Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
May 11-12-13, 2012
86th Season / Subscription Concert No. 8
Michael Allsen

In our closing concert, the Madison Symphony Orchestras celebrates the music of George Gershwin (1898-1937). We begin with three of Gershwin’s orchestral works, starting with the lively Cuban Overture and his An American in Paris. Three guest artists will make their Madison Symphony Orchestra debuts at this program, beginning with pianist Martina Filjak and the famous Rhapsody in Blue. Maestro DeMain has a special relationship with Gershwin’s most ambitious stage work, Porgy and Bess: he has led dozens of productions of the opera worldwide, and won a Grammy Award for his recording of the work with the Houston Grand Opera. Our soloists for a concert version of Porgy and Bess will be soprano Laquita Mitchell, and baritone Michael Redding.

From Tin Pan Alley to the concert hall

George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Russian-Jewish family. When the family bought a piano in 1910, young George was immediately smitten, and began to teach himself to play. By 1914, he quit school and went to work in Tin Pan Alley, New York’s famous songwriting district. Gershwin worked as a pianist and a “song-plugger” for a successful publisher, recording player piano rolls of the latest hits. Before long, he was writing his own songs, and in 1919 scored a huge hit with Swanee, which was popularized by the ruling King of Broadway, Al Jolson. George began to make a name for himself as a Broadway composer, and beginning in 1921, collaborated frequently with his brother Ira, a successful lyricist. Gershwin loved celebrity, and would seek the center of attention in any group. There are many stories about how, at any party, he would sit at the piano as soon as he arrived, and play brilliant improvisations on his own songs for hours.

Though he was becoming famous as a musician, Gershwin also realized the limitations of his own largely self-taught musical background, and continued to seek out formal lessons on piano and composition. He was well aware of the gulf between Popular and Classical styles and wrote several early pieces that went beyond the standardized popular song form. His first public attempt at what he referred to as “serious” music was Blue Monday, a short opera produced as part of George White’s Scandals of 1922. The Scandals shows were fairly typical 1920s Broadway revues—lots of lighthearted music and scantily-clad showgirls, and very little plot. Blue Monday, inspired in part by the literature of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance (though it was presented in blackface) was a rather depressing little story about a gambler’s hard luck. It was presented at the opening performance of Scandals, to mixed reviews, and was promptly yanked from the show. Despite this early frustration, Gershwin continued a career that had two tracks. He was best known in his day for his popular work on Broadway, and later in Hollywood, but continued to write “serious” musical works throughout his career. The four works on our program are a cross-section of “Classical” Gershwin, showing his development as a composer in the most productive period of his life, 1924-1935. [NOTE: In the following, pieces are discussed in chronological order, rather than program order. -M.A.]

Rhapsody in Blue

Gershwin composed his Rhapsody in Blue in early 1924. The first performance, with Gershwin at the piano and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, took place in February of 1924, at Aeolian Hall in New York City. The Rhapsody was first performed by the Madison Symphony Orchestra in 1929, with Sigfrid Prager—the orchestra’s first conductor—at the piano. Additional performances were in 1963 (Arthur Becknell) and 2002 (Leon Bates). Duration 17:00.

By 1924, Gershwin was a success on Broadway, and well-regarded as a pianist. He had a full plate of musical theater commitments for that year, beginning with Sweet Little Devil, and the 1924 edition of White’s Scandals. It was at this time that Paul Whiteman, whose band had provided the background to Gershwin’s Blue Monday, conceived one of the most ambitious concerts of the Roaring ‘20s. Whiteman, the self-styled “King of Jazz” lead the Palais Royal Orchestra, one of New York’s best big bands, known for their sophisticated “society” arrangements of danceable jazz. He announced an “Experiment in Modern Music” for February 12, 1924, to be held at the venerable Aeolian Hall, a concert that would supposedly answer the question “What is American Music?” Whiteman planned to bring together Jazz of all styles with European Classical music, and newly-composed works by American composers such as Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert. Whiteman and Gershwin had earlier talked about a large-scale jazz-style orchestral work for the Whiteman Orchestra, and Whiteman expressed his hope that Gershwin would write one. This casual commitment became a fait accompli when Gershwin read in the New York Herald’s January 3 announcement that he would be composing a “Jazz concerto” for Whiteman’s grand concert!

