If any work can be dubbed as ‘The Great American Opera’, it is Gershwin’s genre-transgressing masterpiece, Porgy and Bess. It was based on white Southern writer DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy (1925), as well as on his highly successful stage adaptation of the novel which had been a hit in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Heyward was of Southern ‘aristocratic’ stock, but had strong connect ... (read more)