Journal of the Society for American Music (2021), Volume 15, Number 2, pp. 143–170 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music doi:10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’”: Porgy and Bess as American Religious Export to the USSR LENA LESON 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. On Christmas Day 1955, members of the Breen-Davis Porgy and Bess cast attended afternoon worship services at a Baptist church in Leningrad.1 The minister, Mikhail Orlov, asked the performers to address the congregation during the service; Rhoda Boggs tearfully sang “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” and the rest of the cast lifted their voices in song with the hymn “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”2 Equally touched by the performers’ expressions of Christian faith, the local congregation wept into their handkerchiefs, waved them in applause, and finally flung them toward the musical missionaries from Catfish Row in thanks.3 These and numerous other stories of the cast’s Christmas in Russia flooded US dailies and news magazines as Americans celebrated the holiday season. The Breen-Davis production of Porgy and Bess toured the Soviet Union in the winter of 1955–1956, appearing in Leningrad and Moscow as well as Warsaw, 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. 1 Some members of the cast may have preferred to attend morning services offered at the same Baptist church, or Catholic mass, though the tour’s daily log does not specify where the Catholic worship service was held. It is also possible that other faiths, including Judaism or Islam, were observed and that members of the cast may have been non-religious, but unfortunately, there are no records of available FBI files for cast or artistic staff members that might detail religious affiliation. 2 “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” is a 1934 Christmas song written by Robert MacGimsey in the style of a spiritual. 3 Images depicting these scenes appeared in a 1956 photo essay for LIFE magazine. Edward Clark, “They Don’t Sound Like Khrushchev—Russians Lionize ‘Porgy’ Cast,” LIFE 40, no. 2 (January 9, 1956), 20–21. 143 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 144 Leson Stalinogród [Katowice], and Prague.4 Although the production was intended to counter concerns raised by the mistreatment and abuse of African Americans in the United States, both the production and press coverage emphasized the show’s sacred content and fortuitous Yuletide timing to promote a secondary US objective: Porgy and Bess as an American religious export to the USSR. Despite the minor role religion has played in scholarship on Porgy and Bess to date, the Breen-Davis staging and the cast’s participation in religious ceremonies like the one described above drew increased attention to the work’s religious dimensions, projecting an idealized American faith central to Cold War rhetoric.5 This did not go unnoticed by Truman Capote, who, in his coverage of the Leningrad performances for the New Yorker, observed that the opera was “brimming with the kind of bacteria to which the present Russian regime is most allergic. It is God-fearing; over and again it stresses the necessity of faith in a world above the stars rather than below, demonstrates in song and dialogue the comforts to be derived from religious belief.”6 In the United States, many believed that faith could be marshaled in the fight against communism, thought to be a dangerous religion itself.7 This article reexamines the mid-century exportation of Porgy and Bess through this lens, investigating how the tour grappled with both American and Soviet ideas about religion’s role in international diplomacy in the mid-1950s. I analyze the Breen-Davis production as well as the reception of this 1955–1956 tour at home, where the opera represented a hopeful vision of the nation’s progressive racial and religious politics, and in the USSR, where the production’s twin messages of American spiritual superiority and racial equality were challenged by Soviet authorities. Examining the spiritual features of the production and the framing of the cast’s religious observance by the US and Soviet press intended to make both nations appear tolerant and inclusive, this article reveals new propaganda objectives and political vulnerabilities of this landmark cultural exchange.8 After reviewing the cultural-political contexts in which the Breen-Davis production was conceived, this article will explore three examples of American religiosity 4 The production appeared “behind the Iron Curtain” from late December 1955 to mid-February 1956. Performances were offered in Leningrad from December 26, 1955 to January 5, 1956, and in Moscow from January 10–17, 1956. 5 The tour was not initially planned to coincide with Christmas, but dates for performances in Leningrad and Moscow respectively began to firm up by early November, giving the US press ample time to frame the tour against the backdrop of holiday festivities. 