Porgy and Bess (Fragments)

Gershwin worked on Porgy and Bess for close to two years, spending the summer of 1934 on Folly Island off the South Carolina coast to hear at first hand the Gullah singing he had read about in DuBose Heyward's novel. The result — tried out in Boston in September 1935, then opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York on 10 October — was announced as an American folk opera and fitted none of the categories available: too operatic for Broadway, too close to popular song for the opera house. Its individual numbers entered the standard repertory long before the whole work did.