The Lullabies

Of all the moments that can be compared, the richest is between the lullabies “Summertime” and “Mädel, was fangst Du jetzt an?” that Clara and Marie sing to their infants as they rock them. Allen Forte has examined certain connections in detail, beginning with the observation that the two arias “share certain characteristics. Of these, perhaps the most apparent are the two-chord oscillation and the contour similarity of the opening melodic figures that set ‘Summertime’ and ‘Mädel,’ respectively. Moreover, the voice leading of the oscillating chords is similar: those of Gershwin progress by parallel whole steps. while Berg's are connected by half step, the two upper parts moving in contrary direction to the lower two.”¹⁴

Forte shows as well that one of the chords occurs in both, “the first chord in ‘Summertime’ and the harmony that sets ‘du’ in the Berg lullaby (B, D, F-sharp, G-sharp, plus C-sharp in the Berg).”¹⁵ To these characteristics I will add the following: both lullabies have two verses, and verse two is set to a varied repeat that commences at roughly the same moment (Berg's in m. 17, Gershwin's in m. 18).

These resemblances are of limited interest in part because they are themselves limited: clearly, Gershwin did not need assistance writing a lullaby, and the style of a German expressionist lullaby would be of no great relevance to the African American milieu Gershwin wanted to create. But additional traits suggest what Gershwin felt he could learn from Berg. First, both lullabies return more than once in the opera, and because these returns each make analogous adjustments, the ways in which they return are significant (Appendix 2 compares the lullabies and their reprises). Second, the lullabies have comparable musical-dramatic settings. They are preceded by music that ensures maximum contrast: in Porgy, Clara sings the lullaby after the “Jasbo Brown Blues” in cut C, performed with an onstage piano, while in Wozzeck Marie's lullaby follows the military music, a raucous march in 4/4 with an onstage band.¹⁶

The blues grow in intensity and volume from piano to fortissimo, while the military march crescendos rapidly from pianissimo to fortissimo and eventually fff. Berg and Gershwin provide short introductions to their lullabies, Berg for nine slow measures, Gershwin for thirteen fast measures, although the music shifts definitively nine measures before, just as the stage lights focus on Clara. Both composers prepare the first note of the lullaby by sustaining it beforehand, Berg for seven measures, Gershwin for five and a half, and both conclude the introduction with two high pitches orchestrated to achieve the same sort of color: Berg scores his for celesta and Gershwin for theater-pit bells. This orchestration returns to begin the second verse.

The parallels in approach to the lullabies are followed by others at the conclusion. While Marie and Clara sing their final measures, the orchestra (and in Porgy and Bess, also the choir) descend by half step, either for a fifth or a tritone (Wozzeck, Act 1, mm. 398–403; Porgy, Act 1, R21+2). Following the last cadence, the arias exploit a fragment of the opening melody as the source of an instrumental coda. The melodic fragment appears twice and then quickly twice more in a compressed, elided form pitched an octave lower. Berg and Gershwin then introduce a motive of central importance that eventually becomes associated with death. As Willi Reich described it for Wozzeck, from the instrumental coda “a cadential transition … is developed as an ending, one of the most important motifs of the opera. The open fifths represent the somewhat aimless waiting of Marie, a waiting that is terminated only by her death.”¹⁷

Indeed, this is the motive to which Berg returns just as Wozzeck stabs Marie in the neck with a knife and gasps “Todt!” Reich further observes, “The repetition of [this motif] is interrupted by the swiftly intruding figure of Wozzeck suddenly knocking at the window.”¹⁸ Gershwin, in turn, follows his lullaby with the first statement of the fight music, the motive that soon enough builds to Crown's murder of Robbins and, later in Act 3, to Porgy's murder of Crown. But in its initial statement, as in Wozzeck, this motive breaks off for Mingo, Sporting Life, and others to play craps. This is one of the best examples of a practice that Steven Gilbert observed in Porgy and Bess: “The later emergence of motives and themes from material stated early in the opera. These motives and themes not only recur; they precur.”¹⁹ Reich's detailed analysis of Wozzeck provided an explanation of a process Gershwin found useful for his own purposes.

Both operas thus have the following events in succession: a dance or march played on stage in loud 4/4 or cut time, followed by a lullaby (with various points in common) and subsequently a brief truncated statement of a central motive. These introductory statements then give way to an extended segment of music without arias, songs, or any of Berg's repetition-based instrumental forms. After Reich describes the interruption of the motive associated with Marie, he continues: “From here on the musical structure abandons all formal schemes of unity and suggests the free, unconstrained technique of composition of the post-Wagnerian style, which was so prone to develop long stretches of the text in this manner, using the leitmotif only as a means of support. I emphasize this particular idiosyncrasy here, because it is the only place in Wozzeck where it occurs.”²⁰

Gershwin reacted accordingly. Between the introduction of the fight motive and the next large vocal number (Jake's “A Woman Is a Sometimes Thing”), he wrote 182 measures of small units, either recitative or melodic segments of up to twenty-one measures. His leitmotives figure heavily in this section.

In Porgy and Bess, the next two statements of the lullaby were additions to the opera; that is, in the play Porgy the lullaby had appeared only twice, once each in the first and final acts. The kindred variations between the multiple reprises of the lullabies by Berg and Gershwin thus introduce into Porgy dramatic as well as musical elements from Wozzeck. Although less prolonged, Gershwin's musical shadowing of Berg is nevertheless evident because of some changes that appear in both operas, shown in Appendix 2. At the first return there is only one verse, sung against an active, blatantly intrusive counterpoint (impassioned craps shooters in Porgy and Bess, a fortissimo violin line marked “wild” in Wozzeck), and the lullaby fails utterly; that is, the baby does not fall asleep. Also, in this reprise and the next, the orchestral preparation of the singer's first note is shortened, and shortened comparably: one or two measures for the first reprise, three for the second (Appendix 2, no. 3).

The second reprises also have musical interjections, in this case disconnected outbursts that import sounds from the surrounding musical context: in Porgy, the lullaby follows a musical depiction of wind, gusts of wind then arise every few measures within the lullaby, and the wind resumes momentarily at the end. This device emulates a sequence in Wozzeck in which a polka precedes Wozzeck's parodistic rendition, the pianist repeatedly attempts to play during Wozzeck's singing, and the polka starts anew when Wozzeck breaks off. Lastly, the final reprises of the lullaby are sung not by Clara and Marie but by Bess and Wozzeck. Since this vocal transfer also occurred in the play, it does not by itself indicate anything about Berg's potential influence on Gershwin. But significantly, Gershwin and Berg once again exit the lullaby as they had the first time, by recalling the same portentous motives they had introduced after the first lullabies. Moreover, another detail of Berg's last reprise is taken over literally by Gershwin, namely the segue to the lullaby from an out-of-tune onstage piano playing 2/4 music. This sequence he adopted for the first statement in Porgy, Act 1, sc. 1.

The Fugues

Although the “crap game fugue” has justifiably been compared to the fight fugue in Wagner's Die Meistersinger, it also shares several elements with the fugue in Wozzeck (Appendix 1, no. 3b).²¹

Like Wagner's fugue, it has incessant, strongly accented sixteenth-note motion in the orchestra while the singers react to the onstage tussle. Wagner's fugue was perhaps dramatically better than Gershwin's for being shorter, 79 mm. of 2/4 rather than 111, but in its extended length, Gershwin's fugue had roughly the same dimensions as Berg's, which runs for sixty mm. of 4/4. More significant, Berg and Gershwin both precede their fugues with extended free-form introductions of the themes that appear in the fugue (Appendix 1, no. 3a). Berg labeled this scene “Fantasia and Fugue” and presented three themes for development in the fantasy before bringing them together in the fugue. The crap game fugue in Porgy also has two of its themes presented in an extended fantasylike treatment immediately before fusing them together in the fugue. In both operas one of the leitmotives treated in this pre-fugal section belongs to a male adversary, that is, Crown (the motive first introduced in Act 1, R83+10) and the Captain (Hauptmann); moreover, Gershwin, like Berg, presents precisely this motive once in inversion against itself (Wozzeck, Act 2, m. 322, Porgy and Bess, I, R107+6ff). The dimensions of the fantasies are comparable: the 254 measures in Porgy are primarily in 2/4 and Wozzeck has 115 measures of 3/4 and 4/4. The developmental fantasies lead into the fugues with a pedal, 3 measures of 4/4 in Wozzeck and 6 measures of 2/4 in Porgy; and both of these pedals culminate in a major seventh with a singer adding a minor second above the lower pedal tone.

Gershwin's less pervasive counterpoint is difficult to compare to Berg's, but in addition to presenting Crown's leitmotive in inversion, Gershwin's crap game theme includes a melodic palindrome that compares to the retrograde figures heard in Wozzeck. Indeed, this idea loosely echoes Berg's Hauptmann motive, especially in the rhythms and pitches of the last notes, shown in Example 2. Wayne Shirley, who has noticed the resemblance between these two themes, concluded that this motivic debt was highlighted by Gershwin, by virtue of how he emulated Berg's orchestration. While Berg assigned the motive to an English horn, Gershwin scored it for several instruments, but almost always assigned the English horn “one dynamic level higher than the other instruments” (a shading no recorded performance has achieved).²²

Also suggestive is that when this theme returns in augmentation in the fantasy and fugue, it has a palindromic shape that may have inspired Gershwin's retrograde treatment, shown in Example 3.

