In May 1953, Soviet ambassador to the United States Andrei Vishinsky attended a performance of Porgy and Bess by the Everyman Opera Company at New York's Ziegfeld Theatre. He was so impressed that he suggested to one of its producers, Robert Breen (1909–90), that the opera be performed in the Soviet Union. The Everyman Opera Company had just returned from its first European tour, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, which had guaranteed round-trip transportation and four weekly payments of $15,000 (the equivalent of $133,000 in 2014) for salaries and housing expenses.Footnote 1 Breen was eager to take advantage of the opportunity to perform in Russia and approached Mary Stuart French, a State Department representative and fellow American National Theatre Association board member. French had been instrumental in convincing the Department to sponsor the appearances of Porgy and Bess in Vienna and West Berlin as part of the international cultural exchange program.Footnote 2 Unfortunately, on 24 June 1953, Breen was contacted by an official at the State Department with disappointing news: “The Department does not believe that, all things being considered, you would want to present ‘Porgy and Bess’ in Moscow at the present time.”Footnote 3
The State Department's refusal to provide financial resources to send Porgy and Bess to the Soviet Union in 1953 and two years later in 1955, when the proposal was brought up again, stood in contrast to its enthusiastic support of the production in other countries around the world. As historian David Monod reveals, the international/European tours of Porgy “became the most heavily governmentally subsidized artistic production of the 1950s.”Footnote 4 During two tours, the Everyman Opera Company performed the Gershwin and Heyward opera in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America (see Figure 1). Between 1952 and 1955, the U.S. government spent over $800,000 ($7.1 million in 2014) on direct subsidies, in addition to an unspecified amount in United States Information Agency advertising and research.Footnote 5
Figure 1. International tour schedule of Porgy and Bess, 1952–56. Porgy and Bess: International Tour, Robert Breen / ANTA Theater Collection, Mason Archival Repository Service, George Mason University, http://hdl.handle.net/1920/5084.
Yet when Breen finally negotiated a trip to the Soviet Union in late 1955, the U.S. State Department declined to change its position. In a surprising turn of events, Porgy and Bess relied exclusively on monetary support from the Soviet Ministry of Culture—a fact that is often only briefly mentioned in scholarship on this tour or on the early Cold War.Footnote 6
Moreover, while historians of the Cold War uncover the troubling details of overt and covert forms of cultural exchange and cultural propaganda during this time, much of this study focuses on the way that U.S. and Soviet officials allocated financial and institutional resources to generate propaganda that portrayed their own countries in the best political, economic, and artistic light.Footnote 7 The production of this famed American opera in the Soviet Union was an unusual example of “cultural propaganda” or “cultural exchange,” thereby adding to and complicating our understanding of the role of unofficial or unsanctioned culture in the U.S. government's foreign policy.
The Soviet tour did not conform to the usual model of cultural diplomacy, whereby a home country financed and sent abroad an artist or performing group to various host countries. This model characterized not just the earlier European, Latin American, and North African tours of Porgy and Bess, but also many of the later examples of cultural exchange through which the State Department sent musicians like the “jazz ambassadors” to Africa and the Middle East or exchanged American composers for Soviet ones.Footnote 8 Instead, the Everyman Opera Company relied on what Danielle Fosler-Lussier calls the “pull” of Soviet political interest and cultural desire that Porgy and Bess be performed in Russia.Footnote 9
In this article I show how race, representation, and identity were critical aspects of the Soviet Ministry of Culture's willingness to pay for the production, the cast members’ decision to perform, African American newspaper critiques, and State Department officials’ unwillingness to fund the trip. I analyze these perspectives through personal interviews with cast members, correspondence and documentary material, and reviews and advance articles in both the Soviet and the African American press. During a period of significant outcry for greater civil rights for African Americans and international criticisms of the way the U.S. government was handling the “Negro Question,” Porgy and Bess represented race and class in America in an explosive way. The “Negro Question”—a term used during this period—referred to a range of issues concerning African Americans in the United States, from the political and economic structural inequalities they suffered, to the burgeoning civil rights movement and the government's response to it. As the first American theatrical production in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution, the Everyman Opera's performances created a defining moment in Cold War cultural history.Footnote 10 In contrast to previously recorded or printed media, Porgy and Bess was, for many Russians, the first live encounter and impression of “America,” “American people,” and “American art.”
I argue that misplaced fears, miscalculations, and misunderstandings concerning Porgy and Bess from both the U.S. and Soviet sides were derived from the differences between artistic and racial representation and perceptions of authenticity and veracity. U.S. government officials and African American critics were concerned about the production, but for vastly different reasons and with varying degrees of ambivalence. The State Department feared Soviet negative propaganda, while the black press (some members of whom were sympathetic to the communist party), challenged the opera's negative stereotypes, fearing essentialist interpretations from the Soviets. What is most evident from Soviet reviews and descriptions of the production, however, is that, surprisingly, most critics understood the opera through a socialist realist lens. Contrary to U.S. officials’ concerns, the reviews’ main focus was on the artistic aspects of the production, rather than overt propaganda. And contrary to African American concerns, the Soviets incorporated the characters of Porgy and Bess as part of the international working class.
U.S. government officials and diplomats not only miscalculated the Soviet focus on artistic aspects of the opera, but also the degree of Russian interest in cultural exchange. At the same time, the extravagance of the cast members’ appearance and fashion at social events outside of the production contradicted the Soviet reading of the characters in the folk opera as working class. Finally, contrary to African American critics’ discontents, artists in the production communicated enthusiasm regarding the opportunity to perform internationally with a talented and highly accomplished cohort. The significance of Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union ultimately shows the multiple perspectives that need to be taken into account in order to understand both the malleability and blunt instrumentality of musical and racial representation during the beginnings of the Cold War and the civil rights movement.
