2. A few remarks on these early singers: Tibbett sounds more “black” than Duncan. He’s a  white performer singing from the transliterations the lyricists (primarily Ira Gershwin, but also the Heywards and in a few spots Mamoulian, the director of both the Heywards’ play and the opera) had made of the speech of the Charleston and island communities, inevitably tweaked for theatrical clarity. Tibbett was used to this, for he frequently programmed songs in a range of dialects, as actors did when dealing with the texts of Eugene O’Neill and other playwrights. This was of course an attempt not to comment or condescend, but to inhabit the character—to not merely empathize, but be at one with him—necessarily embracing the ethnic/linguistic elements of expression. It’s not “cultural appropriation;” it’s the actor’s central task, and Tibbett was very good at it in the classical singing context. I wasn’t on Catfish Row c. 1920, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the transliterations, but given the deep familiarity of the creators with the culture they were evoking, I suspect it’s not far from the mark. How it looks on the page is irrelevant (take a glance at, for instance, the Scandinavian/American of O’Neill’s Anna Christie for a non-African-American comparison). What counts is how persuasive it is from the mouth of an actor or singer with superior gifts of ear and voice.

Duncan was a fine singer. It’s a pleasure to hear his burnished baritone run freely and unaffectedly through the music, save for a straight high note or two, and in “Bess, You is My Woman Now” he catches an intimate tone with simple means. He’s a much less vivid actor-with-the-voice than Tibbett, though, and his Porgy has a cultivated, even elegant, profile, a tendency for the unaffectedness to turn to emotional diffidence, that I find strange for the character. Anne Brown is a little more limited vocally, not free to let fly at the top, though the voice is attractive and she, like Duncan, sings with appealing directness and verbal clarity. Among the performances uploaded by Horowitz, I found Elzy (with a higher-timbred, more fragile soprano than we’ve become accustomed to for Serena) interesting for her bluesy, natural-sounding approach and a wonderful cadential wail at the end of “My Man’s Gone Now.” Bubbles, in a clip taped from a TV show, perhaps around the time he finally recorded his songs for yet another RCA Victor highlights album (1963, with Leontyne Price and William Warfield, conducted by Skitch Henderson) is captivating. I derived very little from Holliday’s “I Loves You Porgy,” but a lot from Nina Simone’s riveting version of the same song. I hope it’s understood that neither Holliday nor Simone could have sung the role.

3. I’ve now seen six productions of Porgy. I’m tempted to say the one I enjoyed the most was the first. This was during the 1953-54 New York run of the long-touring Robert Breen/Blevins Davis version, originally starring Price and Warfield, which treated the piece more as a musical than as the “folk opera” Gershwin had christened it. By the time I saw it, Warfield had departed, and it happened that on the night I was there, Price’s alternate, Urylee Leonardos, played Bess.  I much enjoyed her singing, and that of LaVern Hutcherson as Porgy, and the inimitable Cab Calloway as Sportin’ Life. But then, I was 19; I was just off a long tour, feeling myself part of the theatre world, and on a date; the show was in the splendid Joseph Urban-designed Ziegfeld Theatre; and I still didn’t know much about it beyond its hit songs. So let’s not put much weight on memories of the experience—except that I do recall my feelings at the end of the evening, as Porgy headed through the courtyard arch in his goat cart: Poor Porgy. He’s lost the love of his life, and is never going to find her, no matter how far he gets or how hard he tries. He and the chorus can sing about being on the way to the Promis’ Lan’, and the song that they and Porgy sing is supposed to make me feel uplifted, but it doesn’t, quite. It feels like a rather perfunctory, conventional musical-comedy happy ending tacked onto a deeply felt tragic story.^(I)