Sermons and Abductions

Like the fugue, the mock sermon “It ain't necessarily so” is an addition to the opera that had not existed in the novel or in the play, and is one of the Broadwayesque song texts that Ira Gershwin wrote, evidently with little or no input from Heyward. Wozzeck seems musically and textually a model. Gershwin's marking that this sermon should be sung “Happily, with humour” may have been influenced by Reich's description of Berg's setting as a “good-natured parody of a sermon,”²³

and so, in order to create a mood appropriate for these irreverent spoofs, the sermons both take place in the context of dancing and choral singing. The African American counterpart of the dance and stage band in Wozzeck is the dance accompanied by African drums; and as Berg's choir sings “Halli, Hallo,” Gershwin's vocalizes on “Ha da da.” Leading in to the sermon itself, the composers both write a brief section in 5/4 to accompany two vocal lines that are essentially one voice, Gershwin's because the two parts sing in unison, Berg's because the two voices seldom sing together. For this section Berg composed a bass ostinato that repeats twelve times in sixteen measures, Gershwin a midrange ostinato that repeats nineteen times in twenty-two measures (Appendix 1, no. 8).

The poetic structure of the mock sermons is in both cases a succession of examples that illustrate an initial thesis. In the sermon that George Gershwin commissioned from his brother Ira, Sporting Life presents five improbable stories from the Bible as evidence of why “it ain't necessarily so.” In Wozzeck, the First Apprentice asks rhetorically “Why, then is man?” and answers, “It is good so.” He then lists occupations that depend on other human beings: the farmer, the caskmaker, the tailor, the doctor, etc. The sermons are both in 4/4 time and include quarter-note triplet motion, Gershwin pervasively, Berg twice. Berg and Gershwin also create duple syncopations within triplets by adding grace notes to a line that in any case already oscillates between two notes. After listening to the sermon the dancers resume. This event leads in Wozzeck to the idiot's omen of death and in Porgy and Bess, to Serena shaming the dancers while the orchestra plays an additive rhythmic motive (in the right hand of the piano vocal score) that is related to the rhythmic-chordal motive that accompanies the deaths of Crown and Robbins.

The scenes in which Crown forces sex on Bess and the Drum Major does the same to Marie have some of the closest dramatic parallels between the two operas (Appendix 1, no. 9). Reich's description of this scene's significance in Wozzeck befits the situation in Porgy: “It is the most important in the development of the plot, for here Marie is seduced by the Drum-Major, an event that is the immediate cause of the conflict and tragic catastrophe.”²⁴

Gershwin's portrayal of Bess succumbing to Crown has numerous points in common with the rapid-paced structure that Berg devised to depict the struggle between the Drum Major and Marie. The indebtedness commences at the outset when Marie and Bess meet their seducers, but is particularly strong at the violent moments when the women desperately attempt to break away. When Marie and the Drum Major start to talk, Berg creates a sense of foreboding by composing the beginning of the scene over a bass line that descends steadily by step, usually a half-step or two, each measure. As shown in Example 4, there are really two descents, one across twenty measures, another over six. Likewise from the moment Bess meets Crown, Gershwin's bass line sinks gradually over forty-one measures, also in two segments, the first of which uses an octatonic scale.

By the end of this section, Berg has arrived at the turning point when Marie tries to defend herself, a pivotal moment that takes longer to reach in Porgy and Bess. Thus whereas each segment of Berg's setting has a counterpart in Gershwin's, Porgy and Bess also contains a lengthy middle section that has no model in Wozzeck. Berg's influence resumes as Bess sings, “Take yo' hands off me,” and Marie “Lass mich!” Both women enter on high F-sharp, and the intense brief struggles commence. Doubtless symbolic of the women's resistance, Berg and Gershwin follow these exclamations with imitative counterpoint at the third, both writing motives essentially on scale degrees 5 and 1, with four entries over rhythmic chordal pedals. At the moment the women yield, the thirds come together and the texture shifts to a scale of parallel triads accompanied by triplets moving in the same direction. Throughout this section, the musical dimensions are virtually identical: the matching stage directions “Her arms close around him” and “sie stürzt in seine Arme” lead rapidly to exit, curtain fall, and scene end. Gershwin's studious attention to Berg's handling of this dramatic encounter extends, as Example 1 shows, to the arias that follow, where Bess and Marie sing nearly identical motives to express unworthiness and remorse.