The State Department, the “Negro Question,” and the Possibility of Cultural Exchange
Porgy and Bess—the opera set to music by George Gershwin, with a libretto by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and lyrics by DuBose and Ira Gershwin—has had a controversial history since its first production in 1935.Footnote 11 Virgil Thomson called the opera “fake folklore,” questioning Gershwin's right to speak for a community not his own, and the critic Edward Morrow, in an interview with Duke Ellington, included editorializing on “Gershwin's lamp-black Negroisms, and the melodramatic trash of the script.”Footnote 12 In 1967, African American scholar and cultural critic Harold Cruse famously wrote that the opera “must be criticized from the Negro point of view as the most perfect symbol of the Negro creative artist's cultural denial, degradation, exclusion, exploitation and acceptance of white paternalism.”Footnote 13 Nonetheless, the opera (or simply its music) has been popular and widely produced into the twenty-first century.Footnote 14
The same year as the opera's premiere, Congress chartered the American National Theatre Association (ANTA) to support non-commercial theater in the United States. Fifteen years later, the U.S. State Department appointed this organization to choose arts presentations for performance in West Germany. While the Department provided funding and retained veto power, ANTA selected the artists and approved budget outlays. ANTA's secretary, Robert Breen, resigned from the organization in 1952 to produce Porgy and Bess with Blevins Davis—“a millionaire with a passion for theatre”—but Breen maintained close connections with ANTA board members.Footnote 15 In the following years, ANTA selected Porgy and Bess several times to perform around the world as part of its International Exchange Program.
Meanwhile, tours of musicians and dancers overseas received an additional financial boost in 1954 when President Eisenhower issued an executive order to establish the President's Emergency Fund, to be used at his discretion for the support of cultural presentations abroad. As Emily Abrams Ansari describes in detail, this fund inaugurated the State Department's Cultural Presentations Program.Footnote 16 Eisenhower cited Porgy and Bess specifically as an excellent example of how the government would send “ambassadors of the arts” to cultivate better international understanding.Footnote 17
Thus the State Department's initial support of Porgy and Bess aligned with the government's strategy to engage increasingly in deliberate political and diplomatic efforts by sending certain upwardly mobile artists and celebrities abroad.Footnote 18 Historian Donna Binkiewicz characterizes the 1950s as a period when the United States was accused internationally of becoming conformist, materialist, complacent, and aesthetically deplorable.Footnote 19 Representative Frank Thompson, Jr. (D-NJ) articulated this concern in an article, “Are the Communists Right in Calling Us Cultural Barbarians?” According to him, “the Communist parties in various countries and the USSR find it extremely easy to spread their lies that we are gum-chewing, insensitive, [and] materialistic.”Footnote 20
At the same time, the United States faced criticism from the Soviet Union for the way it treated African Americans and other minorities. Legal historian Mary Dudziak writes that from 1946, Soviet periodicals described lynchings and poor labor conditions for African Americans in the South.Footnote 21 By 1949, the U.S. embassy in Moscow reported that the Negro question was one of the principal Soviet propaganda themes criticizing the United States.Footnote 22 A year later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) referred to race relations as “our Achilles’ heel before the world,” and the State Department asserted that “no American problem receives more wide-spread attention, especially in dependent areas, than our treatment of racial minorities, particularly the Negro.”Footnote 23
The U.S. government responded to Soviet and other international criticisms on the “Negro question” in several ways. One response was to stifle African Americans who criticized the U.S. government, especially those who were politically active and publicly associated with communism, by preventing them from travelling abroad and speaking to international audiences.Footnote 24 Granted, a cultural exchange was different from a perceived threat to U.S. security. But while I have not found any cast members openly connected with the Communist party, as might be published in Red Channels—which named 151 artists and journalists for their alleged communist manipulation of the entertainment industry—blackness was often associated with communism during this period. The tour's timing in 1955, as well as the overall social and political situation provided the justification to suppress any hint of dissent or resistance. Company members were frequently asked during the tour why the outspoken vocalist Paul Robeson was not performing with them.Footnote 25 In fact, Robeson addressed the cast members in a New Year's greeting published in the Soviet state paper Pravda: “I know that they [the cast members] are proud of the heroic struggle of their people, who defend equality and human dignity in Mississippi, and South Carolina where the events of the opera in which they perform unfold.”Footnote 26
An altogether opposite State Department strategy toward addressing the “Negro question” was to send certain black artists abroad to be living representatives of African American progress and improved economic opportunity in the United States. Penny von Eschen analyzes how the government sent Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie as “goodwill jazz ambassadors” in the late 1950s and 1960s. They performed throughout Africa, South America, and Asia with the purpose of promoting a positive image of black American life and American race relations.Footnote 27 Danielle Fosler-Lussier notes the differences between the State Department tours of Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson, both in the types of music they performed (jazz versus classical) and their remarks about political matters and civil rights controversies.Footnote 28 While Armstrong toured throughout Africa, plans for his trip to the Soviet Union in 1957 were cancelled after he denounced the Eisenhower administration's handling of the standoff between African American students and segregationists at Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School.Footnote 29 The Soviet Union did not welcome a jazz ambassador until Benny Goodman in 1962, seven years after the Porgy and Bess tour.
The State Department's international strategies in response to the “Negro question” were further complicated by the Everyman Opera Company's production. On the one hand, Porgy and Bess was an American opera, written by American artists on an American theme, presenting a concrete example of high art to the Soviets and the rest of the world. On the other hand, the opera highlighted the social and economic marginalization of African Americans, especially when black characters interacted with white characters on the stage.Footnote 30 These issues are crucial in understanding the U.S. government's response to the possibility of Porgy and Bess as a formal cultural exchange, especially in the Soviet Union, as compared to Western Europe, Latin America, or Africa.
For a nation so culturally, regionally, and racially diverse, any work of art would be insufficient and incomplete in depicting “American life.” But if one purpose of cultural exchange was to show foreign audience members an example of what it was like to live in a different geographic and political environment, then Porgy and Bess offered an unflattering portrayal of national identity and everyday life in the United States. Much of the opera had the potential to be reduced to issues of racial representation: from the cast's skin color, to the dialect, to the influences of jazz and African American spirituals in the music. During a time of great political and diplomatic uncertainty, it is understandable why such tensions and concerns would be high among U.S. government officials. The central event immediately preceding the State Department's decision regarding the funding of this opera and the Soviets’ subsequent agreement to finance the tour in full was the Geneva Summit. A simple two-word phrase that emerged in the popular press—“politically premature”—captured the particularly difficult intersection between politics and race in this matter of cultural and national identity.
