Blue Monday (Opera à 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 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.
Contents
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
Guests
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.
Synopsis
Setting:
A basement café near the intersection of 135th Street and Lenox 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 a 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 woman'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, whom she is supposed to be meeting 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 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 he 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 Blues" (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".
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 revue, 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, which included 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.
Preservation status
On September 22, 2013, it was announced that a musicological critical edition of the full orchestral score (with the original orchestrations by Will Vodery) will be eventually released. The Gershwin family, working in conjunction with the Library of Congress and the University of Michigan, are working to make scores available to the public that represent Gershwin's true intent.
The entire Gershwin project may take 30 to 40 years to complete, and it is unclear when the Blue Monday edition will be released.