Other Parallels

The influence of Willi Reich's commentary is evident in two other Bergian aspects of Porgy and Bess: harmony and relative balance of the three acts. Many writers have noted the complexity of Gershwin's harmonic vocabulary in Porgy and Bess and in works written in the preceding years. The thickening of dissonance has been attributed to Joseph Schillinger's teachings, but it had begun before then, in the 1920s, about the time Gershwin discovered the music of Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel. I agree with David Schiff that in Porgy and Bess “the harmony often sounds like Berg's,” an assessment that need not be limited to Wozzeck but could encompass other works such as the Lyric Suite, which Gershwin knew well.²⁵

Nevertheless, one chord from Wozzeck warrants particular scrutiny, both because of Reich's reference to it and because of the use Gershwin made of it. A central sonority in Wozzeck, as Allen Forte, George Perle, and others have recognized, is a seventh or ninth chord with an added sharp 4, often spelled as a G-major chord made dissonant with a C-sharp or D-flat. Perle termed this G9 sharp11 chord (also G-flat9 sharp11) the “principal referential chord of the work as a whole.”²⁶ It begins and ends the first scene and each of the three acts, as shown in Example 5, Act 1, m. 6; m. 171; and the end of Act 1, mm. 716–17. Reich had already labeled this chord the equivalent of a tonal center for the opera, pointing out that Berg made each act “steer its way toward one and the same final chord in a sort of cadence to rest there as on a tonic.”²⁷

This chord is also prominent in Porgy and Bess, where it often appears spelled on G with a C-sharp or D-flat. Occurring first in the Jasbo Brown Blues that begin Act 1 (Example 6a, Act 1, R11), it returns frequently as the first chord of the motive associated with Crown and death (Example 6b, Act 1, R83+2; Act 2, R169; and Act 2, R255+2).

When this motive accompanies Crown's murdering Robbins and later Porgy's killing Crown, Gershwin transposes the chord to E-flat and A, emphasizing its tritone symmetries. Granted, Gershwin and other composers had discovered this chord before Porgy and Bess, and it can also be related to the Petrushka chord, which Gershwin had used years earlier in An American in Paris (1928).²⁸

But the influence of Berg lies as much in the use of the chord as in the actual notes. While it is not “the principal referential chord” of the opera—that distinction goes instead to the fourth chord that begins and ends the opera and many individual scenes—it turns up at many of the opera's most dramatic moments.

Reich also discussed the relative length of the acts and something of their ABA formal relationship to each other: “The first and third acts reveal definite structural parallels. [They are] shorter by far than the weightier middle act…. While the second act … is a completely integrated musical structure from the last to the first measure, the form of the first and third is much freer.”²⁹

In comparison, the middle act of Porgy and Bess is the longest and has the most arias and duets (nine), and Acts 1 and 3 have structural parallels, including a return to the opening music near the end. As Lawrence Starr remarked, “Scene 1 of the last act presents a recapitulation of the most important, and directly associated, musical and dramatic ideas presented in scene 1 of the first act.”³⁰ These outer acts have as well a greater percentage of recitative-like and arioso passages.

The model of Berg may have extended beyond the actual writing of the opera. Once the performances had begun, Gershwin pursued two promotional steps that Berg had taken before him: a public written statement of his goals in composing Porgy and Bess, and an orchestral suite of excerpts from the opera. Berg had written a brief account of what he had hoped to achieve with Wozzeck, an essay published in English as “A Word about Wozzeck.”³¹

Berg, motivated by a desire to answer critics, denied accusations that he had attempted to reform “the structure of opera.”³² Several key points that Berg makes in this essay find echoes in the short explanatory article Gershwin contributed to the New York Times.³³ Self-conscious modernists that they both were, they emphasized the newness of their achievements while at the same time qualifying that claim to avoid any suggestion that they had created novelty for novelty's sake. And they both assert their goal of writing “good” music that was music “for the theater.” More important than the similarity of the individual thoughts expressed here is the unprecedented step—for Gershwin—of answering his critics publicly, a step he may have taken in the awareness that Berg had also responded in print to journalistic criticism.