The U.S. State Department and Porgy and Bess as “Politically Premature”
The Geneva Summit of the “Big Four” began on 18 July 1955. The Summit's purpose was to initiate discussions on pressing foreign policy matters concerning trade, global security, and the incipient nuclear arms race.Footnote 31 In attendance were Dwight D. Eisenhower (president of the United States), Anthony Eden (prime minister of Great Britain), Nikolai A. Bulganin (premier of the Soviet Union), and Edgar Faure (prime minister of France), as well as each of their foreign ministers. Nikita Khrushchev, as first secretary of the Communist Party (a position he assumed in 1953) was also in attendance. It was a momentous diplomatic occasion: not only the first meeting of the powers since the Potsdam Conference of 1945, but also the first occasion on which the Americans encountered the new Soviet leadership after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953.Footnote 32
As historian J. D. Parks argues, the Soviets took the initiative between 1953 and 1955 in restoring communication between the scientists, athletes, and artists of the two countries; American officials and the American public, on the other hand, were more cautious of Soviet advances, viewing them as “a new form of threat, albeit a more subtle one.”Footnote 33 In April 1954, the first significant cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and a capitalist country occurred: the Comédie Française's trip to Russia, performing Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Tartuffe, Le Cid, and Poil de carotte.Footnote 34
Robert Breen saw the Geneva Summit as an opportunity to convince both the Americans and the Soviets of the value of bringing a production of Porgy and Bess to Russia. Immediately preceding the Summit, he sent variations of the same letter to U.S. delegates in attendance, including the personal secretary to President Eisenhower, urging the U.S. government to endorse Porgy and Bess. “It would certainly be good timing to immediately implement the . . . agreement ‘in principle’ with a tangible example in the form of PORGY AND BESS. And—to agree and announce it here on the spot [Geneva].”Footnote 35
Breen also sent telegrams to Bulganin and Khrushchev:
It is respectfully proposed that immediate plans for the initial, concrete realization of this concept be engineered by arranging exchange of: the American Negro Folkopera PORGY AND BESS by George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward and the MOISEYEV STATE FOLKLORISTIC BALLET of the U.S.S.R. This offer is in no way a perfunctory “gesture,” but is a concrete and genuine proposal, which has the blessings of the proper authorities within the American Government.Footnote 36
The Moiseyev Dance Company had been founded in 1936 by Igor Moiseyev, the ballet master of the Bolshoi. The Soviet Union began sending the company abroad in 1955 to showcase the country's many folk traditions and dance styles. On the one hand, the suggestion of this group showed an attempt at parallelism, linking Porgy and Bess with American folk art. On the other hand, Breen had suggested that the State Department exchange Porgy and Bess with the Bolshoi Ballet, a “high art” form.Footnote 37 In either case, however, Breen acted preemptively—perhaps out of ambition, business sense, naiveté, or a combination of all three—by attempting to arrange this cultural exchange without actually having the “blessings of the proper authorities” (i.e., U.S. government officials).
The State Department refused yet again to provide funding for a tour to Russia. The New York Times reported first on 27 September 1955 that the decision not to support Porgy and Bess was reached by Herbert Hoover, Jr., under secretary of state (son of the former president), and Theodore Streibert, director of the United States Information Agency. According to the article, State Department officials explained that “cost and political considerations had combined to bring about the decision” and that “they felt that such a tour was ‘politically premature.’” If the company was able to finance the tour on its own, however, the officials said that “they did not expect the department to put any obstacles in its way.”Footnote 38
The newspaper reported the phrase “politically premature” at least twice more in the following two months. On 1 October 1955, challenging the State Department's decision not to fund the Soviet tour, the Times asked, “Can it ever be said to be ‘premature’ to give a demonstration of true democracy within those lands where Communist tyranny has so long held sway?”Footnote 39 And on 11 November, Welles Hangen, the paper's Moscow correspondent, claimed that the opera would play in Moscow “despite the State Department's opposition.” Furthermore, purportedly quoting the company's tour manager, Anatole Heller, Hangen wrote that “the State Department was maintaining its stand that the company's trip to the Soviet Union . . . would be ‘politically premature.’”Footnote 40 Ultimately, then, Porgy and Bess would be financed by the Soviet Ministry of Culture and (undisclosed) private sources.
Four days after Hangen's final article in the New York Times, Breen felt obliged to write to Robinson McIlvaine, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs (State Department), that he was disturbed to see the article and to apologize for its release, fearing damaged relations with the State Department because of the problematic phrase. Breen shifted the blame away from himself and Heller, however, emphasizing that the two words “politically premature” had earlier origins and had not been coined by Anatole Heller.Footnote 41 McIlvaine reported back to Breen on 16 November that he had tracked the phrase down to a telephone conversation between the Times and an officer of the State Department who had nothing whatsoever to do with the President's Emergency Fund, which could have supported the Soviet tour.Footnote 42
Despite solving the mystery of the phrase's provenance, though, the State Department never changed its mind about financing the trip. The Department had already informed Breen that it would not fund performances in the Soviet Union purportedly due to its review of the large allocation of monetary resources the company had previously received. In a 21 October 1955 letter to Robert C. Schnitzer, General Manager for ANTA, McIlvaine explained:
The decision . . . regarding Porgy and Bess was made on the basis of certain operating facts such as (1) Porgy and Bess had already received $707,000 [$4.9 million in 2014] in assistance for tours of Europe, the Mediterranean and Latin America. This additional grant would bring the total assistance up to $1,107,000 [$9.8 million in 2014] or 25% of the entire two-year world-wide program, (2) The $400,000 [$3.5 million in 2014] required would represent more than 95% of the 1956 budget for the European area necessitating the cancellation of other major projects already scheduled or under consideration.Footnote 43
McIlvaine also wrote, “As I am sure you realize, the aim of this fund is to present, as best we can, a balanced picture of United States culture, as represented by the performing arts (opera, dance, music, drama, etc.) and by sports groups and individuals.” (Note that this letter was written after the first appearance of “politically premature” on 27 September).
