Gershwin- Classical or Jazz?

Originally Posted by tenor10

Gershwin is like Beethoven, i think he was both.

Explain, please.

Beethoven was both Classical and Romanic.

Well people are always saying well Beethoven was romantic or classical and really he was both. He was the brige between both. With Gershwin I feel he is both "jazz" and classical. I mean he had a jazz background but he also had a classical background, and in his music you can find hints of both. It almost as if he merged them together in a very harmonious way. I mean listen to Porgy... so jazzy, yet it has its classical appeal, thats why people debate that as a musical or an opera.
Enough?

Originally Posted by tenor10

Well people are always saying well Beethoven was romantic or classical and really he was both. He was the brige between both. With Gershwin I feel he is both "jazz" and classical. I mean he had a jazz background but he also had a classical background, and in his music you can find hints of both. It almost as if he merged them together in a very harmonious way. I mean listen to Porgy... so jazzy, yet it has its classical appeal, thats why people debate that as a musical or an opera.
Enough?

Okay....because for a second there, I thought you were saying Beethoven was Classical and Jazz.

As far as I know, the ONLY spoken dialogue in Porgy and Bess is that spoken by the white people (policemen). And just as a FYI, the inclusion of spoken dialogue doesn't mean that a piece is not an opera. Carmen has LOADS of spoken dialogue in it.

Originally Posted by QcCowboy

As far as I know, the ONLY spoken dialogue in Porgy and Bess is that spoken by the white people (policemen). And just as a FYI, the inclusion of spoken dialogue doesn't mean that a piece is not an opera. Carmen has LOADS of spoken dialogue in it.

Same with Die Zauberflote.

Musical theatre history follows this order:
opera -> operetta -> musical play -> musical comedy -> the musical

The operetta has spoken dialogue, but the music is still the most important thing. If we want to get really specific, Carmen is an operetta, Die Zauberflote is an operetta or singspiel.

I know the difference between opera and what not, but even so there is still debate about the "jazz opera" Porgy and Bess.
ok?

the amount of spoken dialogue in Porgy and Bess is so minimal as to have no sway what so ever on the definition one would apply to it - opera or musical or operetta.

As a matter of fact, the spoken dialogue in Porgy is there for a very specific effect: only the black people sing. The white people speak. It's what differentiates the two very different worlds.

I can't say off-hand since I don't have a scor handy, but there may be no more than a dozen spoken lines in Porgy.

What divides an opera from an operetta is considerably more than the inclusion/exclusion of dialogue. The depth/topic of the story, and the over-all structure of the work are far greater issues in defining between the two.

As for Magic Flute being a "singspiel", I happen to believe that THAT was considerably more a question of marketing than a reference to any actual form. Magic Flute is as complex and demanding as any "opera". In essence, it IS an opera. Mozart's "modesty" is more liable to be the instigator of the "singspiel" label.

I tend to think of Sondheim's "musicals" as a sort of hybrid form. The music is highly complex, and generally heavily cyclical. The vocal lines are quite demanding. Even when his works are divided into "numbers", there's a certain ambiguity as to where exactly the number starts and finishes. Surely more the hallmark of an opera than of a musical.

Very few musicals are cyclical in their treatment of thematic material. Generally, it would be safe to presume the same for operettas.

We DO come into more complicated territory when trying to apply the opposite definitions we've just applied to musicals as pertains to opera. Not ALL operas are cyclical. Some even eschew completely any thematic links between sections of the work. Some operas have extremely frivolous and superficial subject matter.

So, see? it's all still pretty vague.

Yea its all really confusing... i mean some people make their living researching this and debating it. There are ways to go either way but I think we can call as what we know. Magic Flute is an opera, thats how we were taught. Porgy and Bess an opera. Sondheim writes "musicals". Its just all in the medium its released in you know?
anyway......whatever we'll live.

You could say that Sweeney Todd is a musical because Sondheim chose to write it for the Broadway stage. And yet, it has been performed in opera houses. Les Miz ran for years on Broadway and the West End and has hardly any spoken dialogue. It has, to my knowledge, never been performed in an opera house.

I worked at the York Theatre Company at the time they were producing a new musical called Asylum: the Strange Case of Mary Lincoln, and the opera crowd ate it up. In terms of book to score ratio, it was about even, and the dialogue was wonderful and plentiful. But something about the score and the epic nature of this woman's struggle to prove her own sanity while her money was wasted away to pay for her imprisonment felt very operatic. We even had opera diva Carolann Page in the lead role of Mary Todd Lincoln, and she was brilliant!

Nor does the exclusion of spoken dialogue render a piece an opera. Les Miserables is still a musical, though its three spoken lines are written in rhythmic notation in the score.