6 Truman Capote, The Muses Are Heard: An Account of the “Porgy and Bess” Visit to Leningrad (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1957), 18. Originally a two-part story for the New Yorker published in 1956, Capote’s account of the Leningrad performances was later published as a short book that highlighted the culture shock, anti-communist paranoia, and American ethnocentrism of the tour, with infrequent examples of genuine cultural exchange. The Gershwin family as well as the Breen-Davis production strongly distanced themselves from Capote’s reporting on the tour. 7 Although this rhetoric would feature heavily in US Cold War politics, the idea of communism as a religion unto itself was first articulated decades earlier by American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in “The Religion of Communism,” published by Atlantic Monthly in 1931. The following year, Niebuhr’s interpretation of communism was largely affirmed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev in “Russian Religious Psychology and Communistic Aesthetic,” published in Vital Realities. 8 This research draws heavily on materials from the Robert Breen Archives housed in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute at the Ohio State University Archives, including production documents, memos, correspondence, and press clippings. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 145 on the Russian tour. The first focuses on the opera itself and director Robert Breen’s changes to the score, which reveal an increasingly pluralistic formulation of American religious identity in the postwar period. The second is the marriage of two cast members, which serves as a reflection of mid-century American attitudes towards religious marriage, as well as the challenge of replacing religious rituals in the Soviet Union. Finally, echoing US propaganda directives, I examine the cast’s Christmas in Leningrad and concurrent Soviet demonstrations of religious tolerance designed to challenge anti-communist sentiment. Religious elements in both the Breen-Davis production and US press coverage of the cast’s activities in Russia told the hopeful story of a United States united by faith in its fight against communism, while the Soviet Ministry of Culture challenged criticism of its religious policies during the company’s groundbreaking tour of the USSR through displays of religious tolerance and vitality that demonstrated the liberalization of the Khrushchev administration and sought to earn the nation political capital in the West. Porgy and Bess, Religion, and the Cold War Conflict George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess has been revived numerous times since its premiere, including the celebrated Breen-Davis touring production, which ran from 1952 to 1957 and helped to cement the work in the operatic repertoire.9 Director and producer Robert Breen and his co-producer Blevins Davis’s revival, which featured William Warfield and LaVern Hutcherson in the role of Porgy, Cab Calloway as Sporting Life, and a young Leontyne Price as Bess, traveled to twenty-nine countries during the show’s four-year run.10 The Breen-Davis production was the most prominent 9 The scholarship on Porgy and Bess is vast, exploring production history, reception, and the opera’s racial politics. For pertinent production histories, see Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess”: The Story of an American Classic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Christopher Lynch, “Cheryl Crawford’s Porgy and Bess: Navigating Cultural Hierarchy in 1941,” Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 3 (2016): 331–63; Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 567–664. For reception history and race-focused studies, see Ray Allen, “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; Ray Allen and George P. Cunningham, “Cultural Uplift and Double-Consciousness: African American Responses to the 1935 Opera Porgy and Bess,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 342–69; Gwynne Kuhner Brown, “Problems of Race and Genre in the Critical Reception of Porgy and Bess” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2006); Richard Crawford, “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as a Symbol,” Anuario interamericano de Investigación musical 8 (1972): 17–38; Ellen Noonan, The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess”: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 10 Robert Breen (1909–1990), an arts administrator, theatrical producer, and director, was a crucial figure in US federal funding for the arts. He was appointed executive secretary of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), which had been chartered by Congress to serve as the official US national theater in 1946, and authored plans for the National Theater Foundation, which eventually helped to establish the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1966. His co-producer, Blevins Davis (1903–1971), was also a playwright; his personal wealth and political connections, particularly his friendship with the Trumans, were important sources of support for the production, especially in its early years. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 146 Leson recipient of support from the Emergency Fund for International Affairs established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. The fund, according to the United States State Department, “permitted a tremendous step forward in presenting American culture abroad,” and suggested a model for future cultural diplomatic efforts including the State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program.11 But the Soviet tour of Porgy and Bess, while instructive to future US cultural programs, was underwritten not by the State Department, but rather by Soviet authorities. Diplomat Andrey Vyshinsky first suggested the possibility of a Soviet tour to director and producer Robert Breen after he attended a performance of the opera at New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre in May 1953. Breen single-mindedly pursued the idea, twice asking for State Department support—which was twice refused.12 He even went so far as to make overtures to both the US and Soviet governments at the 1955 Geneva Summit, during which the two nations as well as the Prime Ministers of France and Britain attempted to negotiate a cultural exchange agreement.13 When Breen finally managed to organize a Soviet tour of the opera in the fall of 1955, the State Department refused to underwrite the expense, claiming that the tour was “politically premature.”14 Ultimately, the performances were financed primarily by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, then led by Nikolai A. Mikhailov, and organized by Nikolai Savchenko, a high-ranking officer with the Ministry.15 Because the opera has long been a potent and contested representation of US racial politics, previous studies of this tour have focused on its racial symbolism, exploring the use of Porgy and Bess to refute Soviet accusations that the United States denied equal rights and opportunities to its African American citizens.16 11 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Foreign Economic Policy; Foreign Information Program, Volume IX, Part 6, The USIA Program, eds. C. D. Jackson, James S. Lay Jr., and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2010), Document 185. 12 Michael Sy Uy, “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): 470–71. 13 John Harper Taylor, “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), 117. 14 For a rich discussion of the State Department’s decision and the Soviet tour’s financing, see Sy Uy’s “Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union.” 15 Committed to cultural exchange, Minister Mikhailov may be best known in musical circles for organizing the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition. Mikhailov intended that the competition would “stimulat[e] the development of performance culture, populariz[e] the work of native composers, [and] strengthen cultural ties between countries,” but he also hoped to “demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system” and the virtuosity of Soviet musicians. Famously, however, it was the American pianist Van Cliburn who won the inaugural competition in 1958. Kiril Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 89. Truman Capote noted that while four of the five members of the delegation from Moscow’s Ministry of Culture were translators who had been assigned to the company, Savchenko was an important official who had previously served as Consul at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC during World War II. Capote, The Muses are Heard, 57–58. 16 Many scholars have contributed to discussion of the tour’s racial politics. See Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Charlotte M. Canning, “Onstage III: Porgy and Bess, 1952–56,” chap. 6 in On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 186–222, and “A Cold War Battleground: Catfish Row versus the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 147 At a time when discrimination and the burgeoning civil rights movement was beginning to attract international attention, race was paramount in State Department memos regarding the tour and in the collaborators’ own view of the production.17 But the tour also projected an idealized American faith so important to the political and cultural rhetoric of the 1950s through the opera’s staging and the cast’s religious observance, on which the US and Soviet press frequently reported. Breen-Davis’s Porgy and Bess was not the only work to project US religious identity, but rather one in a series of exports that targeted the irreligious and anti-clerical dimensions of communist ideology in the Cold War era. These exports included Westminster Choir’s 1956–1957 five-month world tour under the auspices of the US State Department’s Cultural Exchange Program, and the Robert Shaw Chorale’s seven-week tour of Russia in 1962.18 Although presenting the religious heritage of the United States or critiquing Soviet atheism was rarely an averred goal of these state-sponsored cultural exchanges, sacred music and particularly spirituals were regularly programed on these tours. Such performances served to communicate President Eisenhower’s 1955 assertation that, “without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.”19 Religion forcefully reentered the cultural-political landscape in the postwar period after decades of secularization. Church membership rose substantially and construction of religious edifices skyrocketed as polls declared that 98 percent of Americans reported belief in God.20 The origins of the US’s