One interpretation of McIlvaine's statement places emphasis on simply having a wide representation of performing arts genres. But another interpretation focuses on what a “balanced” picture of America itself meant. As Mary Dudziak notes, U.S. policymakers in the 1950s “saw American race relations through the lens of a black/white paradigm. To them, race in America was quintessentially about the ‘Negro problem.’”Footnote 44 Michael Krenn contends that their attitude was rooted in the “nearly all-white composition” of the State Department's personnel and diplomatic corps.Footnote 45 He argues that officials in the department did not think about race in the same way as African Americans: rather than a lived experience of actual people, “for U.S. foreign policy officials, race was, first and foremost, basically a matter of domestic concern. They felt uncomfortable dealing with it at home, and, since America's record on the issue was not a particularly exemplary one, they felt even more uneasy dealing with it in the international arena.”Footnote 46 Breen had even suggested to his wife in March 1955 that earlier State Department responses revealed that younger officials were especially “frightened” by the Porgy and Bess proposal and would “think first of their jobs.”Footnote 47 According to Breen, for these officials, “the ‘safest’ approach from their point-of-view would be to say ‘no’ and forget it.”Footnote 48
A number of legal and diplomatic considerations, though, also stood as obstacles to a United States–Soviet Union cultural exchange at this time. The Lacy–Zarubin Agreement, which formalized artistic exchanges (as well as scientific, academic, and athletic ones, inter alia), was signed only in January 1958, two years after the Porgy and Bess tour.Footnote 49 Before this agreement, Stalin had effectively cut Russia off from cultural exchanges and foreign ideas, and the U.S. McCarran Act of 1950 had “made it virtually impossible for nonofficial Soviet-bloc visitors to enter the United States.”Footnote 50 Even after the death of Stalin and the reinvigoration of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties (VOKS) on the Soviet side, the fingerprinting requirements of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (a.k.a. the McCarran–Walter Act) prevented large groups of Soviet artists to enter the United States because the Soviet government refused to allow its citizens to be fingerprinted en masse.Footnote 51
State Department concerns regarding the presentation of this opera in the Soviet Union were made most explicit in the company's last-minute briefing on 17 December 1955, the day of its departure from East Berlin to Leningrad. Walter N. Walmsley, Jr. and Roye L. Lowry, counsels of the American Embassy in Moscow, addressed many questions from the mundane, such as the availability of Kleenex (“Perhaps . . . but better to bring a supply”), and the cost of living (“Everything but subway and haircuts outrageously expensive”), to more logistical concerns, such as whether one should accept invitations to private homes (“By all means go!”), or if there was any personal privacy (microphone tapping likely in the hotels, but “official ‘tailing’ is for protection”).Footnote 52
Yet perhaps the most important topics in the briefing dealt with “political questions” and the “Negro question.” Walmsley advised cast members that “all propaganda potentials will be taken advantage of—what they may say is unpredictable,” and that company members should be careful to distinguish between social conversation and interviews, because the “Soviets will seek meanings and interpretations in anything we say.” With regard to political questions: “Don't answer them; we are on a cultural mission. There are always reasons behind questions—Soviets want support of their theories.”Footnote 53 In terms of the Negro question, Walmsley reminded the company that laws among the forty-eight states varied, but that no federal statutes existed concerning discrimination or segregation.Footnote 54
Truman Capote's extraordinary first-hand account of the tour in The Muses Are Heard corroborates the information contained in the log, while also emphasizing that cast members showed special concern for how to answer questions dealing with race.Footnote 55 Capote was assigned by The New Yorker to travel with, and write about, the company from its Berlin departure to the premiere in Leningrad. Footnote 56 The resulting series of articles was republished as a 182-page book.Footnote 57 According to Capote, John McCurry (Crown) asked, “The big problem is . . . what do we say when they ask us political stuff? I'm speaking of the Negro situation.”Footnote 58 Walmsley responded, “You don't have to answer political questions, any more than they would answer questions of that nature put to them by you.” Other cast members pressed on. Jerry Laws (Mingo) asked, “Should we answer it the way it is? Tell the truth? Or do you want us to gloss it over?” Walmsley responded, “Believe me, sir, the Russians know as much about the Negro situation as you do. And they don't give a damn one way or another. Except for statements, propaganda, anything they can turn to their own interests.”Footnote 59
The State Department briefing displays some of the officials’ worries: how to separate political issues of race from a cultural mission and withhold material the Soviets could use as propaganda to discredit the United States. It also provides evidence of a strategy to present positive information about the country's racial situation. Dudziak writes that American embassies during this period cooperated with the State Department “in an effort to present what they considered to be a more balanced perspective” on the “Negro problem.” This endeavor included “efforts to disseminate favorable information” rather than focusing on the problems.Footnote 60 An example of this point was Walmsley's emphasis on the lack of federal statutes, even if individual states practiced de jure and/or de facto segregation.
State Department officials were not alone, however, in expressing their resistance to having Porgy and Bess performed in the Soviet Union. African American critics were also vociferously against the production. Their reasons had less to do, however, with the political nature of representing American life and national identity in the Soviet Union than with a reluctance to present the opera's problematic portrayal of African Americans in other countries.
