ABSTRACT
Trying to get a handle on George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in his own operatic work, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse argues that not only should this folk opera-whose music he hates-have been written “by Negroes themselves,” but that if it had it would “never have been supported, glorified and acclaimed,” as Porgy and Bess has. This is a strange two-way contention, something like the old joke about the restaurant patron who complains, “the food here is terrible-and such small portions!” After his breathless attempt to explain why he considers Porgy and Bess a central text for understanding the relative failures of African American theatrical productions, Cruse settles for calling Gershwin’s work “the most contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western world”1
Cruse makes it clear that he does not like the substance of Gershwin’s work, calling it “a rather pedestrian blend of imitation Puccini and imitation South Carolina-Negro folk music” that participates in the hundred year-old American tradition of making fun (and money) out of travesties of blackness.2 With this Cruse joins earlier critics of Porgy and Bess who derided Gershwin’s attempt to forge unity from diversity: the composer and critic Virgil Thomson wrote that this work came “straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles.” Thomson goes on to note and assail the diffuse nature of Porgy and Bess’s artistic approach, calling it “crooked folklore and halfway opera.” Ralph Matthews, the arts writer for the Baltimore Afro-American agreed, noting that in its hybridity Porgy and Bess lacked the “deep sonorous incantations so frequently identified with the racial offerings.” African American choral director Hall Johnson was also cautiously critical, noting, “When the leaves are gathered by strange hands they soon wither, and when cuttings are transplanted into strange soil, they have but a short and sickly life.”3
