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“I'm on My Way to a Heav'nly Lan’”: Porgy and Bess as American Religious Export to the USSR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2021

LENA LESON
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Abstract

Scholars have explored the use of Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess and its stellar ensemble cast to counter Soviet criticism of US race relations during the Cold War—but an equally prominent theme in contemporary coverage of the production is spirituality. Onstage as well as off, the Soviet tour of Porgy and Bess reflected both American and Soviet ideas about religion's role in international diplomacy in the mid-1950s. This article explores religiosity in the Breen-Davis production as well as the reception of the 1955–56 Soviet tour both in the United States, where the production represented a hopeful vision of the nation's racial tolerance and religious pluralism, and in the USSR, where the tour's twin messages of American spiritual superiority and racial equality were challenged by Soviet authorities. Drawing on materials from the Robert Breen Archives housed in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, this article considers Breen-Davis's Porgy and Bess as a religious export to the USSR, enriching our understanding of US cultural diplomacy and Cold War–era musical exchange with broader implications for American–Soviet history, religious studies, and opera analysis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 143 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Christi-Anne Castro, Mark Clague, Gabriela Cruz, Austin Stewart, Kai Carson West, and the anonymous readers at the Journal of the Society for American Music for their invaluable feedback and suggestions at various stages during this article's preparation.

