Porgy and Bess

I was in my second year of medical school when they played Porgy and Bess here in São Paulo, at a theater that no longer exists. Of course I loved Rhapsody in Blue. Of course I loved George Gershwin’s popular songs, like Embraceable You, Someone to Watch Over Me, The Man I Love, and so on, and so on. Of course I had to go and see it.

I did not have much money, so I bought a ticket on the highest part of the theater. I remember that on the main floor there were many very well dressed colored people. I was happy to see that in my town there was a high class of colored people, I did not know that they existed.

I remember that the company had four Porgys and three Besses, because they had to sing for long periods of time and it was difficult for any single singer to do it every night. On my night Bess was Leontyne Price. She was very young then, of course you know how famous she became since then.

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I was dazzled. I was flabbergasted. I still am when I hear Summertime, or Bess, You Is my Woman Now, or Oh Lord, I’m on my Way. 

It seems that George and Ira Gershwin went to a theater one night to see a play named Porgy, written by Dorothy Heyward and based on a story written by her husband DuBose Heyward. Undoubtedly they liked it very much, for George somehow got hold of Dubose Heyward’s telephone number and simply informed him: “We are going to write an opera.”

George and Ira went to Charleston, South Carolina, to feel the atmosphere. DuBose wrote the book and collaborated with Ira in writing the lyrics. The result was the masterpiece that we all know.

Allan Jay Lerner, a famous American lyricist – he wrote the lyrics for My Fair Lady, Camelot, and so many other musicals – wrote that DuBose Heyward was one of the best American lyricists of all time. Something quite surprising, for the only lyrics he ever wrote were those of Porgy and Bess. But when we listen carefully to the words in Summertime, we will easily concede that Lerner was right.

Summertime, and the living is easy...

Also Stephen Sondheim stated that Heyward's lyrics for Summertime and My Man's Gone Now are "the best lyrics in  musical theater".

Porgy and Bess, completed in 1935, was Gershwin's most ambitious composition. But the critics did not like it. Unlike Bizet, who died in desperation with the failure of Carmen, Gershwin knew that it was his masterpiece. And it is now regarded as one of the most important American operas of the 20th century.

George died in 1937, when he was 39 years old, of a benign brain tumor. Dr. Harvey Cushing, the father of modern neurosurgery, was called to attend him, but he was away in a medical meeting and did not arrive in time. Today, with the available microsurgical techniques, it would have been very easy for us to save his life.

There is no way to tell us what more he could achieve if he had a longer life, being such a fantastic composer.