Composing a concerto in just over a month was a daunting task for a composer who had never written a work of this scale. Gershwin was also heavily involved with the production of Sweet Little Devil, set to open in Boston on January 25. At the time, he was insecure about his qualifications to write a piece of “serious” music—he once joked that, in the early 1920s, everything he knew about harmony could be put on a three-cent stamp—and he had very little experience in orchestration. Rather than attempting a traditionally-conceived concerto, Gershwin settled on a “rhapsody”—a much less rigorous form that would allow him to develop musical ideas freely. According to a letter by Gershwin, the final inspiration for the score came during a train trip to Boston for the premiere of Sweet Little Devil:

“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang that is often stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the heart of noise—I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind, and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.”

Gershwin was a very fast composer, but not quite fast enough. He had the accompaniment finished in time for Whiteman’s staff arranger, Ferde Grofé, to orchestrate it, but left large chunks of the piano part to be improvised or played from memory at the concert.

Whiteman’s pretentious “Experiment” was a qualified success. All of the most influential New York critics were in attendance, as were many of the most important Classical musicians on the day: Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Walter Damrosch, Leopold Stokowski, and many others. The concert was an extremely long affair, and by the third hour, the audience’s attention was beginning to flag. However, Gershwin’s Rhapsody—the 24th work on a program of 25 pieces—stole the show. Olin Downes, reviewer for the New York Times, described the scene:

“It was late in the evening when the hero of the occasion appeared. Then stepped upon the stage, sheepishly, a lank and dark young man—George Gershwin. He was to play the piano part in the first public performance of his Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra. This composition shows extraordinary talent, just as it also shows a young composer with aims to go far beyond those of his ilk, struggling with a form of which he far from being master. His first theme alone, with its caprice, humor, and exotic outline, would show a talent to be reckoned with.”

The Rhapsody opens with a famous clarinet glissando, the trademark lick of Ross Gorman, Whiteman’s lead clarinetist, which Gershwin adopted as the perfect lead-in to the first theme. The piece develops freely, with one theme flowing naturally into the next, and with increasing intensity, until the piano takes a long solo and slows the tempo. The central section is based upon a Romantic melody that sounds like a nod to Tchaikovsky with a bit of Jazz punctuation. There is a recapitulation, and the piece ends aggressively, with the piano playing its loudest.

An American in Paris

An American in Paris was composed in 1928 and received its premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York City, on December 13, 1928. The work has been performed several times by the Madison Symphony Orchestra, most recently in 2002. Duration 19:00.

The premiere of Rhapsody in Blue was a career-making event for Gershwin. Within a year he was approached by Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Society (later merged with Stokowski’s New York Philharmonic). Damrosch, who had been at Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music,” gave Gershwin a commission for a “New York Concerto.” The result, the Concerto in F, is a more ambitious piece than the Rhapsody, and has become the most successful of all American piano concertos. In 1928, Damrosch offered a second commission, this time for an orchestral work.

In March, George and Ira Gershwin, together with their sister Frances and Ira’s wife Leonore, left for a European tour, spent mostly in Paris. Paris of the 1920s could still boast of its place at the center of the artistic universe: the city was host to a dazzling array of composers, sculptors, painters, Jazz musicians, dancers, writers, and poets—both French and foreign. Gershwin, who was still a bit self-conscious about his reputation as a “serious” composer, took every opportunity to schmooze the composers he admired most: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Ravel, and Milhaud. There is a well-known (though possibly apocryphal) story about a meeting with Stravinsky, with whom Gershwin hoped to study. Stravinsky abruptly asked Gershwin how much money he made, and Gershwin, put off guard, answered. “About a $100,000 a year.” “In that case,” replied Stravinsky, “I should study with you.”