References

References

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Robert Breen Archives. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute. Ohio State University. Columbus, OH.Google Scholar
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Allen, Ray, and Cunningham, George P.. “Cultural Uplift and Double-Consciousness: African American Responses to the 1935 Opera Porgy and Bess.” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 342–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alpert, Hollis. The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess”: The Story of an American Classic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.Google Scholar
“Americans Do It: Carols Filled Red Radio.” State Journal (Lansing, MI), December 25, 1955.Google Scholar
Anderson, John. Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
André, Naomi. Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beneke, Chris. Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Bourke-White, Margaret. Shooting the Russian War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942.Google Scholar
Brown, Gwynne Kuhner. “Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of Porgy and Bess.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2006.Google Scholar
Canning, Charlotte M. On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Canning, Charlotte M. “A Cold War Battleground: Catfish Row versus the Nevsky Prospekt.” In Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, edited by Balme, Christopher B. and Szymanski-Düll, Berenika, 25–44. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Cherlin, Andrew J. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (November 2004): 848–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Corley, Felix. Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Frovola-Walker, Marina. Stalin's Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gershwin, Ira. Lyrics on Several Occasions. New York: Limelight Editions, 1997.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Jack. Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Albany, NY: State University of New York in association with the Library of Congress, 2004.Google Scholar
Grigorʹev, L. “Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.” Novoe Vremi͡a, January 2, 1956.Google Scholar
Gunn, T. Jeremy. Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009.Google Scholar
Herberg, Will. Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.Google Scholar
Herzog, Jonathan P. The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
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“Jazz Age Diplomacy.” Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, December 8, 1955, 28.Google Scholar
Jessye, Eva. My Spirituals. New York: Robbins-Engel, 1927.Google Scholar
Jessye, Eva. The Life of Christ in Spirituals for SATB choir and piano. Unpublished, 1931.Google Scholar
Jones, Polly, ed. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era. New York: Routledge, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirby, Dianne. “The Religious Cold War.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, edited by Immerman, Richard H. and Goedde, Petra, 540–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Kirby, Dianne, ed. Religion and the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Luehrmann, Sonja. Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Christopher. “Cheryl Crawford's Porgy and Bess: Navigating Cultural Hierarchy in 1941.” Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 3 (2016): 331–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia: Complete Text of First Code of Laws of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic Dealing with Civil Status and Domestic Relations, Marriage, the Family and Guardianship. New York: Russian Soviet Government Bureau, 1921.Google Scholar
Monod, David. “Disguise, Containment and the ‘Porgy and Bess’ Revival of 1952–1956.” Warring in America: Encounters of Gender and Race. Special issue, Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2, part 2. (August 2011): 275–312.Google Scholar
Monod, David. “‘He is a Cripple an’ Needs my Love’: Porgy and Bess as Cold War Propaganda.” In The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–60, edited by Krabbendam, Hans and Scott-Smith, Giles, 300–12. London: Frank Cass, 2003.Google Scholar
Noonan, Ellen. The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess”: Race, Culture, and America's Most Famous Opera. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Peress, Maurice. Dvořák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrone, Karen. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Preston, Andrew. Sound of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Knopf, 2012.Google Scholar
Pollack, Howard. George Gershwin: His Life and Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popov, Alexander. “The Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union as a Hermeneutical Community: Examining the Identity of the All-Union Council of the ECB (AUCECB) through the Way the Bible was Used In Its Publications.” PhD diss., International Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Wales, 2010.Google Scholar
Robeson, Paul. “Moi novogodnie nadezhdy.” Pravda, January 3, 1956, 3.Google Scholar
Robeson, Paul Jr. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey, 1898–1939. New York: Wiley, 2001.Google Scholar
Sawatsky, Walter. Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II. Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Schultz, Kevin M. “The Irony of the Postwar Religious Revival: Catholics, Jews and the Creation of the Naked Public Square.” In Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America, edited by Donohue, Kathleen G., 213–42. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Siefert, Marsha. “From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia.” In The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945, edited by Stephan, Alexander, 185–217. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.Google Scholar
Silk, Mark. “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America.” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 65–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silk, Mark. “Defining Religious Pluralism in America: A Regional Analysis.” Annals of the American Society of Political and Social Science 612 (July 2007): 64–81.Google Scholar
Smolkin, Victoria. A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Taylor, John Harper. “Ambassadors of the Arts: An Analysis of the Eisenhower Administration's Incorporation of ‘Porgy and Bess’ into its Cold War Foreign Policy.” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1994.Google Scholar
Tomoff, Kiril. Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uy, Michael Sy. “Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company and Porgy and Bess, 1955–56.” Journal of the Society for American Music 11, no. 4 (2017): 470–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wall, Wendy L. Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woods, Alan. “Porgy and Bess as Propaganda: Preaching to the [Eva Jessye] Choir.” Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 25–34.Google Scholar
Wuthnow, Robert. Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation's Faith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wyatt, Robert, and Johnson, John Andrew, ed. The George Gershwin Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Zagurskii, B. “Porgy and Bess—Visit of Everyman Opera Company to U.S.S.R.” Izvestii͡a (Moscow), January 12, 1956.Google Scholar
The Robert Breen/ANTA Theatre Collection. Special Collections Research Center. Mason Archival Repository Service. George Mason University. Fairfax, VA. http://mars.gmu.edu/handle/1920/4609.Google Scholar
Robert Breen Archives. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute. Ohio State University. Columbus, OH.Google Scholar
“A Social Note from Moscow.” Life, February 6, 1956.Google Scholar
