Blue Monday (Opera a la Afro-American) was the
original name of a one-act "jazz
opera" by
George Gershwin, renamed
135th Street during a later production. The
English libretto was written by
Buddy DeSylva.
Though a short piece, with a running time
of between twenty and thirty minutes, Blue Monday is often
considered the blueprint to many of Gershwin's later works, and is
often considered to be the "first piece of symphonic jazz" in that it was
the first significant attempt to fuse forms of classical music such as opera with
American popular music, with the opera
largely influenced by Jazz and the African-American culture of
Harlem
.
Characters
- Roles
- Joe, a gambler, tenor
- Vi, his sweetheart, lyric soprano
- Tom, café entertainer and singer, baritone
- Mike, café proprietor and manager, bass
- Sam, café worker and custodian, baritone
- Sweetpea, café pianist
- Chorus
As in Gershwin's later opera
Porgy
and Bess, all the singing roles are
African-American characters. Unlike
Porgy and Bess, however, the original production of
Blue Monday was performed by
white singers in
blackface, since, according to
conductor Erich
Kunzel, "there were no black people on Broadway during that
period."
Synopsis
- Setting: A basement café near the intersection of 135th Street and
Lennox Avenue in Harlem, New York City
.
- Time: An evening during the Jazz
Age, beginning at around 9:30 P.M.
After a brief
overture, the gambler Joe
appears in front of the curtain as a
Prologue, in an obvious reference to the character
Tonio's opening
aria in
Pagliacci. Like that number, which explained
the serious nature of
Leoncavallo's opera as if it were an
actual event, Joe tells his audience that just like "the white
man's opera", this "colored [Harlem] tragedy enacted in operatic
style" focuses on primal human emotions such as
love,
hate, passion and
jealousy, and that the moral of the story is that
tragic results come from when a women's
intuition goes wrong (Joe: "Ladies and
gentlemen!").
As the curtain rises on a café with a
bar,
gambling
room and dance floor, café owner Mike berates his worker Sam for
his laziness and commands him to get to work. As Sam sweeps the
floor, he relates that he resents "
Blue
Monday" because he always loses at dice gambling and it is the
day when people die, and concludes that there is no use working on
Mondays (Sam: "Blue Monday Blues"). The
pianist Sweetpea arrives and plays for a while until
the arrogant singer Tom comes in and knocks her out of the way,
claiming that the only reason the café is still in business is his
singing. Joe's sweetheart Vi enters, asking if anyone has seen her
"lovin' man" Joe, for which she is supposed to meet for a date (Vi:
"Has Anyone Seen My Joe?").
When Mike goes to the backroom to ask if anyone has seen Joe, Tom
attempts to
seduce and woo Vi. When Tom
tells her that he loves her and asks what she sees in the gambler
Joe, Vi angrily that retorts that even if he gambles, Joe is a man
and unique. Tom continues to try to persuade Vi to leave Joe for
him and attempts to kiss her, when Vi threatens him with a
revolver that Joe had given her. Mike returns with
the news that no one has seen Joe, and Vi leaves. Mike again calls
Sam and scolds him for being lazy, and as Sam again sweeps the
floor he sings a reprise the song "Blue Monday" (Sam: "Monday's the
day that all the earthquakes quiver"). This time Sam more directly
foreshadows the event to come, as he states that "Monday's a day
full of sad, sad news /... That's when a gal will pull a trigger, /
A gal will pull a trigger".
Joe enters the café and Tom hides behind the piano to eavesdrop on
his conversation with Mike. After Mike tells Joe that Vi has been
looking for him and that he has heard that Joe won a large deal of
money in a
crap game, Joe tells him that he is
going to use the money to travel to the
South the next morning to visit his
mother, whom he hadn't seen in years and to whom he has recently
sent a
telegram (Joe: "I'll tell the world
I did"). Joe says that he can not tell Vi that he is going, and
when asked why by Mike he says that she gets jealous and angry for
irrational reasons. He then relates how he yearns to see his mother
and return home (Joe: "I'm Gonna See My Mother").
Joe goes upstairs to meet Vi, and slowly the night's guests and
customers arrive. After a dance, Vi tells him that she loves only
him and although she is a jealous woman, if he remains true to her
then she will be his (Vi: I love but you, my Joe, my Joe"). When
Joe leaves to wait for a telegram from his mother, Tom tells Vi
that he overheard Joe's conversation and that the telegram is from
another woman. Vi initially refuses to believe him, but when
Sweetpea arrives with Joe's telegram, Vi accuses Joe of infidelity
and demands to see the telegram. Joe rebukes her by pushing her
away, and when he opens the envelope Vi shoots him with the
revolver from her handbag.
Vi reads the letter, which says that there is no need for Joe to
come because his mother had been dead for three years. When she
realizes what she has done, she sinks to the floor and begs Joe for
forgiveness, which she receives. As Joe dies, he sings that he is
finally going to see his mother in heaven. (Joe: "I'm Gonna See My
Mother").
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 subsequently
renamed 135th Street when Ferde Grofé re-orchestrated it in 1925, with a concert performance at Carnegie Hall
on December 29.
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.
References
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