Crown, interesting in the verbal text for his sheer nerve, indifference to social opinion, and scorn for piety (and remember that, granting his ulterior motive, it is he, and not any of the God-fearers, who heads back out into the storm to search for Clara), is not interesting in the music. Except for the brief “A Redheaded Woman” in the Storm Scene (cut from the Met production), Gershwin somehow never located him, and just wrote boilerplate Bad-Guy continuity for him. On the other hand, Sportin’ Life, the other antagonist, has two of the score’s most brilliant songs, and is ultimately the more dangerous of the two. Instead of defying God, he mocks Him, and instead of promising the Heavenly Land, he promises fun, which is sorely lacking, and perhaps the safer bet. So with a big assist from Happy Dust, he makes a clean getaway with Bess, whereas Crown is taken care of by Porgy. And, by the way, if we’re looking at Porgy and Bess as morality play, we do have to recognize that that’s murder, and premeditated. (“If dere weren’t no Crown, Bess, if dere was only just you and Porgy, what den’?”) We’re all for it, of course, it’s in the “No jury would convict him” category if we are the jury, and a gratifying win for the underdog. We could even say that, in the fine old knightly Protagonist Couple tradition, it’s the ultimate chivalric deed of slaying the evil antagonist. But it’s still murder, and somehow never figures in the call for politically acceptable revision. (See below, however.)

6. The “Core” of “Porgy”. I have several times seen it asserted that the opera’s “core” is to be found in the choral sequences. In her thoughtful program note, Helen M. Greenwald calls the chorus the opera’s “infrastructure.” That’s a good way of putting it. But an infrastructure doesn’t do anything. It just sits in place while things go on inside it or pass through it—in the case of a stage piece, the actions of characters, the events of scenes, in short, the plot. And in Porgy and Bess, the story of the two title characters and their antagonists must move through, over, and around many miles of infrastructure to get where it’s going. The infrastructure is very handsomely designed, and sometimes it helps speed the story along its way, or at least travels along with it. But just as often, it gets in the story’s way, or leads it back around to places it’s already been. A narrative has a spine, not a core. To dispense with the metaphor: Porgy‘s choral numbers, any of which is beautiful and impressive in and of itself, are so numerous and repetitive in effect that the momentum and suspense of the story is arrested.

The two scenes of Act 1 hang together. By their end, we have already been through the wringer with Serena’s powerful song, the communal mourning of “He’s gone, gone, gone,” the crowdfunding chorus of “Overflow, overflow,” a short reprise of “He’s gone, gone, gone,” and then the buck-up spiritual, “Oh, the train is at the station.” We have about covered the emotional range and musical vocabulary the chorus can give us, and the plot has passed its expository phase: Crown has killed Robbins, Porgy has taken Bess in, Bess has gotten religion and jumped up to lead the last of these choral numbers, and by joining in, the community has signaled its acceptance of her. So ends the beginning of Beginning, Middle, and End, as defined by the score’s division of acts. Now comes Middle.