"Porgy and Bess," and the Gwine Factor
Feb. 9th, 2020 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWoke up to hideous white stuff from the sky!
After selflessly and altruistically toiling for many hours so that the poor and wretched of the Earth could render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s without incurring IRS penalties, I trotted off to the Bardavon to watch the Metropolitan Opera’s simulcast of Porgy and Bess.
The problem with simulcasts is that you don’t get all those weird extended technique vocal sounds because those actually depend upon the interaction of the human voice with the acoustic properties of a physical structure.
Porgy and Bess abounds with such vocal sounds, and they’re the primary reason why I like opera.
But Porgy and Bess tickets at the actual Met have been sold out for months, and scalpers are charging $500-plus per ticket.
Thanks, but no.
The Met production was just amazing. Blah blah blah—set design. Blah blah blah—Gershwin. Blah blah blah—Angel Blue and Eric Owens. (Read a review if you’re really interested.)
The standouts were the choreography, the choral voices, and Frederick Ballantine's Sportin’ Life.
Porgy and Bess has the strongest, most beautiful choral arrangements of any opera I’ve ever heard and of course, Sportin’ Life is the showpiece part ‘cause he’s the only character in Porgy and Bess who ever has any fun. Naturally, Sportin Life gets the best song:
It ain't necessarily so
It ain't necessarily so
The things that you're liable
To read in the Bible
It ain't necessarily so
George Gershwin actually drafted his famous lyricist brother Ira to write the words for this one. It shows. All the other Porky and Bess… I’m gonna call them songs although I suppose technically, they’re arias… are about picking cotton and crossing the River Jordan and whose woman is whose woman now—the type of sentiments that the white liberal Charleston insurance salesman Dubose Heyward, who wrote both the novel on which the opera is based and its libretto, imagined preoccupied the thoughts of simple darkies.
But you can practically see Ira Gershwin cackling as he schmeers more cream cheese on to his bagel at one of the back tables in Katz’s Deli, scribbling on a napkin: Goliath? Vieth? Spieth? Lieth?
From a musical perspective, Porgy and Bess is sublime.
But, oh my goodness, that libretto!
The gwine is strong in that one.
###
So, what exactly is gwine?
To explain it, we will have to travel back in time approximately 55 years to that time when the 12-year-old Patrizia was tackling the novel Gone With the Wind for the very first time.
The various adventures of Scarlett and the other white characters were easy enough to follow, but I was absolutely flummoxed by the black characters who were always doing this gwine thing!
The very first appearance of gwine is on page 23. “You ain’ gwine git much supper,” declares Jeems, the Tarleton twins’ body servant.
Buh?
Mammy is the biggest gwine-r.
“Ah’s gwine ter ‘Lanta wid you and gwine Ah is!” Mammy tells Scarlett. And, “Ah is gwine ter stay right hyah.”
Of course, in retrospect, it’s pretty easy to see that gwine is some kind of transliteration of “going to.”
But this was not at all obvious to my 12-year-old self, and for several years afterwards, I believed that gwine was some kind of mysterious action that black people did and white people didn’t.
###
Anyway, the language in Porgy and Bess had me cringing in my seat.
Apparently, it’s an earnest attempt to reproduce the sounds of Gullah creole.
I just found it awful and condescending.
I mean, if you’re writing a novel in English about French people, you do not have those French people say, “Com-bee-yen day cham don lay mayzone duh votrah pear,” right?
Of course, it’s a problem that all writers have when they’re trying to deal with dialect. One of the reasons why I can no longer bear to read D.H. Lawrence’s fiction—though I continue to like his travel books, and I LUV his poetry—is that it’s got so goddam many Nottinghamshire dialect hacks in it.
It’s also kind of interesting to me that in these times when “cultural appropriation” is the war cry of the Social Justice warrior, Porgy and Bess gets a pass.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
Come to think of it, there weren’t many people under 40 enjoying the simulcast.
After selflessly and altruistically toiling for many hours so that the poor and wretched of the Earth could render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s without incurring IRS penalties, I trotted off to the Bardavon to watch the Metropolitan Opera’s simulcast of Porgy and Bess.
The problem with simulcasts is that you don’t get all those weird extended technique vocal sounds because those actually depend upon the interaction of the human voice with the acoustic properties of a physical structure.
Porgy and Bess abounds with such vocal sounds, and they’re the primary reason why I like opera.
But Porgy and Bess tickets at the actual Met have been sold out for months, and scalpers are charging $500-plus per ticket.
Thanks, but no.
The Met production was just amazing. Blah blah blah—set design. Blah blah blah—Gershwin. Blah blah blah—Angel Blue and Eric Owens. (Read a review if you’re really interested.)
The standouts were the choreography, the choral voices, and Frederick Ballantine's Sportin’ Life.
Porgy and Bess has the strongest, most beautiful choral arrangements of any opera I’ve ever heard and of course, Sportin’ Life is the showpiece part ‘cause he’s the only character in Porgy and Bess who ever has any fun. Naturally, Sportin Life gets the best song:
It ain't necessarily so
It ain't necessarily so
The things that you're liable
To read in the Bible
It ain't necessarily so
George Gershwin actually drafted his famous lyricist brother Ira to write the words for this one. It shows. All the other Porky and Bess… I’m gonna call them songs although I suppose technically, they’re arias… are about picking cotton and crossing the River Jordan and whose woman is whose woman now—the type of sentiments that the white liberal Charleston insurance salesman Dubose Heyward, who wrote both the novel on which the opera is based and its libretto, imagined preoccupied the thoughts of simple darkies.
But you can practically see Ira Gershwin cackling as he schmeers more cream cheese on to his bagel at one of the back tables in Katz’s Deli, scribbling on a napkin: Goliath? Vieth? Spieth? Lieth?
From a musical perspective, Porgy and Bess is sublime.
But, oh my goodness, that libretto!
The gwine is strong in that one.
###
So, what exactly is gwine?
To explain it, we will have to travel back in time approximately 55 years to that time when the 12-year-old Patrizia was tackling the novel Gone With the Wind for the very first time.
The various adventures of Scarlett and the other white characters were easy enough to follow, but I was absolutely flummoxed by the black characters who were always doing this gwine thing!
The very first appearance of gwine is on page 23. “You ain’ gwine git much supper,” declares Jeems, the Tarleton twins’ body servant.
Buh?
Mammy is the biggest gwine-r.
“Ah’s gwine ter ‘Lanta wid you and gwine Ah is!” Mammy tells Scarlett. And, “Ah is gwine ter stay right hyah.”
Of course, in retrospect, it’s pretty easy to see that gwine is some kind of transliteration of “going to.”
But this was not at all obvious to my 12-year-old self, and for several years afterwards, I believed that gwine was some kind of mysterious action that black people did and white people didn’t.
###
Anyway, the language in Porgy and Bess had me cringing in my seat.
Apparently, it’s an earnest attempt to reproduce the sounds of Gullah creole.
I just found it awful and condescending.
I mean, if you’re writing a novel in English about French people, you do not have those French people say, “Com-bee-yen day cham don lay mayzone duh votrah pear,” right?
Of course, it’s a problem that all writers have when they’re trying to deal with dialect. One of the reasons why I can no longer bear to read D.H. Lawrence’s fiction—though I continue to like his travel books, and I LUV his poetry—is that it’s got so goddam many Nottinghamshire dialect hacks in it.
It’s also kind of interesting to me that in these times when “cultural appropriation” is the war cry of the Social Justice warrior, Porgy and Bess gets a pass.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
Come to think of it, there weren’t many people under 40 enjoying the simulcast.