Gershwin brought the unfinished score for the new orchestral piece with him to Europe, and sketched out much of the score in Paris that spring. In fact, several of his themes seem to have been conceived during an earlier, 1926 trip to Paris, long before there were any hints of a commission. He completed the full score and orchestration by November, 1928. Reviews of the first performance were decidedly mixed, but once again the best answer to the critics was success: An American in Paris became a standard of the orchestral repertoire almost as soon as it was premiered. Gershwin provided the following outline of the work:

“This new piece, really a rhapsodic ballet, is written very freely, and is the most modern music I’ve yet attempted. The opening part will be developed in a typical French style, in the manner of Debussy and the Six, though the themes are all original. My purpose here is to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris, as he strolls around the city, and listens to various street-noises and absorbs the French atmosphere.

“As in my other orchestral compositions, I’ve not endeavored to represent any definite scenes in this music. The rhapsody is programmatic only in a general impressionistic way, so that the individual listener can read into the music such as his imagination pictures for him.

“The opening gay section is followed by a rich blues with a strong rhythmic undercurrent. Our American friend, perhaps after strolling into a café and having a couple of drinks, has succumbed to a spasm of homesickness. He harmony here is both more intense and simple than in the preceding pages. This blues rises to a climax, followed by a coda in which the spirit of the music returns to the vivacity and bubbling exuberance of the opening part, with its impressions of Paris. Apparently the homesick American, having left the café and reached the open air, has disowned his spell of the blues, and once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life. At the conclusion, the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant.”

Gershwin’s use of the orchestra in this work is much more confident than in either the Rhapsody (which, after all was arranged almost entirely by Grofé) or the Concerto. There were some later, nasty rumors that Gershwin had had help with the orchestration of An American in Paris, but it appears that virtually every bit of this score is his. He felt no need in the completed score to include a piano part for himself, though the original score does have a piano part at several points which he later crossed out. The influence of Jazz is clearly audible, but the most prominent element is the variety of orchestral moods he projects and the ingenious ways he achieves them. The standard orchestra is augmented by saxophones, a huge array of percussion, and—one of Gershwin’s most prized souvenirs from his 1928 trip to Paris—a set of four French taxi-horns.

Cuban Overture

Gershwin composed his Cuban Overture in the summer of 1932. The work was performed for the first time at an all-Gershwin concert at Lewison Stadium in New York on August 16, 1932. Previous Madison Symphony Orchestra performances were in 1963, 1993, and 1996. Duration 10:00.

By 1932, Gershwin was at the pinnacle of his popularity. He and his brother Ira were among the most successful composer/lyricist teams on Broadway, and his “serious” works had earned respect from classical musicians. During the early summer of 1932, he took a vacation in Havana, staying for a few weeks of parties and good times. Gershwin was fascinated by the vivacious dance music of the Cuban capital, and came back to New York with a suitcase full of Cuban percussion instruments—maracas, bongos, claves, and guiros. It was perfectly natural that he would absorb this Cuban influence in a concert work. In August, he completed a brief orchestral work titled Rumba, now universally known as the Cuban Overture. The rumba rhythm, or clave, the basis of most Afro-Cuban dance music, appears here in a simplified form, as the musical basis of this composition.

Prior to composing the Cuban Overture, Gershwin spent a few months studying composition and musical form with Joseph Schillinger. His studies with Schillinger—a precise, mathematically-minded music theorist—may explain the rather academic tone Gershwin adopts in the program note he wrote for the first performance:

“The first part (Moderato e Molto Ritornato) is preceded by a (forte) introduction featuring some of the thematic material. Then comes a three part contrapuntal episode leading to a second theme. The first part finishes with a recurrence of the first theme combined with fragments of the second. A solo clarinet cadenza leads to a middle part, which is in a plaintive mood, It is a gradually developing canon in a polytonal manner. This part concludes with a climax based upon an ostinato of the theme in the canon, after which a sudden change in tempo brings us back to the rumba dance rhythms. The finale is a development of the preceding material in a stretto-like manner. This leads us back again to the main theme. The conclusion of the work is a Coda featuring the Cuban instruments of percussion.”

Despite the tone of Gershwin's program note, there is nothing dry or academic about the music. The introduction and first main section are dominated by the trumpets and even more prominently by the percussion. In a note to the score, Gershwin directs that the “Cuban instruments of percussion” are, quite literally, to take center stage—right in front of the conductor. Gershwin's quieter and “more plaintive” middle section has sensuous woodwind and string lines. At the conclusion, Gershwin turns up the heat and volume a bit further, returning to the opening theme, and bringing the percussion even more to the fore.  