African American Concerns with Racial Representation in the Soviet Union
Many authors in the black press opposed sending Porgy and Bess to the Soviet Union. Articles in the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier show that African American critics were afraid that it would showcase negative, essentialist stereotypes, either newly introducing them to the Soviet public or reinforcing previous exposure.Footnote 61 These depictions troubled the African Americans who believed that most Soviets (or Europeans or Asians) would likely never encounter a black person again. They feared that Soviets would not understand that Porgy and Bess was an inaccurate representation of African Americans even though the opera's writers (the Gershwins and Heywards) strove for some form of musical and racial authenticity.Footnote 62
The concern was powerfully conveyed by the editor of the Chicago Defender on 20 August 1955: “‘Porgy and Bess’ will be performed for a people without any background for the subject, and, moreover, people without any concept of the Negro's actual condition in America. . . . We are somewhat disturbed by the plan to send ‘Porgy and Bess’ with a Negro company to Moscow. . . . The saga of Catfish Alley [sic, Catfish Row] essentially concerns the antics of a primitive, superstitious, ignorant and shiftless group.” The editor argued that to produce it would “lift Negroes out of the context of the American scene, and reinforce the Russian belief that Negroes are a backward people.”Footnote 63 Similarly, a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American wrote on 8 October 1955 that the Russians indeed knew little about “colored Americans except lynchings, slums, flagrant discrimination and ‘OL’ Man River.”Footnote 64 These writers worried that Russian audiences would see and hear a particular representation of African Americans—one that was not only negative, but also fragmentary.
In an extended, commanding account in the Pittsburgh Courier, P. L. Prattis voiced his strong opposition not just to the Soviet portion of the international tour, but to the entire tour itself:
I love “Porgy and Bess,” have seen it at least six times. But I don't like it in Europe and Asia. Over there, those folk don't know me too well. Through the years, Hollywood has been indoctrinating Europeans, Asians, even some Africans and South Americans, with queer notions about me. I am supposed to be afraid of the dark and of graveyards. I go wild, simply wild, over watermelon and chicken. I'll dance a jig at the drop of a dime. I am a servant—always. I live in slums—always. I share in none of the things which make America a great country. All I'm pretty good at is singing and praying—and only that because it is sort of entertaining to white folk.Footnote 65
Prattis's concerns thus focused on the power of Porgy and Bess as a form of “indoctrination” in “queer notions” about black people, ranging from superstition and religion, lack of self-control, and “naturally-born” skills in entertainment. It is also interesting to note, however, that Prattis's opposition to the production stood in contrast with his love of the opera, an ambivalence felt by other African American critics as well.
Additional articles appeared to be positive, but their praise veiled a subtext of irony and critique. For example, an article in the Baltimore Afro-American on 22 October 1955 was titled “Choice of ‘Porgy’ for Russian Tour is Alternately Rapped and Lauded.” The reporter, however, spent most of his time “rapping” rather than “lauding.” He quoted Westbrook Pegler—a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of the most outspoken critics of the opera—who had written that Porgy and Bess was “a story of low morals in a minority of the American people. It is not regarded by respectable Americans white or colored as a fair or decent commentary on the American colored person.” Similarly, regarding tour performances at La Scala, Pegler speculated that “the few Italians who saw it must have wondered whether this was sabotage by our State Department.”Footnote 66
These accounts and many others reveal a clear apprehension that the opera would portray African Americans in a negative light. Yet the reasons why critics may have cared how the Soviets understood the opera were also important. Brandon Terry, a political theorist and historian, suggests that black critics may have feared that if the Soviets saw the opera, they would think that African Americans suffered injustice not as a result of capitalism, but because they were indeed an “ignorant and shiftless group” of people deserving of their economic plight and political disenfranchisement.Footnote 67 Inherent criminality—captured by the characters of Crown, Sportin’ Life, and eventually, Bess—could be seen as essential and not circumstantial, that is, a part of their very being rather than a product of their material living conditions. While a fair Marxist-Leninist interpretation would focus on the materialist aspects of African American subjugation rather than any inherent racial fault, black political and social leaders’ concerns cannot be discounted as legitimate predictions of Soviet understanding.Footnote 68
In fact, some African American anxieties, especially concerning overt, excessive, and uncontrollable sexuality, were confirmed in Welles Hangen's review of the Moscow production for the New York Times and Truman Capote's account in The Muses Are Heard. Hangen wrote that the sudden transition in the picnic scene from a “prim religious outing to a bucolic orgy” left many audience members confused.Footnote 69 According to Capote, what most disturbed the Soviet audience was the opera's depiction of sex, from its “shake-that-thing brand of choreography” to the violent rape scene between Crown and Bess.Footnote 70
Robert Breen likewise worried that Russian audiences would mistake Porgy and Bess as an accurate representation of the living and working conditions of all African Americans instead of a fictional story first written in the 1920s by a white author. Breen was concerned enough to take at least two actions to address the issue. The first was a new program insert for the Moscow performances (they were not included in the Leningrad performances, which came earlier). In a memorandum from 3 January 1956, addressed to Vladimir Stepanov and N. Savachenko, Soviet Ministry of Culture assistants assigned to the company, Breen wrote:
It is increasingly apparent that some of the Russian journalists—and therefore most likely the public—are not completely aware that PORGY AND BESS is a “period piece” and does not represent negro life in the United States today. . . Everyman Opera will be happy indeed to bear the cost of such printing [of an insert], etc.Footnote 71
Second, Breen emphasized this point in an article of 4 January 1956 for the Soviet newspaper Neva: “PB [Porgy and Bess] is not in any sense documentary, and does not reflect life in the United States any more than AIDA, MADAME BUTTERFLY, or BORIS GODUNOV have a real bearing on present day Egypt, Japan or the Soviet Union.”Footnote 72 There was a key difference between this opera of “otherness,” however, and orientalist or exoticist operas of the European canon that I would like to point out: Porgy and Bess was performed by a cast racially (in this sense, phenotypically) consistent with the characters in its story. By contrast, Verdi's Aida was set in Egypt; it was premiered in Cairo, but its performing cast was Italian. Puccini's Madame Butterfly was set in Japan, with most of its characters Japanese, but at its premiere, its performing cast was again, Italian. Porgy and Bess, on the other hand, was a story written by white authors about black people, and if following Gershwin's explicit instructions, to be performed only by black singers. The cast's skin color thus had the power to lend the opera a degree of greater real-life accuracy or credibility, rather than foreground its fictional basis. Mistaking an Italian prima donna for an Egyptian princess was visually and sonically more difficult than believing that John McCurry really was Crown. McCurry did not need cork to appear black.
