It's not unusual for music lovers to ponder what the Great American Opera is. A good portion will argue persuasively in favor of Stephen Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD. Others will present strong reasons for George Gershwin's PORGY AND BESS. It's quite possible that THE GHOSTS OF VERSAILLES by John Corigliano has its coterie of supporters, too.
There's no question about this matter in the mind of conductor Keith Lockhart, who will be leading a new production of the Gershwins'masterpiece in Atlanta: his hands-down choice is PORGY AND BESS. "I'm really enjoying spending time with this work again. The last time I spent any significant time with it was during the Gershwin Centennial year when I wasn't lucky enough to do a stage production but I did two concert versions of the piece. Now I'm coming back to it after thirteen years have gone by. I'm stopping my studying dead in its tracks to marvel at what a great piece it is. It really is! When you think about who George Gershwin was and the brevity of his classical composing career--which was a scant thirteen years--it's amazingly ambitious. It's a full grand opera in every sense of the word and it contains some truly fabulous theatrical writing. There's part of me that wants to argue in favor of SWEENEY TODD, but certainly in terms of American subject matter and integrating an American musical idiom into an opera, I can't think of anything that has come close to PORGY AND BESS."
The question of orchestrations was broached and although it isn't clear about whether George Gershwin did them for this piece, Lockhart is convinced he did. "There are lots of letters from Gershwin that go way back seven or eight years before he wrote this opera and the time when he was writing the "Concerto in F" and "An American in Paris" that indicate he did them. It's rather clear that he didn't write his own orchestration for "Rhapsody in Blue" but Gershwin was nothing if not a quick study. He had amazingly quick assimilation. In "An American in Paris" you can tell that he did his own orchestrations simply from the fact that there are issues that I think if he'd gone back to it after ten years or so, he would have done differently. As for this opera, my vote is ‘yes', I don't see any great evidence to the contrary. I think the orchestration is absolutely masterful. It's very Gershwin. It's not done by anybody else."
Oddly enough, though, when PORGY AND BESS received its first production, it was done as a 
Broadway musical. Its recitatives were replaced with dialogue and it was performed at the Tremont Theatre in Boston and then moved onto Broadway for a not very successful run. "You have to understand that there were lots of issues that relegated it to a Broadway house," observes Lockhart. "Looking at the score, there's no doubt that it's an opera. It is far too musically written to be a book musical. At the time that it was written, it was unusual to have anything performed by almost an all-black cast. That alone would take it out of the realm of the Met. However, all of the plot-forwarding is done by recitative and a lot of the spoken dialogue is written in the score against music It's extremely free-form and changes tempo every couple of bars. This opposed to the recitative in Mozart's operas where basically there's a chord held and you say a lot of fast notes. This piece features recitatives closer to what's found in THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, where it's all in tempo but every tempo is in a different for different characters. All of that is reflected in Gershwin's music and it makes conducting it extremely difficult."
Speaking about the challenges this particular score presents to a conductor, Lockhart jokes and states, "Yeah. It's pretty hard. One of the funny things about doing it in a concert format, is that you basically present a two and a half hour version with cuts here and there. One thing I noticed when I came into this was feeling: ‘Oh yeah, I know PORGY AND BESS' and then I started looking at the places under the paperclips where we had cut things that are plot-forwarding and don't really work in a concert version. I began to realize that there were a hundred pages of music that are very dense and difficult. I also have to add that so much of this score is Gershwin's pastiche of musical languages. It's grand opera with very distinct jazz idioms in it. Just the notation and performance practice of jazz in the 1930's being integrated into an opera makes some translation necessary by the conductor." The score includes "Bess You Is My Woman Now," "Summertime," "I Loves You Porgy," and "It Ain't Necessarily So" among others.
