Summertime and the living is easy...

So, the reason we came back on Friday instead of being the last out of the field was music: on Saturday, we had tickets to the last performance of "Porgy and Bess" by the San Francisco Opera.

From the first chords of "Summertime" to the very end, there was a sense of familiarity and difference about this performance. Listening to the comments of people around me (why is it that people in public events think their conversations are private?), I was struck by how many people were uncomfortable with what they saw as the production's departure from the authentic version. I can only assume that these listeners were comparing the opera to the movie from 1959.

But of course, what we were watching was the original operatic version, which program notes told me had rapidly been reworked during the original run in 1935 and never performed intact again until 1976. As an opera, the story moved entirely through musical vocalization, interrupted only when the few white characters-- the police, the coroner-- entered the scene and spoke without song.

For me, beyond the beauty and power of this performance, the problem of authenticity and memory posed by "Porgy and Bess" might be exemplary of a broader cultural process. What is seen as legitimate and authentic is what we remember a work to have been. The version that reached the most people outweighed the original intentions of the creators, and made the revival of the full opera something that must struggle to replace the movie's iconography in the minds of viewers and listeners. Unusually for opera, at this performance, at each break I heard voices-- all women's voices-- singing well-remembered lyrics in cadences that clearly came from the movie, not the opera we were seeing. Summertime echoed and hummed throughout the building, but it was not, in the end, a single unified experience we shared, but instead the layering of what we heard and saw over what we each had seen, heard, and yes, sung before.