Berg's precedent is important as well for the orchestral suite based on the opera. As Berg assembled three concert excerpts from Wozzeck, the Drei Bruchstücke aus “Wozzeck,” so Gershwin also extracted several numbers as an orchestral composition, which he never published, however. He titled this five-movement composition “Suite from Porgy and Bess,” incorporating many of the segments he had cut from the Boston and New York performances, such as the “Jasbo Brown Blues” leading in to “Summertime,” portions of the fugue and hurricane music, and the children's chorus.³⁴

These sections are all among those that had been modeled on Wozzeck. Johnson has noted that Gershwin passed up an opportunity to cobble together a medley of the most popular hits from the opera, instead unconventionally selecting many of the more intellectually challenging passages: “The unusual shape of the Suite suggests that he had particularly strong feelings about this material.”³⁵ For his Suite, which was likely inspired in part by Berg's example, Gershwin drew together some of his most Bergian moments.

Gershwin's numerous debts to Berg's music necessitate a reevaluation of what Gershwin might have learned at the hands of New York City's composition guru, Joseph Schillinger. Many stylistic details that have been presumed to originate in study sessions with Schillinger can now also be attributed to the example of Berg, not only the music of Wozzeck but also that of the Lyric Suite. In an article reviewing the claims of Schillinger's influence on Porgy and Bess, Paul Nauert concludes that the evidence for Gershwin's debt to Schillinger was strongest “in the cyclic harmony of ‘Gone, Gone, Gone’ and the elaborate rhythmic patterning of ‘Leavin’ for the Promise' Lan'.”' Other moments, such as the fugue, the additive chords leading up to “Summertime,” and various rhythmic devices also have possible sources in Schillinger's method.³⁶

But if Gershwin studied Wozzeck closely enough to learn from his structural designs, then surely Berg offers an alternative, or more likely a complementary, source for many of the ideas usually credited to Schillinger.³⁷ Schillinger's attraction for Gershwin may have been enhanced by the obvious overlap in Berg's style and Schillinger's system, a possibility that Forte has also suspected: “Gershwin hoped his studies with Schillinger might bring him closer to the kind of modern concert music he so obviously admired in the works of Berg.”³⁸ Gershwin's aspirations to compose with an American voice that was the technical equal of his European contemporaries (or his European-educated American contemporaries) predated his studies with Schillinger by many years; these aspirations are also not the result of his 1928 pilgrimage to Europe in the hopes of studying with Ravel or Berg. Rather it was his fascination with dissonant counterpoint and modernist rhythmic patterns that led him first to Berg and subsequently to Schillinger.

For much of Porgy, Gershwin had no need to ask what Berg had done before him. Because he was setting English rather than German, because he needed to draw on American popular and folk musical forms rather than on German forms, Gershwin had nothing to learn from Berg about melody and text setting. In these areas he was already an acknowledged master. The examples that I have presented here suggest that Gershwin carefully studied Berg's approach to scene construction (i.e., how to integrate a song into an evolving, ongoing musical context), and his techniques of unification across great stretches of time (i.e., how to repeat ideas, whether motives or larger units). He turned to Wozzeck for musical guidance at several dramatically significant moments of the opera. The murder of Robbins, the drowning of Jake, the lullaby and its reprises, the abductions of Bess and Marie, the fugue and crap game music, and several other events all derive details of structure from Wozzeck. That some of these moments had not existed in either Heyward's novel Porgy or the subsequent play further suggests that Gershwin considered these elements to have been particularly effective. The mock sermon in Porgy and Bess has no precedent in the Heyward play Porgy, nor do the multiple repetitions of the lullaby or the importance of children (and children's chorus) at the end. For these and for numerous musical details, Berg was Gershwin's model.

Corroboration for this conclusion comes from two previously uncited sources: a recollection by William Rosar and an interview with Gershwin. First, a secondhand report from Rosar, a scholar of film music and an acquaintance of Edward B. “Eddie” Powell, a Hollywood orchestrator who was a confidant of Gershwin's during the period in which Gershwin began to compose Porgy and Bess. In the 1930s Powell, along with Gershwin, was a student of Joseph Schillinger, and also according to Rosar, the person Gershwin hired to orchestrate his musical Let 'Em Eat Cake.³⁹

Rosar also claims that Gershwin wanted Powell to orchestrate Porgy for him as well, but that Powell instead went to Hollywood in summer 1934 when he was offered work there by Eddie Cantor. Decades later Rosar and Powell went together to a performance of Porgy and Bess that the Houston Grand Opera staged in Los Angeles on 18 June 1977. Based on notes Rosar made immediately after this performance, Rosar remembers Powell saying that Gershwin “wanted to write it like Wozzeck, an American Wozzeck.” Rosar's communication to me needs to be quoted more fully: Rosar's recollection, it must be noted, is secondhand information with a presumed lapse of forty or more years between Gershwin's alleged comment to Powell (their discussion would have taken place either in 1933 before Powell left New York or a few years later in Los Angeles) and then an additional twenty-seven years between Powell's statement to Rosar and Rosar's e-mail to me. Whether or not Rosar has remembered Powell's exact words—and after so many years that hardly seems likely—the import of Powell's revelation was memorable because its claim was so improbable; and it is credible both because it accurately describes the relationship of Porgy and Bess to Wozzeck and because of Gershwin's documented esteem for Berg and Wozzeck.

