Kittiwah has no room for changes. The only thing I’d say about it, now that Sportin’ Life starts to carry his weight, is that I believe it’s an error to cast the part with a classically trained tenor, even one who’s entirely with the idiom of his songs. It may be true that the voice of John W. Bubbles, Gershwin’s personal choice for the part, would not quite carry against orchestra and chorus in the opera house. And on the sociopolitical front, his identity as a vaudeville song-and-dance man (and as such, in line of descent from minstrel-show performers) is up for cancellation. But remember, we’re favoring art here, and a presence like that of Cab Calloway, established nightclub and film star with a strong, clear—but not legit—voice (check him out on the ’52 Berlin radio performance) is, I’m pretty sure, the right kind for the role. Who that would be today, I don’t know.

In Act 2, Scene 3, the sense of the incidental and habitual happenings, the atmosphere of an ongoing everyday life, which our staging has tried to keep hold of, shows its value. As one of my correspondents noted, the cries of the Strawberry Woman and Crab Man seemed like abstractions, occurrences in a vacuum, in the Met production. These aren’t supposed to be star turns; they’re cameos, emerging from the fabric of the courtyard life and putting Bess’s trauma temporarily on background, then fading away. And they’re supposed to include the Honey Man’s return, restored to his place as Archdale promised, and this time getting some sympathetic interest. So back in he goes. And the pace of this interlude is slow, so we are extending and restoring here, for the sake of the fulfillment of elements that can otherwise seem like detached effects. At the top of Scene 4, something must be done to shorten the ensemble sections. The opening prayer sextette, the following choral sequence, and “Oh, Dere’s Somebody Knockin’ at de Do'” collectively outlast their dramatic value before Crown comes bursting out of the storm into the room, like Peter Grimes into the pub. Crown must dominate the scene; the antagonist powers are at their height. I leave these redactions to the expert ministrations of the musical and choral directors, once they have returned from drowning their sorrows over the losses they and their forces have suffered in the course of the act. For a few thoughts on the ending of the opera, see my original article.

I don’t know if Porgy can ever be wrestled into total submission. But there is so much in it that is wonderful, and its tale is so quintessentially American, that we have to keep trying. I’ve outlined one direction, the one that seems most promising to me.

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And further to my post of Oct. 11: On October 30 (print edition), the New York Times printed a brief article by Michael Cooper, under the title of “Yannick Nézet-Séguin Takes Over the Met’s Young Artist Program.” Noting first that this project (The Lindemann Young Artist Program) had been left under a cloud following the abuse scandal that led to James Levine’s exit from the company, the piece first quoted N-S on the importance of ” . . . a re-evaluation of what it means to be in power, and what is the correct way to foster a culture where everybody feels that they are respected and that they can develop”—thoughts to which no one can take exception. N-S goes on to say that in the course of many auditions ” . . . sometimes we’re finding that maybe young singers, it seems that they want to fit a mold that’s already prepared . . . and that maybe at some point in their development they’ve shut down their own personality.” And further:”I think that what the audience wants to hear is . . . people who actually have something very individualized to say . . . “