postwar religious revival Nevsky Prospekt,” in Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Berenika Szymanski-Düll (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 25–44; David Monod, “Disguise, Containment and the Porgy and Bess Revival of 1952–56,” Warring in America: Encounters of Gender and Race, special issue, Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2, part 2: (August 2011), 275–312, and “‘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, ed. Hans Krabbendam and Giles Scott-Smith (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 300– 12; Ellen Noonan, “Neither the Measure of America nor That of the Negro: Porgy and Bess, 1952– 56,” chap. 4 in The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess,” 185–235; Taylor, “Ambassadors of the Arts”; Alan Woods, “Porgy and Bess as Propaganda: Preaching to the [Eva Jessye] Choir,” Theatre Symposium 14 (2006), 25–34; and Sy Uy’s “Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union.” 17 Wilva Breen, Robert’s wife and close collaborator, called the refutation of anti-American racial criticism “an essential element of the project” in the minds of those involved in the mid-1950s Porgy and Bess. Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess,” 146. 18 An important dimension of the Westminster Choir’s appeal was its racial integration; the choir included two African American members, a fact stressed in promotional materials. Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 135. 19 Eisenhower’s address to the American Legion is quoted in Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 97. Although the First Amendment of the US constitution establishes separation between church and state, the degree to which these institutions remained distinct was heavily debated during the 1950s and early 1960s, as evidenced by a series of Supreme Court decisions in this period, including Zorach v. Clauson (1952). For additional discussion of mid-century debate over the separation of church and state, see Kevin M. Schultz, “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, ed. Kathleen G. Donohue (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 20 According to a 1953 Gallup poll, 98 percent of Americans answered “yes” when asked, “Do you believe in God?” These results were replicated in 1954, 1965, and 1967, although the percentage of respondents who answered “no” or “no opinion” varied slightly in these years. Frank Newport, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 148 Leson are complex and contested, but its impact on Cold War rhetoric was clear: Americans were frequently told that a spiritually unified nation empowered by faith could defeat atheistic communist enemies both within their communities and in the world at large.21 After waves of early Soviet religious repression including arrests and executions of religious figures, the destruction of churches, and the use of propaganda to indoctrinate Soviet citizens into atheism were reported in the international press, Americans began to fear communism not merely as an atheistic economic system, but a religion unto itself—one that they were assured could be defeated by a nation united in faith.22 Such messages of spiritual solidarity relied on a view of religious pluralism defined in the mid-1950s as the relatively equal acceptance of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions within the US public square.23 This perspective is perhaps best illustrated by the title of Will Herberg’s landmark 1956 study of faith in the United States, Protestant–Catholic–Jew, published in the same year that the Breen-Davis cast performed in Moscow.24 An example of postwar consensus culture in the United States, religion, once a wellspring of American pluralism, was transformed by Herberg and others into a source of civic accord during the Cold War.25 This consensus drastically simplified the challenges of contemporary religious life in the United States, as Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and other groups “More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God,” Gallup News, June 3, 2011, https://news. gallup.com/poll/147887/americans-continue-believe-god.aspx. For more on the relationship between polling and religion in the United States, see Robert Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 21 The religious dimensions of the Cold War Conflict are explored in Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009); Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex; Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015); and Andrew Preston, Sound of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 2012). 22 Dianne Kirby, introduction to Religion and the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3. 23 It was only in midcentury that American culture began to recognize and accept non-Protestant faiths—though notably, “pluralism” as it was understood in the early Cold War period, did not apply to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, animists, pantheists, or non-believers. For additional information on religious pluralism in the United States, see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); William R. Hutchinson, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Mark Silk, “Defining Religious Pluralism in America: A Regional Analysis,” Annals of the American Society of Political and Social Science 612 (July 2007): 64–81. 