Porgy and Bess (Concert Version - arr. Robert Russell Bennett)

The score for Porgy and Bess was completed in September of 1935. The premiere took place in Boston, on September 30, 1935. The “concert version” heard here was prepared in 1956, and was first performed in New Haven, CT, on June 26, 1956. Our only previous performance of this version was in 2002. Duration 40:00.

The beginnings of Porgy and Bess date to 1926, when Gershwin read DuBose Heyward’s Porgy—a novel inspired by characters and situations Heyward observed in the black community of his home town, Charleston, SC. The title character was based directly on Goat Sammy, a crippled black man who got around on a goat-drawn cart. The setting for the novel, Catfish Row, was a fictionalized version of Cabbage Row, a cluster of shabby tenements in Charleston. Gershwin—who had already tried to create an opera with black characters in his unsuccessful Blue Monday—quickly wrote to Heyward proposing a collaboration. Heyward was politely interested, but it would be nearly six years before Gershwin would return to the work. In the meantime, in 1927, Heyward and his wife Dorothy produced a successful stage version of Porgy that ran for some 369 performances in New York. Their play included several spirituals and other musical material, but Gershwin had something much more elaborate in mind.

Gershwin and Heyward renewed their correspondence in 1932, but work did not begin until the end of 1933. Heyward was uncomfortable in New York, and Gershwin was unable to leave, so much of their collaboration was carried on by mail and telegram. Eventually Ira Gershwin was brought into the project. Ira was responsible for the majority of the song lyrics, though Heyward was solely responsible for one of the show’s finest songs, Summertime. Eventually, George did make a trip to Charleston in the summer of 1934 to try to get the local flavor right and to hear the Gullah dialect that is so much a part of Heyward’s novel and libretto. Gershwin and the Heywards spent a few weeks together on Folly Island, one of the Barrier Islands outside Charleston. He had to return to New York in the fall because of his contract with Feen-A-Mint, but their long-distance collaboration continued, and Gershwin began to create a score for Heyward’s libretto.

By the end of 1934, Gershwin was looking for a producer and beginning to cast the production. Both Gershwin and Heyward agreed that Porgy and Bess was to be a serious work, produced with an all-black cast, dealing in a sympathetic and realistic way with its characters. At the time, African American singers were excluded from the operatic stage: Marian Anderson, possibly the finest soprano of the day, had not appeared on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. African American characters were also largely absent from Broadway, and when they were there, it was still routine for these characters to be played in blackface, the ugly legacy of the old minstrel show tradition. Broadway star Al Jolson—who made Gershwin a star years earlier singing Swanee in blackface—at one point tried to leverage Heyward’s Porgy as a star vehicle for himself. All-black shows like In Dahomey and Shuffle Along had occasionally made it on to Broadway, but these were far from the mainstream. Kern & Hammerstein’s Show Boat of 1927 was one of the only hit musicals to feature an integrated cast.

Rehearsals went well, though there were some troubles with John W. Bubbles, the vaudeville dancer chosen for the crooked Sporting Life—Bubbles seems to have more or less typecast for the role. According to the usual practice for musicals, Porgy and Bess was given a tryout performance in Boston before settling in on Broadway, though the cast did give an unstaged run-through at Carnegie Hall first. Reaction to these preliminary performances was everything they could have hoped for. One Boston reviewer wrote that Gershwin: “…has travelled a long way from Tin Pan Alley. He must now be accepted as a serious composer.” There had been some rumors of a place for Porgy and Bess at the Metropolitan Opera, but when it was produced in New York it was on Broadway, at the Alvin Theater, where it opened on October 10. The New York audience was just as enthusiastic as the Boston audience had been, but the reviews ran from lukewarm to savage: the Kiss of Death for a Broadway production. Porgy and Bess closed after a respectable, but hardly profitable run of 124 performances. Though several of the individual songs quickly became well-known, Gershwin did not live long enough to see his proudest creation universally acclaimed as one of the masterworks of American music.

