hear Porgy and Bess. But the concession applied to that engagement. It did not permanently end segregation at the National.

The theatre’s later history makes the distinction clear. According to the National Theatre’s own account, the management’s refusal to integrate led to its closure as a venue for live performance in 1948. It reopened without segregation only in 1952. The March 1936 decision was a genuine achievement, not a permanent settlement.

Within months of its premiere, then, the opera’s history had been shaped not only by its creators and audiences but by the choices of its performers. Duncan and Brown insisted that access to the music should not depend on the colour of a listener’s skin. In Washington, during that week of performances, their stand changed who could sit in the theatre and hear them sing.

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🎧 Listening Guide

For a first complete listening, follow a few changes that can be recognised without reading a score. Subtitles, where available, are useful: the shorter exchanges often explain why the next song means what it does.

Before the lullaby: hear the energy of the introduction and Jasbo Brown’s piano. The transition to Clara makes the shift from public activity to private care immediately tangible.

In Serena’s lament: notice how her voice moves beyond conversational rhythm and how the neighbours give mourning a communal form. Listen, too, for the interruption created by the officials’ speech.

Across the love scenes: compare the broad assurances of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” with the vulnerable appeal of “I Loves You, Porgy.” Their changing vocal character follows the changing relationship.

On Kittiwah: attend to Sportin’ Life’s management of an audience. The group’s responses establish his influence before his later acts of manipulation.

During the hurricane: distinguish the prayers from Crown’s song and follow the orchestra’s pressure around them. Conflict is audible in the way different voices occupy the room together.

In Act III: recognise “Summertime” in Bess’s voice and remember who first sang it. At the end, allow the music’s uplift to coexist with uncertainty about Porgy’s journey.

🎶 Further Listening

The scale of the opera and the independent lives of its songs emerge differently through these clearly identified approaches.

• Todd Duncan, Anne Brown, Alexander Smallens — historical selections. Naxos Historical 8.110219–20 gathers recordings involving artists from the early productions. Valuable for diction and vocal style, it should be distinguished from a complete live document of the 1935 premiere.
• Lorin Maazel, Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus — Willard White, Leona Mitchell. The Decca recording offers an extensive operatic experience, making room for the choral and orchestral connections beyond the most familiar songs.
• Simon Rattle, London Philharmonic Orchestra — Willard White, Cynthia Haymon. Glyndebourne’s 1986 production, directed by Trevor Nunn, provides a substantial theatrical route into the work. The later television version derives from this staging; the orchestra is the London Philharmonic.
• Miles Davis and Gil Evans — Porgy and Bess. This jazz reinterpretation, also linked in the official Gershwin catalogue, makes an illuminating comparison with the opera. Instrumental reworking changes the melodies’ breathing and colour; the album develops selected material rather than presenting the complete stage work.

📚 Further Reading

These readings open different questions: the work’s creation, the relationship between score and performance, and the place of race relations within the music.

• Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work. University of California Press, 2007. A substantial monograph on the composer’s creative and professional environment, recommended for study beyond the sources examined here.
• Charles Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production of Porgy and Bess.” JAMS 40/3 (1987), pp. 495–532. Examines evidence from the first production and the historical complications behind the idea of a “complete version.”
• Kai West, “Buckra: Whiteness and Porgy and Bess.” JAMS 75/2 (2022), pp. 319–377. Studies the inhabitants’ encounters with white characters and their treatment in successive productions.

🔗 Related Works

Comparison is most useful when it follows particular musical or theatrical relationships, while allowing each work its own direction.

• George Gershwin — Rhapsody in Blue. Bringing American popular idioms into a concert work provides a useful comparison with their theatrical functions in the opera.
• George Gershwin — An American in Paris. The orchestra organises a world of movement and changing colour without a staged plot or sung dialogue.
• Georges Bizet — Carmen. Songs within the action, social marginalisation, and gendered violence offer substantial points of comparison. The two central women nevertheless require distinct readings.
• Kurt Weill — Die Dreigroschenoper / The Threepenny Opera. The ease with which a song becomes public entertainment while commenting on social behaviour reveals another relationship between music and theatre.
• Leonard Bernstein — West Side Story. Community, dance, violence, and love enter a later form of American music theatre, within a different social setting and musical architecture.

🎼 Closing Reflection

A melody can travel much further than the people who first sang it. “Summertime” now belongs to voices and instruments that seem far removed from Catfish Row. Returning to the opera gives us back a child, a mother, and, later, another woman taking that child into her care.

The familiar tune becomes particular again. Its beauty remains, carrying the small additional weight that things acquire when we know to whom they once belonged.

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📖 Bibliography and Sources

The historical narrative draws on performance programmes, institutional archives, and recollections of the original performers. Opera-company guides were used to check the dramatic sequence, while musicological research informed the discussion of versions and representation. Score catalogues helped identify editions; they did not replace the study of a complete musical score.

Primary and Editorial Documents

George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess: Vocal Score with Piano Reduction. New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation, 1935. First edition, Morgan Library & Museum catalogue, no. 113492.

Library of Congress, A Night at the Opera: Beyond Verdi and Wagner. Items 050 (annotated page from the stage manager’s score) and 051 (National Theatre programme for the week beginning 16 March 1936).

George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” The New York Times, 20 October 1935; reprinted in Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (eds.), The George Gershwin Reader, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 218–221. Bibliographical information and editorial summary were consulted.

Musicological Research and Performance History

Ray White, “Catfish Row Comes to New York: The Genesis of Porgy and Bess,” Library of Congress — In the Muse, 25 April 2025.

Charles Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production of Porgy and Bess,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 40/3 (1987), pp. 495–532. The published abstract, rather than the complete article, was consulted.

Kai West, “Buckra: Whiteness and Porgy and Bess,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 75/2 (2022), pp. 319–377.

Jesse Rhodes, “Todd Duncan: We Love You, Porgy,” Smithsonian Magazine, 6 February 2009.

Jenna Clark Embrey, “An American Odyssey: Porgy and Bess Through the Years,” American Repertory Theater, 1 August 2011.

Susan Jackson, “Time Capsule: Juilliard Porgy Connections,” The Juilliard School, 20 December 2019.

The National Theatre Foundation, History of The National, entries for 1948 and 1952.

Internet Broadway Database, Porgy and Bess, original Broadway production, no. 11998.

Dramatic Sequence and Listening Resources

The Atlanta Opera, Porgy and Bess: Educator’s Guide, 2020 production guide, especially pp. 5–9. A misprinted premiere year on p. 2 was checked against other sources and not adopted.

English National Opera, “The History of George Gershwin’s Summertime.”

Gershwin Enterprises, Porgy and Bess, official work and recording catalogue.

Naxos Historical, no. 8.110219–20; Decca Classics, Gershwin: Porgy and Bess (Lorin Maazel); Glyndebourne Opera Archive, 1986 production.