24 Protestant–Catholic–Jew posited that US society was divided by major religious rather than ethnic groups, and therefore, that religious affiliation superseded racial identity. Articulating the consensus culture of the immediate postwar period, Herberg argued that despite the differences between these faiths, their common belief in the “American Way of Life”—a set of rites, symbols, and ideas that celebrated democracy, free enterprise, the values of egalitarianism, individualism and idealism, and a strong moral impulse—was the source of the three groups’ fundamental equality and Americanness. Will Herberg, Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956). 25 Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 78. Wall describes the Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 149 tensely negotiated ongoing discrimination and social isolation. But a united Judeo-Christian United States was presented in sharp contrast to so-called “godless communism” in its domestic and international propaganda as Cold War tensions grew.26 American politicians relied on religious rhetoric to frame the clash as a holy crusade, giving spiritual significance to an economic conflict. In President Truman’s 1950 Christmas Eve radio address, for example, he called on the power of faith in the fight against communism, preaching to millions of Americans that “Democracy’s most powerful weapon is not a gun, a tank, or a bomb. It is faith— faith in the brotherhood and dignity of man under God.”27 As religious belief began to shape public dialogue on international intervention and US containment of communism during the early Cold War period, faith was intentionally weaponized. A council of spiritual leaders working with the United States Information and Educational Exchange Program (USIE) to establish the nation as the international champion of religion proposed that political leaders emphasize the ongoing importance of faith to American culture, the spiritual foundation of US institutions, and the religious component of major holidays.28 The State Department implemented these recommendations across a number of programs including the Voice of America, a state-sponsored radio broadcast that delivered religious messages and other US propaganda to Soviet satellites. The State Department also began sponsoring cultural programming to support these efforts, and African American folk and popular music played a significant role. Whether spirituals were sung in recitals by African American classical performers like William Warfield, who starred as Porgy in the early years of the Breen-Davis production, or majority-white choirs, as in the Westminster Choir’s five-month world tour, the use of African American sacred music in concerts performed under the auspices of the State Department projected an idealized democracy of racial and religious harmony both at home and abroad.29 With its emphasis on political liberalization and greater cultural exchange, the Khrushchev administration also found that religious tolerance could be an important tool in Soviet foreign policy. Shortly after Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin at the 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government initiated a series of liberal religious reforms, now termed “de-Stalinization.”30 During de-Stalinization, many religious leaders who had been imprisoned or exiled in the religious purges of the 1920s and 1930s were freed. Restrictions on religious literature were also lifted and Bibles were printed “consensus culture” in the United States of the 1950s as a political project, built on “the notion of a unifying and distinctive “American Way.” 26 For more on the phrase “Judeo-Christian” and its significance to the Cold War conflict, see Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 65–85. 27 Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion, 61. 28 Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, 127–28. 29 Coopting the music that Black communities created for worship and comfort during enslavement to counter criticism of US race relations was unscrupulous, but the popular quality of uplifting spirituals made them potent symbols of American optimism. 30 Polly Jones, Introduction to The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (New York: Routledge. 2006), 2–4. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 150 Leson in Russian for the first time in the Soviet state’s history. Displays of religious vitality, including pro-government messages by religious leaders directed at foreign audiences, were common in this period.31 So too were organized visits by the state-run tourist bureau, Intourist, to Russian churches and cathedrals, which ensured that foreigners witnessed religious freedom in the Soviet Union.32 As Truman Capote wryly noted, the Porgy and Bess cast and the journalists traveling with them were offered a choice of Sunday services and frequently toured cathedrals—but trips to anti-religious museums like the Kazin Cathedral were not on the agenda.33 Demonstrating the nation’s increasingly liberal attitude toward religious observance was one important way that the USSR earned political capital abroad, thereby allowing the Soviet government to pursue greater cultural and intellectual exchange with the West during the cultural thaw.34 Staging Faith in Porgy and Bess Strong elements of religiosity permeate the musical and dramatic fabric of this celebrated American opera. George Gershwin made two trips to South Carolina to study Black musicmaking during the composition of Porgy and Bess; both visits contributed important spiritual elements to and provided inspiration for the work. In late December 1933 and early January 1934, the composer visited DuBose and Dorothy Heyward in Charleston with the explicit goal of “hear[ing] some spirituals.” Gershwin was impressed by what he called the “primitiveness” of the worship services he attended that winter, including an “experience service” at Charleston’s Macedonia Church where he heard a woman sing a spiritual whose title he reproduced in “Oh Doctor Jesus.”35 After his first trip to Charleston, Heyward urged the composer to spend more time absorbing Black Southern musical traditions. In a letter to his collaborator, Heyward specifically identified secular music as an area that he, Gershwin, had 31 Felix Corley, Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 202. 32 Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 70. For example, the Moscow Baptist Church where Helen Thigpen and Earl Jackson were married became a popular destination for prominent Americans visiting the Soviet Union in the years after the production’s Soviet tour; notable visitors included diplomat Adlai Stevenson, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dr. Billy Graham. 33 Capote, The Muses Are Heard, 143. 34 The term “thaw” refers to the period from the early 1950s to the early 1960s when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were generally relaxed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released as a result of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policy and his theory of peaceful coexistence. Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, 60, 70. Dianne Kirby, “The Religious Cold War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard H. Immerman and Patra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 555. 35 Pollack, George Gershwin, 577. Notably, Breen’s production featured all three reprises of “Oh Doctor Jesus”: during Bess’s illness, at the top of act 2’s hurricane scene, and as the act 2 finale. The latter two, which both take place in act 2, scene 4, are also called the “Six Simultaneous Prayers.” Cheryl Crawford’s 1941 revival, in contrast, did not include the reprise of “Oh, Doctor Jesus” in the act 2 finale. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 151 yet to experience.36 His insistence that the composer study non-religious traditions in particular suggests that Gershwin was already gravitating toward music with a spiritual dimension early in the opera’s development. Gershwin responded to Heyward’s urging by returning to South Carolina for five weeks in the early summer of 1934. During this second visit to Folly Island off the coast of Charleston, the composer immersed himself in Black Southern life, attending recitals and church services in a number of local communities. As he made his way back to New York, Gershwin also visited a meeting of Holy Rollers in Hendersonville, North Carolina.37 The rhythmic prayer the composer heard at this meeting was the musical inspiration for the “Six Simultaneous Prayers,” sung during the hurricane scene.38 Moved by what he observed during these visits to the Carolinas, Gershwin aimed to represent these religious practices as newlycomposed spirituals, which indeed became some of the opera’s most profound depictions of religious sentiment, bringing Christian faith to the fore in Porgy and Bess. Much has been made of the apparent naturalness with which Gershwin integrated into the Black communities he encountered that summer, but the opera’s spirituals were not musical quotations of folk materials.39 Instead of a genuine representation of Black culture, numbers like “Oh Doctor Jesus” and the “Six Simultaneous Prayers” reflected Gershwin’s own ideas about Black spirituality. This is a departure from DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel, Porgy, as well as Dorothy and DuBose’s 1927 theatrical adaptation upon which the opera’s libretto was based. Where the Heywards quoted genuine Southern spirituals—“Death, Ain’t You Got No Shame,” “In the Promised Land,” and “Ain’t It Hard,” among others—to evoke both the emotional strength and religious faith of African American communities, Gershwin’s spirituals represent an interpretation of folk traditions. Newly composed rather than “authentic,” Gershwin’s spirituals nevertheless gave a strong impression of spiritual solidarity. Eva Jessye, who conducted the choir in the original production and many subsequent revivals, including the Breen-Davis 1952–1956 tour, was also an arranger of spirituals with a deep interest in the Black culture of South Carolina. Her own collections of spirituals lent her favorable judgment of Gershwin’s significant weight, as Jessye believed that the composer “had written in things that sounded just right, like our people,” which expressed 36 In a letter dated February 6, 1934, Heyward told Gershwin, “You really haven’t scratched the surface of the native material yet. This secular stuff, for instance.” Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson, ed., The George Gershwin Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 206. 37 “Holy Roller” is a term used to refer to a member of a Protestant sect whose worship meetings are characterized by spontaneous expressions of emotional excitement and religious fervor, including dancing, shaking, or other movements. 38 Pollack, George Gershwin, 579. 39 According to DuBose Heyward, George’s study of Black Southern life was “more like a homecoming than an exploration.” Stories of the composer’s rhythmic gifts and musical intuition for Black Southern practices appear in numerous studies of the opera as well as Howard Pollack’s definitive biography of the composer. Pollack, George Gershwin, 578. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 152 Leson “our inheritance, our own lives.”40 In particular, the “Six Simultaneous Prayers,” which has the effect of a religious ritual, continues to make a tremendous impression on listeners. Although the opera’s major plot points concern violence, this fearful moment of worship demonstrates the community’s faith in a higher power and the importance of religion in the face of great tragedy. Similarly, when discussing Serena’s act 1 lament, “My Man’s Gone Now,” Leontyne Price, who appeared as Bess in the early years of the Breen-Davis tour, expressed the importance of religious belief to the opera. During a masterclass at Mannes College of Music in 1995, Price instructed a student performing the lament to sing the sighing refrains “like moaning in church.”41 Such evocative descriptions of the religious music that fills Porgy and Bess articulate the singular place of faith and the spirit of Southern religious practices to the musical and dramatic fabric of the opera. Whereas “Oh Doctor Jesus” and the “Six Simultaneous Prayers” give the opera a strong Christian identity, other scholars have explored the work’s relationship with Jewish liturgical music. Maurice Peress describes the “Six Simultaneous Prayers” as a davenning minyan, a Jewish communal prayer that features a structure similar to that of the operatic centerpiece.42 Geoffrey Block has noted melodic similarities between Sporting Life’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and the Torah blessing “Baruch atah Adonai,” while Jack Gottlieb enumerates the correspondence between Gershwin tunes and Yiddish songs as well as Hebrew chants in numbers from Porgy and Bess including “Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” and “Oh Lawd, I’m On My Way,” as well as Sporting Life’s irreligious showstopper.43 Beyond simply examining structural similarities, Naomi André has identified the shared Judeo-Christian references of “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” She notes that as it alludes to only the Old Testament, and more specifically the Five Books of Moses or the Torah, the song’s lyrics would have resonated with members of the Jewish faith while “speak[ing] directly to diverse religious backgrounds . . . through quotations spanning both Christian and Jewish cultural associations.”44 In an era of increasing religious pluralism and Cold War rhetoric about the importance of faith to the conflict, the Breen-Davis Porgy and Bess embraced the opera’s inherent spiritual dimensions, beginning with the plot summary. Titled, “The Passionate Story of a Girl and Three Men,” the summary—translated into eighteen different languages over the course of the show’s four-year run—described 40 Pollack, George Gershwin, 597. Eva Jessye’s collections are My Spirituals (New York: Robbins-Engel, 1927) and The Life of Christ in Spirituals for SATB choir and piano (unpublished, 1931). 41 Anthony Tommasini, “Master Classes: The Play vs. 3 Recent Realities,” New York Times, November 28, 1995, New York edition. 42 Maurice Peress, Dvořák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African American Roots (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 71. 43 Geoffrey Block, Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 72. Jack Gottlieb, 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). 44 Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 102. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 153 the opera as “a story of life and love among the hard-working, deeply religious, and yet carefree Negroes about 30 years ago, in Catfish Row, a section of Charleston, South Carolina.”45 The community’s religious belief was made explicit in published materials that foreign audiences depended on for comprehension, as the Gullah-inspired dialogue was often difficult for non-native English speakers to understand.46 In addition to written materials about the opera’s religiosity, an important restoration and reordering by director Robert Breen foregrounded the importance of the title character’s faith. In addition to a Christian identity reflected in “Overflow” and “Oh Doctor Jesus,” emphasis on Porgy’s superstition in the midcentury production echoes the stress on religious pluralism