There was a poignant moment at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday September 30 as a staff member announced that the evening’s performance of Porgy and Bess would be dedicated to the great African-American soprano Jessye Norman. A poignant moment, and a timely reminder of the increasingly impressive roster of singers of colour who grace the Met’s stage. The ensuing three-and-a-quarter hours followed through on that reminder, largely sweeping away familiar questions of opera versus musical and the issues of cultural naivety that regularly dog productions of the Gershwin masterpiece.

Eric Owens (centre) as Porgy. All photos © Ken Howard / Met Opera

The opera – and why anyone questions its validity as an opera I’ll never know – has its roots in the 1925 novel Porgy by DuBose Heyward, a white, South Carolina native who wrote sympathetically, if with limited in-depth first-hand experience of the trials and tribulations of the poor black population of Charleston and its surrounds. His Catfish Row is a fictionalised version of Cabbage Row, a street whose dilapidated mansions had been turned into tenements for the descendants of freed...