Cultural Encounters from Cast Members’ Perspectives
These concerns, however, contrasted with the meaningful artistic, professional, and economic rewards that the international tour of Porgy and Bess provided to the cast members. For almost a century since its premiere, Porgy and Bess has given opportunities to African Americans to perform on professional stages where they were often otherwise excluded.Footnote 73 As Gwynne Kuhner Brown argues, “[the] willingness of first-rate black artists” to perform in Porgy and Bess challenged the assertion that the opera was “something done by whites to blacks.”Footnote 74 African American artists gained material and professional benefits, even while critics argued that Porgy and Bess was socially harmful to the black community because it perpetuated racial stereotypes. Given the difficult history of racial subjugation in the United States, I want to probe this problem further in the context of the Everyman Opera production.
I have conducted interviews with cast members Maya Angelou (Ruby and the principal dancer in the company) and Martha Flowers (Bess), which support the claim that black artists were enthusiastic about performing in the opera for several reasons, but especially because of its talented cast.Footnote 75 In her memoir, Singin’ and Swingin’, Angelou remarks how a production in San Francisco in 1953 revealed to her “the greatest array of Negro talent” she had ever seen.Footnote 76 Moreover, in our interview she noted that the company hired black singers with degrees from Curtis and Juilliard just to be in the chorus—singers who were so “exquisite” that if one person dropped a note or had to cough or sneeze, another could step in and sing the line. Few professional opportunities existed for African Americans trained in classical music: “I was very grateful for the opportunity to be around so many wonderful singers and to be involved, enmeshed, in good music, and to travel throughout most of Europe.”Footnote 77
Martha Flowers agreed. Flowers, trained at Fisk University and Juilliard, joined the company in 1954 after touring Europe in Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts—another opera with an all-black cast—where she sang the role of St. Settlement. Flowers was a good friend of Angelou, who described her as “delicately made as a Stradivarius” with a voice that sounded like “hot silver melted.”Footnote 78 In our interview, Flowers said that when she joined the cast in 1954, “there were no opportunities [before the civil rights movement]—literally no opportunities to sing in this country especially [for those] singing with trained voices.” She elaborated at greater length:
There was beginning to be a great deal of international concern about how African Americans were being treated in this country and . . . this made the Europeans seemingly even more sympathetic towards Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts. It was just phenomenal how they accepted us and the music and loved the artists. It was not known to me in this country of such admiration and respect for how we had performed and done.Footnote 79
As Flowers's comments suggest, not only did Porgy and Bess offer a chance for black artists to perform professionally when their opportunities might otherwise be limited in the United States, but European audiences also gave them a level of appreciation that they had rarely experienced.
As successful performing artists, Flowers, Angelou, and their colleagues demonstrated their high level of achievement to international audiences.Footnote 80 Angelou remarked that Porgy and Bess was composed of a whole cast of individuals with college degrees from prestigious universities, trained to dance and sing in the classical tradition. She remembered that during the tour, “people [often] sang in concerts. Wherever we were, we were out in the nightclubs and restaurants. . . Since we were rare, we were always asked to sing.”Footnote 81 Flowers also noted that they were often invited to sing at embassies.
The black press frequently remarked on the cast members’ activities outside of Porgy and Bess performances on the theater stage. The Pittsburgh Courier reported that four days before the Leningrad premiere, the ninety-three-member cast attended Russian ballet and opera performances, signed autographs, and sang Christmas carols and spirituals.Footnote 82 A tour highlight was the wedding of Helen Thigpen (Serena) and Earl Jackson (Sportin’ Life) at what the Baltimore Afro-American called the Russian Baptist Church.Footnote 83 According to the Afro, “More than 2,500 persons crowded into the little church which has an auditorium that seats 1,500. Several thousand more jammed the small street outside of the church.”Footnote 84 The idea for holding the wedding in the Soviet Union had been developed while the company was touring in Mexico City, and planning for the event included assembling a brilliant yellow trousseau for the bride with silver accessories and a chocolate-colored full-dress suit, yellow bow tie, and yellow lapels for the groom.Footnote 85 This type of public engagement—or informal cultural exchange—was a kind of racial representation that contrasted with the theatrical representation seen on stage. These artists, who were not only highly talented but also often dressed in fashionable clothing and jewelry, modeled a vision of African Americans that differed from the images of poverty and oppression in Porgy and Bess.
Interviews with cast members and reports from black newspapers show the complicated ways that African Americans on this tour presented deeply conflictual aspects of race, class, and national identity. They called attention to unique living human individuals who were not reducible to the characters in a fictional story. Thus the measure of their social and cultural impact in changing preconceptions based on stereotype directly correlated with the amount of informal cultural exchange they engaged in. The more they were in the public spotlight, the less they appeared like Porgy, Bess, Sportin’ Life, or Crown. Artistic performance perhaps ended with the drop of the curtain, but public performance did not.
Soviet Descriptions and Reactions to Porgy and Bess
The Soviet responses to Porgy and Bess were complex, revealing an understanding of the opera and the production at different moments laudatory, critical, and bewildered. The Everyman Opera Company's daily log indicates that the highest echelons of Soviet political leadership were in attendance on 11 January 1956, including Bulganin, Khrushchev, and a large party of other officials. They and the Russian public had access to two main sources of written information about the production: the program distributed to the Leningrad and Moscow audiences and reviews published in Soviet periodicals.Footnote 86
These sources reveal that African American critics need not have worried about Soviet critics’ essentialist interpretations of racial characteristics or inherent criminality. At least in the official record, Porgy and Bess was significantly—and unexpectedly—understood as a socialist realist opera. The prominence of realism, folklore, vernacular style, and the perception of an oppressed working class contributed to this understanding.Footnote 87 Officials at the U.S. embassy in Moscow also overlooked, or were unaware of, any possible aesthetic interpretations of the work and instead commented on the lack of overt critiques of American race relations.
