Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is a masterpiece, whatever other category one finds for it. It is bursting with vitality, it has a larger number of memorable, indeed unforgettable tunes than any work of comparable length in the 20th century, whether opera or musical. And what counts still more for its stature is that the great songs which comprise so large a part of it are more powerful in context than they are out of it, for all that many of them, for instance ‘Summertime’ and ‘Bess, you is my woman now’, have taken on a life of their own.
It was as a novel by DuBose Heyward that Gershwin originally encountered Porgy in 1926, and was inspired by it to compose a full-length opera, though Heyward and his wife first turned it into a play which had a Broadway run, before agreeing to work with George Gershwin and his brother Ira, who wrote all his best lyrics.
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