Second, buttressing our knowledge of Gershwin's high regard for Berg in general and Wozzeck in particular is an overlooked interview with Gershwin that took place on 19 June 1928, immediately upon Gershwin's return from Europe. The interview was reported the very next day in the New York Morning Telegraph, under a headline that is extraordinary because it already refers to Berg as an opera composer: “Gershwin Finds Great Opera Artist,” and, in smaller print, “Returning on Majestic Composer Tells of Thrills Abroad.”⁴¹

The article begins: The significance of the last paragraph is twofold: Gershwin knew of Wozzeck and admired it long before beginning studies with Schillinger; and Gershwin's attendance at the Philadelphia premiere of Wozzeck was spurred by more than idle curiosity. He may have been the first to urge Stokowski to perform it.⁴²

What does Gershwin's desire to compose an “American Wozzeck” mean for how we interpret the many points of correspondence? A few years before beginning Porgy and Bess, Gershwin described how he learned to compose songs, and his remarks from 1930 suggest that his emulation of Wozzeck was primarily pedagogical: “I learned to write music by studying the most successful songs published. At nineteen I could write a song that sounded so much like Jerome Kern that he wouldn't know whether he or I had written it. But imitation can only go so far. The young songwriter may start by imitating a successful composer he admires, but he must break away as soon as he has learned the maestro's strong points and technique.”⁴³

What served a young songwriter in his teens worked as well for a novice composer embarking on his first opera. Indeed, despite the quantity and subtlety of Gershwin's musical debts, relatively few of them may be considered musical allusions. If an allusion were simply an intentional reference to another work made by means of a resemblance, then all of Gershwin's references to Wozzeck would qualify, because the scope is sufficient to indicate that they are the result of Gershwin's knowledge of Berg's piano vocal score. But an allusion is also a reference made with the intention of shaping the meaning conveyed to any who recognize the reference. Both the intent to shape meaning and the expectation of writing for an audience are important conditions. Relatively few of Gershwin's debts to Wozzeck easily satisfy these criteria.⁴⁴ When Bess sings “I wants to stay here, but I ain't worthy,” the context and the audibility of the motive make it a straightforward allusion to Marie's motive at “Bin ich ein schlecht Mensch” (shown in Example 1). There is an audience—however small—capable of recognizing this allusion and enjoying Gershwin's wit. But is this also true of the first lullaby (including its preparation and the music which follows it) or of the scene in which Crown assaults Bess, both of them scenes with extended parallels in Wozzeck?

There are other instances of influence and indebtedness in Porgy and Bess that can be brought to bear on this question. Two non-motivic debts have already been mentioned: the cries of the Strawberry Woman that many recognized early on as influenced by an analogous moment in Charpentier's Louise; and the crap game fugue, which Johnson has compared to Wagner's fight fugue in Die Meistersinger. That neither involves motives or themes is irrelevant for the question of allusion, because motives are but one means of marking a resemblance; similarities of musical structure and dramatic moment convey enough information for listeners to note the resemblance and to assess the significance of that resemblance for their interpretation. It is reasonable to conclude in both of these cases that Gershwin makes assimilative allusions to the earlier works, that he accepts the meanings and the authority of Charpentier's cries and Wagner's fugue and creates moments similar enough for others to make the connection.

Two additional references have not been recognized previously. Both, like these just discussed, are strongly assimilative, one of them close enough in motive to be considered a quotation. Among Eastwood Lane's Five American Dances for Piano is one titled “The Crap Shooters: A Negro Dance.”⁴⁵

The main theme of this dance provided Gershwin with a model for the beginning of his crap game theme, for the three measures that precede the Bergian motive he also presents in retrograde. As shown in Example 7, these measures compare closely in key (C minor and E-flat major), in tempo, and in dynamic (piano). The motive is a syncopated sixteenth-note figure that occurs three times. As in the allusions to Charpentier and Wagner, Gershwin's music adheres to the original association, in this case, a crap game. That Gershwin knew of Eastwood Lane (1879–1951) is beyond question. Lane also resided in Manhattan, working as a pianist, composer, and from 1914 to 1935, as an assistant director at the Wanamaker Auditorium concerts. Paul Whiteman performed several of Lane's works, including three arranged by Ferde Grofé at a Carnegie Hall concert on 17 November 1924 that featured the Rhapsody in Blue with Gershwin at the piano. The next day the critic of the New York Times, Olin Downes, lambasted this concert because, arriving late, he had missed Lane's pieces, which he had particularly wanted to hear.⁴⁶

