DuBose Heyward: An Appreciation

CATFISH ROW

Ask a knowledgeable music lover what the greatest American opera is and the answer is likely to be Porgy and Bess. Ask who wrote Porgy and Bess and the answer is likely to be not even two-thirds correct. While George Gershwin gets credit for the music and his brother Ira for the lyrics, the inspiration for the opera and its libretto are the works of a long forgotten white Southerner who had an uncanny eye and ear and deep love for black culture.

DuBose Heyward, a descendant of Thomas Heyward Jr., who signed the Declaration of Independence as a representative of South Carolina, was an insurance and real-estate salesman in genteel Charleston, but his passion was literature. And so when he became financially independent he became a fulltime writer.

To the extent that he is known at all today, Heyward is best remembered for his 1924 novel Porgy, a bestseller that arguably was the first book to portray Southern blacks without condescension.

Langston Hughes extolled Heyward as a writer who saw "with his white eyes, wonderful, poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row that makes them come alive." While perhaps not stereotype free, historians and critics have noted that his portrayals are accurate.

Heyward and his wife Dorothy had spent many years in Charleston interacting with blacks. He participated in an amateur Southern traditional singing society open to anyone whose family had lived on a plantation, whether as owner or slave, and it was from this rich trove that he found much of the inspiration for Porgy, the story of Porgy, a crippled black man living in Cathfish Row in the Charlestown slums of and his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life, a drug dealer.

The non-musical play Porgy opened on Broadway in 1927, eight years before the opera Porgy and Bess and differed in key respects from the book. Heyward used the play for the opera's libretto nearly word for word with large sections of dialogue set to music.

Ironically, Porgy the play was a considerable greater success than Porgy and Bess was initially.

Originally conceived by the Gershwins as an "American folk opera," Porgy and Bess premiered in New York in the fall of 1935 and featured a cast entirely of classically trained African-American singers, which was a daring and visionary artistic choice at the time. George Gershwin chose Eva Jessye as the choral director and brilliantly incorporated blues and jazz idioms into the classical operatic art form. He considered it his finest work.

The work was not widely accepted in the U.S. as legitimate opera until 1976 when the Houston Grand Opera's production of Gershwin's complete score established it as an artistic triumph. Nine years later, the Metropolitan Opera gave its first performance of the work and today it is considered part of the standard operatic repertoire and is regularly performed internationally.

Still, despite this success the opera has been controversial; some critics consider it a racist portrayal of African Americans.

Stephen Sondheim writes that Heyward has gone largely unrecognized as the author of the finest set of lyrics in the history of the American musical theater:

"There are two reasons for this, and they are connected. First, he was primarily a poet and novelist, and his only song lyrics were those that he wrote for Porgy. Second, some of them were written in collaboration with Ira Gershwin, a full-time lyricist, whose reputation in the musical theater was firmly established before the opera was written. But most of the lyrics in Porgy -- and all of the distinguished ones -- are by Heyward. I admire his theater songs for their deeply felt poetic style and their insight into character. It's a pity he didn't write any others. His work is sung, but he is unsung."

PHOTOS (From top): DuBose Heyward, George Gershwin,
Ira Gershwin, Eva Jessye