The production's program included a cast list in English and Russian, as well as an eight-page synopsis and two short commentary essays (see Figure 2).Footnote 88 The first essay, “George Gershwin and His Opera ‘Porgy and Bess’” by Gennady Rozhdestvensky (b. 1931), informed the audience that George Gershwin was a popular songwriter and the composer of Rhapsody in Blue (it did not mention Gershwin's Russian–Jewish background).Footnote 89 Additionally, it highlighted some important scenes in the opera, including Serena's lament. The second essay, “The Opera ‘Porgy and Bess’ on the Stage” by Boris Pokrovsky (1912–2009), focused more on the production, including biographical information about Robert Breen and the stage and costume designers, Wolfgang Roth and Jed Mace.Footnote 90
Figure 2. Russian program of Porgy and Bess. P&B: Public Relations—Leningrad (F27), Robert Breen Collection, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University.
More importantly, the essays focused on Gershwin's alleged ability to capture the “heart and soul” of black people and the opera's ability to recreate the world of “port loaders [stevedores], fishermen, and beggars.” Pokrovsky wrote, for example, that “the world, in which the suffering of people combines with their faith in human happiness, is recreated in Gershwin's opera with great truth and strength.” He continued, “The very life of Catfish Row in all its diversity of color” is captured in “the mass [choral] scenes,” which are “diverse in meaning, character, [and] rhythm.” Rozhdestvensky focused more on the musical aspects of the opera as evident signs of American black culture. He argued that Gershwin's “rhythmic variety and harmonic freshness” were inseparably connected to the supposed folklore from which they came—the songs themselves acted as “a mirror that reflect[ed] the heart and soul of a people.” More specifically, Gershwin's use of “negro songs” and melodies managed to “bring to the listener the freshness and spontaneity of the feelings and thoughts of a simple people.” For Rozhdestvensky, the choral accompaniment to Serena's lament, for example, ended “as though in a moan of a people crushed [or depressed] by sorrow,” while the picnic scene on the island beat out “the complex rhythms characteristic of folk negro music.”
Common to Pokrovsky's and Rozhdestvensky's program articles was a reading of African Americans as a “suffering proletariat.” The focus on their “truth” and “strength” despite the oppression that they encounter, and more importantly, the emphasis on the use of mass choruses, “negro songs,” and folklore, placed and praised the work in line with a socialist realist aesthetic. As Marina Frolova-Walker has argued, “the use of folk music was the single most prominent strand of musical Socialist Realism” because it allowed Soviet composers to walk the line between formalism and banality.”Footnote 91 The claims, for example, that the characters were a “simple people” qualified and contrasted with the African American concern that black people would be interpreted as a “backward people” or an “ignorant and shiftless group.”Footnote 92 Instead, through a socialist realist understanding, the characters of Porgy and Bess were joined with the international working class.
In addition to the program essays, the public had access to the Leningrad and Moscow newspaper reviews.Footnote 93 In a memorandum to Charles Bohlen, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Roye L. Lowry, the embassy's second secretary, noted that the reviews were “noteworthy for dealing with the work in terms of artistic and critical standards familiar everywhere,” rather than focusing on political manipulation. Lowry explained further that “there were attempts to relate the story portrayed on the stage to Soviet political propaganda, but even in those reviews which bore down most heavily on this, the political content of the review was subordinated to artistic criticism.” On the whole, he concluded, the reviews were surprisingly “favorable.”Footnote 94
Lowry was most likely referring to a politically oriented article by the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky in the 29 December Vecherniy Leningrad (Evening Leningrad): “We, the Soviet spectators, realize the corrosive effect of the capitalistic system on the consciousness, the mentality and the moral outlook of a people oppressed by poverty. This lifts Heyward's play, as set to music by Gershwin, into the realm of a social drama.”Footnote 95 Although the article's social and political critique was the most heavy-handed among the reviews, Lowry failed to notice how even in this “critique,” the author's primary focus was on artistic details. Bogdanov-Berezovsky noted the number of arias, ensembles, choral numbers, and “little songs of a couplet variety and dance elements close to ethnic and music-hall forms.” Ultimately, Bogdanov-Berezovsky interpreted Gershwin's music, in the form of Clara's lullaby, Serena's lament, and the “penetrating and lyrically deep duet of Porgy and Bess,” as “intentionally suffused with Negro musical folklore.”Footnote 96
Other reviews were focused even more on the “artistic” elements of the production, including Gershwin's purported use of folk songs.Footnote 97 Writing in Smena, Yuri Kovalev asserted that Gershwin “widely used the folk art of the American Negroes” and that “it [was] quite likely that the unique combination of melody and movement in Negro art (ragtime, blues) suggested to Gershwin the idea of creating a synthetic genre in which movement, music, and song would be organically fused.”Footnote 98 The issue of African American representation, however, was left unaddressed. The actors were not seen to represent a black essentialism of inherent criminality, irrepressible sexuality, or mental naiveté at least in the recorded account (which was not necessarily the same as an audience member's account), but they could still represent an idealized and romanticized authenticity of black folk life and culture. This interpretation allowed the Soviets to appropriate both the characters in the opera and the actors in the production into the international proletariat. Thus, the Soviets mistook the story of Porgy and Bess to stand in for the wide range and diversity of African American experiences in the United States.
