Opera, Sound Recording, and Critical Race Theory

This review essay considers the relationships among opera, sound recording, and critical race theory, and explores them at a moment when these fields are beginning to converge. One of my concerns will be the recent and ground-breaking studies and collections on opera and race by Naomi Adele André (2017, 2019), Kira Thurman (2012, 2019), Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson (2011), and Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley (2016). Another will be the neglected history of opera and sound recording; notable scholars here include Karen Henson (2020), Robert Cannon (2014), and Richard Leppert (2015). Finally, I will focus on the thought-provoking analyses of race and sound by Alexander Weheliye (2005), Brian Ward (2003), Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) and Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019). There are obvious connections among these three bodies of scholarship, yet these connections have not yet been clearly identified and explored. Although many scholars have come to embrace opera as a material and embodied phenomenon, the artform’s dissemination, analysis, and enjoyment through sound recording is still overlooked as a site of enquiry, especially its potential as a fertile site of inquiry about identity. To overlook the issue of identity in relation to recording is to perpetuate the belief that recordings are primarily documents of performance practice. It ignores the army of technicians who invisibly craft the acoustic object, many of whom are historically white and male. This review essay seeks to address this neglect and to suggest some ways in which the processes of making and consuming opera recordings is intimately related to whiteness and anti-Blackness—but also to Black possibility. In what follows, I cast a broad net, ranging widely and at times unexpectedly. I begin with some recent events in American musicology and in the New York operatic scene; then, turn to a consideration of some of the scholarship just mentioned; and finally conclude with a brief discussion of a specific recording, the Metropolitan Opera’s “live” sound recording of the 2019 production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Hospitalidad y reciprocidad en ritmo de arrullo. Representaciones trinitarias del amor maternofilial en la canción de cuna de autor conocido

Las canciones de cuna de autor conocido se distinguen por retomar y resignificar aspectos enunciativos y semánticos presentes en el género folklórico. Ello hace que incluso un autor sentado frente a un papel en blanco, sin niños a la vista, siga teniendo en cuenta un contexto propio de la lírica funcional, con una situación cuyo objetivo concreto es dormir al pequeño. Por ello, al abordar las representaciones de amor maternofilial implícitas en obras de este género, resulta productivo tener en cuenta dos correlatos teológicos de este amor, ambos expuestos por Juan Pablo II en Mulieris Dignitatem: uno, el vínculo decisivo entre Cristo, segunda persona de la Trinidad, y la Virgen María; otro, el íntimo engendrar de Dios y su descripción bíblica bajo la imagen del amor materno. Bajo la consideración de estos ejes, el presente trabajo se propone analizar «Summertime», de George Gerswhin (en su ópera Porgy and Bess, sobre el libreto de Ira Gershwin y DuBose Heyward, 1935) y «Regalitos», de Juan Quintero (en el álbum Después de usted, Buenos Aires, 2013), para distinguir de qué modo la hospitalidad y la reciprocidad trinitarias dejan su huella en el género de la canción de cuna, resignificándose en contextos de dolor.

“I'm on My Way to a Heav'nly Lan’”: Porgy and Bess as American Religious Export to the USSR

Scholars have explored the use of Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess and its stellar ensemble cast to counter Soviet criticism of US race relations during the Cold War—but an equally prominent theme in contemporary coverage of the production is spirituality. Onstage as well as off, the Soviet tour of Porgy and Bess reflected both American and Soviet ideas about religion's role in international diplomacy in the mid-1950s. This article explores religiosity in the Breen-Davis production as well as the reception of the 1955–56 Soviet tour both in the United States, where the production represented a hopeful vision of the nation's racial tolerance and religious pluralism, and in the USSR, where the tour's twin messages of American spiritual superiority and racial equality were challenged by Soviet authorities. Drawing on materials from the Robert Breen Archives housed in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, this article considers Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess as a religious export to the USSR, enriching our understanding of US cultural diplomacy and Cold War–era musical exchange with broader implications for American–Soviet history, religious studies, and opera analysis.

‘THE DESTINY OF A WHOLE RACE’: IDENTITY, RACE, AND POLITICS IN THE COLD WAR ITALIAN PERFORMANCES OF ‘PORGY AND BESS’

In 1954–5, Porgy and Bess appeared for the first time in Italy in an all-Black production formally endorsed by the US State Department. Italian theatre administrators saw this production as an opportunity to sever any ideological connection with Fascism after decades of institutional support. At the same time, while Italian audiences and critics were often aware of the essentializing practices at the origins of Porgy and Bess, they relied on the stereotypical image of African American culture presented by the show to project their own experiences and political aspirations onto the opera’s subject and music. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and the analysis of the earlier European reception of Porgy and Bess, this article argues that the success of the opera in Italy, rather than being determined by US diplomatic efforts, was a result of Italians’ need to redefine a sense of collective identity in a time of political transition.

“A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”: (Re)Covering Black Womanhood in Porgy and Bess

This essay reexamines the legendary opera-musical Porgy and Bess by first tending to its origins in the dual phenomenon of early 1920s racialized sonic experimentation and the Southern literary conceits of DuBose Heyward, author of the 1925 novel Porgy on which the theater production was based. It traces the ways in which Heyward and George Gershwin's undertheorized fascination with “the vice of Black womanhood” effectively shaped the form and the content of a work often referred to as “America's most famous opera,” and it ultimately considers the ways that Black women artists navigated, complicated, and transformed the charged aesthetics of a Porgy and Bess. Their performance labor ultimately subverts an archetype whose novel roots threatened to circumscribe their representational and artistic possibility.

Setting the Stage

The pre-premiere publicity for Oklahoma! generated by the Theatre Guild fixed many of the themes that would dominate its reception history. The Guild had already established a pattern of creating musical versions of plays it had previously staged, by way of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess of 1935. Its executive director, Theresa Helburn, tried to persuade a number of Broadway composers to pick up the torch, including Kurt Weill (for Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, which later became Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel). She also saw some potential in Lynn Rigg’s Green Grow the Lilacs, first done by the Guild in late 1930. Riggs was one of a new generation of “regional” playwrights, and he drew on his own upbringing in Claremore, Oklahoma, for a work interweaving vernacular dialogue and cowboy songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein, however, came from quite other theatrical traditions; anything they did would necessarily be very different.