Akinsha, Konstantin, and Kozlov, Grigorij, with Hochfield, Sylvia. The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Ray. “An American Folk Opera?: Triangulating Folkness, Blackness, and Americaness in Gershwin and Heyward's Porgy and Bess.” Journal of American Folklore 117, no. 465 (Summer 2004): 243–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Ray, and Cunningham, George P.. “Cultural Uplift and Double-Consciousness: African American Responses to the 1935 Opera Porgy and Bess.” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 342–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alpert, Hollis. The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess”: The Story of an American Classic. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.Google Scholar
“Americans Do It: Carols Filled Red Radio.” State Journal (Lansing, MI), December 25, 1955.Google Scholar
Anderson, John. Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
André, Naomi. Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Kate A. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beneke, Chris. Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Block, Geoffrey. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Bourke-White, Margaret. Shooting the Russian War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942.Google Scholar
Brown, Gwynne Kuhner. “Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of Porgy and Bess.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2006.Google Scholar
Canning, Charlotte M. On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Canning, Charlotte M. “A Cold War Battleground: Catfish Row versus the Nevsky Prospekt.” In Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, edited by Balme, Christopher B. and Szymanski-Düll, Berenika, 25–44. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Capote, Truman. The Muses are Heard: An Account of the “Porgy and Bess” Visit to Leningrad. London: William Heinemann, 1957.Google Scholar
Cherlin, Andrew J. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (November 2004): 848–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, Edward. “They Don't Sound Like Khrushchev—Russians Lionize ‘Porgy’ Cast.” LIFE, 40, no. 2 (January 9, 1956).Google Scholar
Corley, Felix. Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader. New York: New York University Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, Richard. “It Ain't Necessarily Soul: Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as a Symbol.” Anuario interamericano de Investigación musical 8 (1972): 17–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson: A Biography. New York: New Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.Google Scholar
Ellwood, Robert S. The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frovola-Walker, Marina. Stalin's Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gershwin, Ira. Lyrics on Several Occasions. New York: Limelight Editions, 1997.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Jack. Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Albany, NY: State University of New York in association with the Library of Congress, 2004.Google Scholar
Grigorʹev, L. “Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.” Novoe Vremi͡a, January 2, 1956.Google Scholar
Gunn, T. Jeremy. Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009.Google Scholar
Herberg, Will. Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.Google Scholar
Herzog, Jonathan P. The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, William R. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
“Jazz Age Diplomacy.” Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, December 8, 1955, 28.Google Scholar
Jessye, Eva. My Spirituals. New York: Robbins-Engel, 1927.Google Scholar
Jessye, Eva. The Life of Christ in Spirituals for SATB choir and piano. Unpublished, 1931.Google Scholar
Jones, Polly, ed. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era. New York: Routledge, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirby, Dianne. “The Religious Cold War.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, edited by Immerman, Richard H. and Goedde, Petra, 540–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Kirby, Dianne, ed. Religion and the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015.Google Scholar
Luehrmann, Sonja. Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Christopher. “Cheryl Crawford's Porgy and Bess: Navigating Cultural Hierarchy in 1941.” Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 3 (2016): 331–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia: Complete Text of First Code of Laws of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic Dealing with Civil Status and Domestic Relations, Marriage, the Family and Guardianship. New York: Russian Soviet Government Bureau, 1921.Google Scholar
Monod, David. “Disguise, Containment and the ‘Porgy and Bess’ Revival of 1952–1956.” Warring in America: Encounters of Gender and Race. Special issue, Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2, part 2. (August 2011): 275–312.Google Scholar
Monod, David. “‘He is a Cripple an’ Needs my Love’: Porgy and Bess as Cold War Propaganda.” In The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–60, edited by Krabbendam, Hans and Scott-Smith, Giles, 300–12. London: Frank Cass, 2003.Google Scholar
Noonan, Ellen. The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess”: Race, Culture, and America's Most Famous Opera. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Peress, Maurice. Dvořák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrone, Karen. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Preston, Andrew. Sound of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Knopf, 2012.Google Scholar
Pollack, Howard. George Gershwin: His Life and Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popov, Alexander. “The Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union as a Hermeneutical Community: Examining the Identity of the All-Union Council of the ECB (AUCECB) through the Way the Bible was Used In Its Publications.” PhD diss., International Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Wales, 2010.Google Scholar
Robeson, Paul. “Moi novogodnie nadezhdy.” Pravda, January 3, 1956, 3.Google Scholar
Robeson, Paul Jr. The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist's Journey, 1898–1939. New York: Wiley, 2001.Google Scholar
Sawatsky, Walter. Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II. Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Schultz, Kevin M. “The Irony of the Postwar Religious Revival: Catholics, Jews and the Creation of the Naked Public Square.” In Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America, edited by Donohue, Kathleen G., 213–42. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Siefert, Marsha. “From Cold War to Wary Peace: American Culture in the USSR and Russia.” In The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945, edited by Stephan, Alexander, 185–217. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.Google Scholar
Silk, Mark. “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America.” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 65–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silk, Mark. “Defining Religious Pluralism in America: A Regional Analysis.” Annals of the American Society of Political and Social Science 612 (July 2007): 64–81.Google Scholar
Smolkin, Victoria. A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Taylor, John Harper. “Ambassadors of the Arts: An Analysis of the Eisenhower Administration's Incorporation of ‘Porgy and Bess’ into its Cold War Foreign Policy.” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1994.Google Scholar
Tomoff, Kiril. Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uy, Michael Sy. “Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company and Porgy and Bess, 1955–56.” Journal of the Society for American Music 11, no. 4 (2017): 470–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wall, Wendy L. Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woods, Alan. “Porgy and Bess as Propaganda: Preaching to the [Eva Jessye] Choir.” Theatre Symposium 14 (2006): 25–34.Google Scholar
Wuthnow, Robert. Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation's Faith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wyatt, Robert, and Johnson, John Andrew, ed. The George Gershwin Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Zagurskii, B. “Porgy and Bess—Visit of Everyman Opera Company to U.S.S.R.” Izvestii͡a (Moscow), January 12, 1956.Google Scholar