What further complicated and even contradicted the official Soviet view was how the cast members appeared off stage. To the chagrin of any Marxist-Leninist, the actors could not easily be seen as members of the proletariat, a fact made especially evident during events organized for them in Leningrad and Moscow. A twenty-minute video of the tour produced by the Central Studio for Documentary Film and held in Robert Breen's Papers at Ohio State University shows how the company arrived by train, stepping out in fur coats, with one actress gently carrying a small pet dog. Large crowds cheered, blew kisses, and showered their guests with flowers.Footnote 99
After checking into the Hotel Metropol, the company boarded a bus, whereupon the video's viewer is similarly given a tour of Moscow, visiting Soviet national museums, passing by monuments, and attending a performance of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at the Bolshoi State Academy Theatre.Footnote 100 The video shows the Soviets hosting a large holiday party for the company in Moscow, including circle dancing, festive drinking and eating, African American boys sitting on the lap of Grandfather Frost (Ded moroz, a Slavic folk character similar to Santa Claus), and a young Pioneer girl (a member of a Soviet mass youth organization) tying a handkerchief around an American boy's neck (see Figures 3–6).Footnote 101
Figure 3. Cast members viewing a portrait of composer Mikhail Glinka by artist Ilya Repin. Robert Breen Collection, Russian Pictures, Box 3, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University. I thank Anne Searcy for identifying the painting and artist.
Figure 4. Cast members strolling down a street in Moscow. Robert Breen Collection, Russian Collection, Box 3, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University.
Figure 5. Cast members with Grandfather Frost at a reception hosted by the Soviets. Robert Breen Collection, Russian Collection, Box 3, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University.
Figure 6. Cast members (right to left) Martha Flowers, Lavern Hutcherson, and Ethel Ayler. Robert Breen Collection, Russian Collection, Box 3, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University.
The Soviets paid substantial costs for the sake of these cultural exchanges and to bring Porgy and Bess to the Soviet Union. The Ministry of Culture remunerated $16,000 (64,000 rubles; $141,000 in 2014) a week, in addition to food and lodging in hotels, transportation in and out of Russia, and a domesticated goat (for Porgy's exit at the end of the opera).Footnote 102 But from his point of view, Truman Capote wanted to make clear that Soviet funding should not be construed as “cultural philanthropy.” Not only did he complain that the Soviets skipped the champagne and caviar the cast members had hoped for—instead, they were disappointed with raspberry soda and yogurt—he also wrote that the Soviets saved money by making half of the salary payments in rubles at a significantly inflated official Soviet rate of exchange.Footnote 103 Capote interpreted Soviet funding as a case of “sound business,” where “the Soviet Ministry of Culture . . . surely double[d] its investment, reaping the equivalent of $300,000 in total box office receipts.”Footnote 104
No matter the profit or loss, however, we should not discount the possibility that the Soviets were sincerely interested in sharing aspects of Russian culture with their guests. One could suggest that the organized events were purely for publicity purposes, and that the Soviets wanted only to put on the best show for the cameras, but undeniable are the facts that the events were organized in advance and magnificently executed. Additionally, no matter how controlled they may have been, there was always room for the informal and unexpected—Soviet officials did not have the ability to curate every act of interpretation or moment of encounter. As the narrator of the documentary film suggests when the young Pioneer girl ties the handkerchief around the young black boy's neck, these events provided members of the Everyman Opera Company “something to remember their young Soviet friends by!”Footnote 105 That knot was a metaphor for the capabilities of informal exchange as a physical bond and a lasting memory in the minds of all the participants.
Conclusion
I have examined Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union through the intersections of race, representation, Cold War diplomacy, and the civil rights movement. Mismatched expectations and unexpected outcomes marked the many problems of racial representation. Robert Breen and the Everyman Opera Company's production of Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union sparked debates that were concerned with the complex collisions of stereotype, patronage, and reception. The opera was caught in the middle of political and diplomatic jostling of “cultural exchange” with “political prematurity,” the latter of which can also be interpreted as a common U.S. government response—as indeed it remains—and a lens through which State Department officials saw Porgy and Bess and the “Negro question.”
The most critical aspect of performing this opera during both the civil rights movement and the Cold War was the clash between the opera's narrative and the real, lived experiences of the performing artists in the Everyman Opera Company. The characters in the story and the cast members in the production shared the same color of skin and lived under the same political and economic systems of racial injustice, but their lives were far different. The problems of race and representation were those of reception and perceived authenticity. If the artists Marian Anderson or Louis Armstrong strutted or shouted, or, in the words of an Ebony magazine author, put too much “hi-de-ho” in their concert performances, then that was different from the artists Martha Flowers, Maya Angelou, or John McCurry doing the same while playing Bess, Ruby, or Crown. The prevalent fear voiced by African American critics was that the Soviets would derive from the opera an inaccurate depiction of black life. In the words of the same Ebony author, the opera was an “example of America's ‘mistreatment’ of Negroes because of its ‘yas-suh-boss’ portrait of colored life in Dixie.”Footnote 106
And yet, what was most significant about the Soviet interpretation (as presented by critics in several official periodicals) was that the reception focused on the socialist realist aspects of Porgy and Bess. Rather that propagandizing the negative aspects of black life in the opera—the State Department's overriding concern—the Soviet critics wrote instead about the artistry of the performers. The Soviet interpretation was thus based on a number of factors that U.S. government officials and the African American press did not consider. Furthermore, the possibility that the Soviets were genuinely interested in sharing aspects of Russian culture cannot be ruled out.
In yet another mismatch, the Soviets’ interpretation of the proletarian struggles of Bess and Porgy differed dramatically from the public appearances of the cast members throughout the tour. The most conspicuous and extravagant of these unofficial encounters was the wedding ceremony of Helen Thigpen and Earl Jackson. Moreover, the photographs and videos taken of Martha Flowers and other cast members show them in large fur coats, jewelry, gowns, and three-piece suits.
The misunderstandings, miscalculations, and misplaced fears surrounding Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union remind us that music is not just multivalent, open to various interpretations, or rooted in a particular place. More importantly, as a marker of cultural or national identity, music provides only an illusion of authentic representation, while being fraught with the expectations and demands of multiple participants and stakeholders. The problems of representation and reception are particularly tricky when music is used as a form of cultural exchange or diplomacy. Music serves as only a blunt tool of instrumentality, which was especially true of Porgy and Bess during this time and in this setting. The history of the opera was, and continues to be, entangled with its performers, aesthetic and political interpretations, the color of black skin, and the future of racial progress.