Gershwin seems to have been a bit uncomfortable about Porgy and Bess’s “operatic” nature: he described it as “folk opera.” Several critics charged that Gershwin had simply created a somewhat dressed-up and pretentious Broadway show, grouped around a series of popular-style songs. Gershwin answered by stating: “It is true that I have written songs [as opposed to arias] for Porgy and Bess. I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs.” His use of recitative and his sophisticated use of the orchestra were certainly closer to the operatic world than anything else on Broadway at the time. Like Bernstein’s West Side Story some twenty years later, Porgy and Bess is a masterful blend of both traditions.

The great Broadway/Hollywood orchestrator—and frequent Gershwin collaborator—Robert Russell Bennett prepared the standard “concert version” heard here. By 1956, Bennett had already created a frequently-programmed orchestral “Symphonic Picture” on the opera, but here he leaves Gershwin’s score largely intact, bringing together the most popular moments of Porgy and Bess with a few connective passages and edits. In this concert version, the main female roles (Clara, Serena, and Bess) will be sung by Ms. Mitchell and the male roles (Porgy, Jake, and Sporting Life) will be sung by Mr. Greene. [NOTE: My University of Wisconsin-Whitewater colleague George Ferencz has laid out the history of all of the later versions of Porgy in a 2010 article in the journal Musical Quarterly. I thank him for his assistance here, -M.A.]  

Synopsis

After a brief entracte, a young mother named Clara sings a lullaby, Summertime, to her baby boy. Her husband, Jake, is nearby shooting craps, and he takes the baby and sings his own sarcastic lullaby, A woman is a sometime thing. Tempers flare at the game, and a fight between Crown and Robbins ends in Robbins’s death. Crown and his girlfriend Bess go into hiding. The only person on Catfish Row who will take Bess in is Porgy, who secretly loves her. The next scene is in the home of Serena, Robbins’s widow, where mourners are paying their respects (Gone, gone, gone). There is a conflict between Serena and Bess, who shows up with Porgy. When Porgy urges everyone to help the widow, the mourners sing Overflow, overflow, trying to drum up more money for the collection plate. After a detective arrives to investigate the murder, Serena sings a heartfelt lament about her husband’s death, My man’s gone now. The act closes as Bess leads the community in a spiritual, The Promise’ Land.

Act II begins with preparations for a church picnic, and Porgy cheerfully singing I got plenty o’ nuttin’ at his window. Sporting Life, a pimp and cocaine pusher shows up, and tries to convince Bess to come to New York with him. Porgy overhears and chases Sporting Life away, and then he and Bess sing the opera’s great love duet, Bess, you is my woman now. Everyone on Catfish Row except Porgy, who cannot make the trip, boats to Kittiwah Island for the picnic, and the community sings and dances to a couple of spirituals, O I can’t sit down and Ain’t got no shame. Sporting Life then puts a damper on the party when he makes fun of their beliefs in the brilliantly sarcastic It ain’t necessarily so. As everyone leaves for home that evening, Crown, who has been hiding out on the island, comes out of the bushes, and forces Bess to stay with him. She makes it back to Catfish Row a few days later, and begs for Porgy’s help. The act ends with a disastrous hurricane. At the height of the storm, Crown appears. He beats Porgy and boasts about his hold over women before leaving.

The final act begins with a devastated community cleaning up in the aftermath of the hurricane and trying to soothe Clara, whose husband was one of several fishermen killed in the storm (Clara, Clara, don't you be downhearted). Crown appears once more, and sneaks towards Porgy’s house, intending to kill him, but Porgy reaches out of the window and strangles Crown. A day later, the detective arrives to investigate, and takes Porgy away. While Porgy is gone, Sporting Life again tries to talk Bess into coming to New York (There’s a boat dat’s leavin’). While she is insulted by Sporting Life’s insinuations, she eventually follows him. Porgy returns a week later, having beaten the charge, to find that Bess is gone. Porgy gets into his goat cart, and resolves to head north to rescue Bess and bring her home. The opera closes as he and the entire community sing Lawd, I’m on my way.

________

program notes ©2012 by J. Michael Allsen

Click here for a short article on Gershwin's 1934 visit to Madison.