The other motivic debt, almost a quotation, is to Alfred Newman's film score for the King Vidor film Street Scene (1931). A faithful rendition of Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize–winning play from 1929, Street Scene takes place in a run-down Manhattan brownstone during the heat of summer. It depicts working-class life in New York City in the kind of unglamorous, unsentimentalized light that ten years later came to typify film noir. A woman's affair leads to a bloody end when her alcoholic husband returns home unexpectedly and shoots her and her lover dead. After directing several Gershwin shows on Broadway during the 1920s, Newman composed the Gershwinesque score for Street Scene soon after he moved to Hollywood in 1930 to become director of music for United Artists. His score became as successful as the film itself, appearing soon in an arrangement for piano,⁴⁷

subsequently as an orchestral composition called “Sentimental Rhapsody,” and then recycled in other movies. The bluesy principal theme of the movie and the piano arrangement is very close to the main theme of Porgy's imposing Act 2 love duet with Bess, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” (Examples 8a and b). Both are primarily in D major, in 4/4 and marked by Newman Quasi Andante and by Gershwin both as Andante cantabile (in the full score) and Andantino cantabile (in the piano vocal-score).⁴⁸ As in his allusion to Eastwood Lane's composition, the text of the allusive source provides fertile imagery for interpreting the parallel context of the motive's use within Porgy and Bess. Certainly the association lends a perilous, foreboding tinge to the love duet that fits well with the expectations that Dubose Heyward's narrative has already created. We know, after all (or at least can surmise), that Bess will soon enough be singing a duet with Crown, and that murder will follow.⁴⁹

In contrast to these few assimilative allusions, most of the structural debts listed in Appendix 1 show no indication of being designed to affect how a sensitive listener might interpret individual scenes in Porgy and Bess. On the contrary, evidence of Gershwin's attempts to obscure his indebtedness abounds, but lies chiefly in his avoidance of motivic or thematic references. When Robert Schumann devised allusions that distanced themselves from the original by careful variation of dynamics, tempo, meter, character, and the like, he did so to create contrastive allusions, allusions that allowed for an ironic or other oppositional reading.⁵⁰

There is little comparable evident in Gershwin's efforts to distance Porgy from Wozzeck, with the result that, taken one by one, the indebted moments and scenes in Porgy and Bess often do not strike me as allusive—at least, individually. There is nothing in Berg's sermon that leads me to a different interpretation of Gershwin's; nothing in Berg's Lullaby that will make one hear Gershwin's in a different light; nothing in the drowning in Wozzeck that alters the impact of that in Porgy.

But on a global level, the effect of scene after indebted scene creates a different impression. The allusive sum is greater than that of its component parts. Although Carolyn Abbate's analysis of Debussy's debt to Tristan und Isolde addresses a different degree of dependence, it is still relevant: “It [Tristan] was manipulated by the composer to become a sort of hidden commentary on Pelléas, and thereby became more than merely an obvious model for the later opera.”⁵¹

A “hidden commentary” is too much to claim for the bond between Gershwin's Porgy and Berg's Wozzeck, less for the greater distance between the musical languages than for an important distinction between the intended audiences. Debussy could assume that many, if not most, of his listeners would know Wagner's operas, and Gershwin, writing for a less classically literate public, wrote for an audience that would have virtually no knowledge of Berg's music. The audiences for the two operas, culturally separate for several generations, have only recently begun to overlap. Also, I have the impression that at least in some of his Berg-inspired moments, Gershwin did aim to create a contrastive statement, one that he articulated in his New York Times essay. Implicitly contrasting American opera and culture with European, Gershwin stressed the role of humor: “Humor is an important part of American life, and an American opera without humor could not possibly run the gamut of American expression.”⁵² As with the mock sermon, the Banjo Song “I Got Plenty o' Nuttin”' can be heard as a lighthearted counterpart to a grimly significant moment in Wozzeck, namely, Wozzeck's aria “Wir arme Leut'.” An anguished cry, this “air” has a text that begins with a declaration of poverty (“Poor folk like us! Money, you see, Sir, money! With no money. ”), shifts to an argument about how easy it is for wealthy people to be virtuous (“If I were a gentleman, Sir, and wore a top hat. ”), and concludes with a bleak prophecy that even in heaven poor people will have it hard: “But I'm only a simple soul. Folk like us always are unfortunate in this world and the other world! I think if we got into heaven, we'd have to be thunder-makers.”⁵³ Porgy's ode to pennilessness could not be more different. Porgy happily admits his state (“Oh, I got plenty o' nuttin', An' nuttin's plenty fo' me”), then pities the fate of wealthy people who necessarily live in fear (“De folks wid plenty o' plenty got a lock on dey door/Seems wid plenty you sure got to worry how to keep de debble away”), and concludes with his own view of life in heaven: “I got my gal, got my song, got Hebben de whole day long. No use complainin'!” Nothing in the music signals this allusion. Only in the context of the other similarities is it possible to suggest that Berg inspired both Gershwins, George and Ira.

