The Premiere Performance of
Porgy and Bess

The attached review of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was penned by music critic and scholar Isaac Goldberg (1887 – 1938), appearing in Stage Magazine some two months after the premiere performance:

“Why the Jew of the North should, in time, take up the song of the Southern Negro and fuse into a typically American product is an involved question. Perhaps, underneath the jazz rhythms and the general unconventionality of musical process lies the common history of an oppressed minority, and an ultimately Oriental origin. In any case, the human focus of this particular type of musical Americanism has been, from the very first notes, George Gershwin.”

– from Amazon: