Ira Gershwin, in New York, wrote lyrics to some of the opera's classic songs, most notably "It Ain't Necessarily So". He worked on the opera there and in New York. In the summer of 1934 Gershwin and Heyward went to Folly Beach, South Carolina (a small island near Charleston), where Gershwin got a feel for the locale and its music. In the fall of 1933 Gershwin and Heyward signed a contract with the Theatre Guild to write the opera. But they are still folk music-and therefore, being in operatic form, Porgy and Bess becomes a folk opera.
Therefore I wrote my own spirituals and folksongs. When I first began work on the music I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece. Its people naturally would sing folk music. In a 1935 New York Times article, Gershwin explained his motivation for calling Porgy and Bess a folk opera: In 1934, Gershwin and Heyward began work on the project by visiting the author's native Charleston, South Carolina. George Gershwin read Porgy in 1926 and proposed to Heyward to collaborate on an operatic version. Heyward produced a play by the same name with Dorothy Heyward. The origin of Porgy and Bess is DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy. A complete recorded version of the score was released in 1976 since then, it has been recorded several times. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the trend has been toward productions with greater fidelity to Gershwin's original intentions, though smaller-scale productions also continue to be mounted. Some of the songs in the opera, such as " Summertime", became popular and are frequently recorded. In the years following Gershwin's death, Porgy and Bess was adapted for smaller-scale performances. The opera plot generally follows the stage play. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin' Life, her drug dealer. The libretto of Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black street beggar living in the slums of Charleston. A 1976 Houston Grand Opera production gained it a renewed popularity after languishing in the doldrums of the 1960s and early 1970s, and it is now one of the best known and most frequently performed operas. It featured a cast of classically trained African-American singers-a daring artistic choice at the time. Porgy and Bess was first performed in Boston on September 30, 1935, before it moved to Broadway in New York City. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play Porgy, itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel of the same name. Porgy and Bess ( / ˈ p ɔːr ɡ i/) is an English-language opera by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin.
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