It is no surprise that Gershwin created a work billed as an American folk opera by lifting ideas from a quintessentially Germanic opera: first because by the 1930s the lines of artistic influence had long been crossing the Atlantic in both directions; and second because Gershwin had from the beginning of his education been schooled in European traditions. Louis Gruenberg, among others, was also attempting to mix black music with musical innovations from Europe (The Daniel Jazz and The Creation are both written for a modified Pierrot ensemble in the immediate aftermath of Gruenberg conducting the New York premiere of Pierrot Lunaire). Gershwin's friend Isaac Goldberg broached this issue when he described Gershwin's special musical position in this country. “As Gershwin does not ‘condescend’ to popular music, neither does he ‘aspire’ to the higher forms; music, to him, is music.”⁵⁴

Goldberg's then commonplace equation of ‘low’ with popular and ‘high’ with serious might be paraphrased: because Gershwin does not condescend to American music, neither does he aspire to European music. In light of Gershwin's dependence on Berg, it seems more accurate to say that Gershwin esteemed both American popular and European art music for different reasons. As his ambitions as a “composer” evolved (as distinct from his identity as a “songwriter”), so did his aspirations to be worthy of comparison to the likes of Ravel and Berg. Porgy and Bess is evidence that Gershwin believed a European post-Wagnerian voice was essential to tell the story of African Americans in South Carolina properly. Because Porgy and Bess is, as Raymond Knapp put it, “at bottom a story told by whites and for whites,” the European voice is inevitable. Because the Gershwins and the Heywards were white, the novel and the opera were quickly criticized by African Americans for engaging in racial stereotyping, a criticism that Gruenberg also experienced in his setting of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1933).⁵⁵ Against these accusations Berg's opera offered Gershwin no protection, no model. The poor and destitute of Buechner's tale were culturally and racially indistinct from author and composer; thus Berg faced no charges of condescension or cultural appropriation.

Gershwin aimed to write music that would survive, as he stated unambiguously in his 1935 New York Times essay on Porgy and Bess. “I chose the form I have used for Porgy and Bess because I believe that music lives only when it is in serious form. When I wrote the Rhapsody in Blue I took ‘blues’ and put them in a larger and more serious form. That was twelve years ago and the Rhapsody in Blue is still very much alive, whereas if I had taken the same themes and put them in songs they would have been gone years ago.”⁵⁶

The notion that music that “lives” only when it is serious was for Gershwin a long-held belief. He had expressed virtually the same thought five years earlier: “An entire composition written in jazz could not live,” and also “the only kinds of music which endure are those which possess form in the universal sense and folk music. All else dies.”⁵⁷

Here in one sentence is Gershwin's explanation of why Porgy and Bess can be at once an American folk opera and an American Wozzeck. Only by combining American folk content with “form in the universal sense” could he create a music that he felt would endure. Charles Hamm, discussing the problems of creating an image of Gershwin that goes beyond the protective biographical accounts of family friends and acquaintances, also cited Gershwin's New York Times article on Porgy as well as his essay on “The Composer in the Mechanical Age,” concluding that “nothing more than these tantalizing scraps of information are available to help us reconstruct Gershwin's ideology.”⁵⁸

But a score the size of Porgy and Bess reveals a great deal about the ideals and methods of its composer: one who found inspiration in Berg, Wagner, Charpentier, and Ravel, as well as composers such as Eastwood Lane and Alfred Newman; who carefully studied a variety of black American musics; who found no contradiction in juxtaposing the learned written contrapuntal techniques of the musical avant-garde and the sophisticated oral contrapuntal practices of unschooled descendants of slaves; who believed with many on the political left that the plight of the dispossessed was worthy material for an opera. Evident in all is a belief that musical assimilations of this magnitude were a fitting expression of an American culture of assimilation.