Blue Monday (opera) - Performance History, Reception and Legacy

Performance History, Reception and Legacy

By 1922, the improvisational and melodic talent of George Gershwin, a former song-plugger for a music publishing firm on Tin Pan Alley, allowed him to write songs for three Broadway shows and then write complete scores for four (although because every one of his previous shows was a revue, Gershwin had basically no dramatic experience). Two of Gershwin's most successful works at this time were the scores to the 1920 and 1921 productions of George White's Scandals, a popular annual revue. Paul Whiteman, the music director and conductor of the Scandals of 1922 (with his Orchestra in the pit), which Gershwin was again hired for, had previously worked with him when the Paul Whiteman Orchestra recorded the latter's song "South Sea Island" in 1921.

Gershwin's lyricist Buddy DeSylva originally conceived a plan for writing a "jazz opera" set in Harlem and based on the Italian language verismo opera Pagliacci with Gershwin in the early 1920s, and Whiteman, who had built much of his reputation on such experimental fusions of different musical and dramatic genres, persuaded producer George White to include it in the 1922 Scandals. White was initially enthusiastic about an idea of a black "opera" because "A recent Broadway success was Shuffle Along, a show with an all-black cast—its words and music by the black creative team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake... White seems to have imagined that a black-oriented segment in the new edition of his revue would capitalize on Shuffle Along's appeal." However, after considering his decision, White realized that a thirty-minute operatic tragedy, or "one act vaudeville opera", as Gershwin called it, would disrupt the flow of his review, and promptly reconsidered before Gershwin and DeSylva had begun writing. The latter two, however, were still the composer and lyricist of the rest of the revue, as it would include the later-famous song "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise."

Three weeks before the opening of the show, White found that he was in need of a longer program and reverted to allowing the (unwritten) opera to be included in the show. Gershwin and DeSylva wrote the work in five days and five nights, and soon after completion it was orchestrated by Will Vodery, a very talented but relatively unknown African-American composer who had befriended Gershwin.

The premiere performance of Blue Monday was at the four Scandal's tryouts in New Haven, Connecticut, and it was received there very warmly and enthusiastically. Gershwin later wrote that what he referred to as his "composer's stomach", ailments which he would have for the rest of his life, originated in his nervousness on the opening night of Blue Monday. A few days after, it opened (and closed) on Broadway at the Globe Theatre on August 28, 1922. The opera itself did not gain a lot of acceptance because of its tragic ending, and was removed from the Scandals after only one performance.

Some critics saw the work as worse than just inappropriate for the Scandals, as Charles Darnton's review in the New York World called it "the most dismal, stupid, and incredible blackface sketch that has probably ever been perpetrated. In it a dusky soprano finally killed her gambling man. She should have shot all her associates the moment they appeared and then turned the pistol on herself." According to Reed University Professor of Music David Schiff, "With the appearance of black musicals like Shuffle Along and the emergence of black stars such as Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters, the minstrel convention of blackface, which survived in the vastly popular performances of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, had become an embarrassment - at least to some critics."

However, "Another critic... said it was a genuine human plot of American life and foreshadowed things to come from Gershwin," and another wrote that "This opera will be imitated in a hundred years." Most importantly, a third critic was relieved that "Here at last, is a genuinely human plot of American life, set to music in the American vein, using jazz only at the right moments, the Blues, and above all, a new and free ragtime time recitative. In it we see the first gleam of a new American musical art." Many biographers and musicologists would see such an assessment as a prophetic prediction of the accomplishment that Gershwin would make thirteen years later with Porgy and Bess.

Blue Monday was one of Gershwin's premature works and lacks the musical and dramatic sophistication of his later musicals and Porgy and Bess, but jazz conductor Paul Whiteman, who conducted the original performance of the piece in 1922, was so impressed by it that he asked Gershwin to compose a symphonic jazz piece for Whiteman to conduct at a concert Whiteman was planning. The resulting piece, "Rhapsody in Blue," became Gershwin's most famous composition.

Arts consultant Jeffrey James claims that Blue Monday is the "genesis of the Rhapsody", and "the missing link in Gershwin's evolution into the Rhapsody in Blue" as well as a source to his Preludes, Piano Concerto and Porgy and Bess.

After its disastrous flop on Broadway, Blue Monday was reportedly renamed 135th Street when Ferde Grofé re-orchestrated it in 1925, with a concert performance at Carnegie Hall on December 29 under the direction of Paul Whiteman. However, the original Grofe score exists in the archives of the Oscar & Hammerstein Library at Lincoln Center, part of the New York Public Library and is titled Blue Monday (135th Street). In an unusually daring move for 1950's television, it was presented in that medium in 1953, as part of the famous anthology, Omnibus, under the title 135th Street. This production featured black singers, not white singers in blackface. Blue Monday is occasionally, though sparingly, revived both inside and outside of the United States, including a 1970 New York revival and recent productions in Adelaide, Australia, Livorno, Italy, Arlington, Virginia and Linz, Austria. A vocal score with a new orchestration by George Bassman was published in 1993. This version was recorded and released on CD that year.

An abbreviated version of Blue Monday, performed in blackface, was included in the 1945 film biography of Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue. The sequence was a fictionalized, but basically true re-creation of the work's opening performance. Bandleader Paul Whiteman appeared as himself.