repeatedly highlighted by the United States in its domestic and international propaganda, as well as in debates throughout the 1950s and early 1960s about the role of religion in public life. Porgy’s religious syncretism, apparent in the theatrical adaptation of Heyward’s novel but missing somewhat from the opera, is underscored in Breen’s revival through the restoration of the “Buzzard Song.”47 Breen moves this number, which had been excised in several earlier stagings, from act 2, scene 1 to a more prominent place at the top of the opera’s final scene, just after Porgy’s return from jail.48 Without the character of Mr. Archdale, a white attorney to whom he explains the portentous significance of the buzzard, Porgy appears more personally invested in the meaning of the ominous bird of prey and more fearful of the bad omen it represents.49 Further, in its new position, the buzzard remains the specter of lost love, but it takes on new intensity and dramatic significance for an audience who has just heard the irresistible “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” and watched Bess abandon Porgy after a “showy kiss” with Sporting Life.50 Ultimately, Porgy’s superstition— suggesting an African American folk religion and represented by the “Buzzard Song”—and his Christian faith—articulated in numbers like “Overflow” and “Oh Doctor Jesus”—are allowed relatively equal prominence in Breen’s production. 45 The quotation above is from the English language summary. The author(s) of the plot summary and its translations is unknown. English- and Russian-language plot summaries, box 2.18, folder 11, Robert Breen Archives, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee Theatre Research Institute, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. 46 Noonan, The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess,” 206. 47 Although Breen takes a significant step in enhancing the opera’s religious plurality with the restoration of the “Buzzard’s Song,” he does not restore the character of Lody, the conjuring woman Porgy pays to perform an act of spiritual healing while pondering the efficacy of “the white man’s religion” (Christian prayer). Lody appears in act 2 of the stage play as well as the opera’s typescript libretto, though not in the piano-vocal score. I am grateful to my colleague Andrew Kohler, who alerted me to Lody’s appearance in the opera’s typescript libretto. 48 Most notably, the “Buzzard Song” was cut from the 1935 Theatre Guild premiere of Porgy and Bess. 49 Archdale appears in act 2 of Breen’s Porgy and Bess, but he does not reappear for the newly restored “Buzzard Song,” now at the top of the final scene of act 3. 50 Grikourov, untitled review of Porgy and Bess, Literaturnaya gazeta, January 19, 1956. After taking issue with the vulgarity of the picnic scene, Grikourov noted that, “The direction of the final scene between Bess and Sporting Life also seemed somewhat wrong. In the remarks in the piano score this scene is resolved in a psychologically deeper and more truthful way. In the play, the meeting of an intoxicated Bess with her adversary ends with a showy kiss.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 154 Leson Thus, the title character’s syncretism suggested an ideal of religious pluralism to the nation’s Cold War enemy. Responses to the Breen-Davis Production Russian critics writing about performances of Porgy and Bess in Leningrad and Moscow frequently called their readers’ attention to the opera’s religious scenes.51 Literature critic Yuri Kovalev, writing for Leningrad’s Smena—the newspaper of Leningrad’s Komsomol, or Young Communist League—praised the spirituals, including “Oh Doctor Jesus,” as the best musical performances in the production.52 Opera director Leonid Baratov echoed Kovalev in his review for Vecheryaya Moskva published several weeks later, noting, “Especially good are the chorus parts . . . the chorus during the hurricane scene, the dirge which follows Robbins’s widow’s lament, the religious songs of the Negroes testify to the composer’s mastery of choral music.”53 Although Grigorʹev found the music a bit uneven on the whole, he was enthusiastic about the opera’s spirituals in his review for Novoye Vremya, writing, “The best parts are the choruses, written in the form of spirituals, the arias in the style of Negro blues and sung with the chorus.”54 In Porgy and Bess, Gershwin’s newly composed spirituals allowed the production to proclaim the United States’ religious devotion in the USSR—and better still, Soviet critics seemed to like what they were hearing. These positive responses to the opera were likely because of the stylistic similarities between Gershwin’s spirituals and Soviet music produced during this period.55 Like mass songs, which enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Soviet era, Gershwin’s spirituals employed large singing forces performing music that avoided obvious modernism, such as high levels of dissonance, in favor of tonally grounded, emotionally impactful numbers.56 Indeed, Soviet theater director Sergei Morshchikhin expressed precisely this preference for simple, tuneful music in a review for Leningradskaya Pravda, which noted that, “the melodies worked out 51 English translations of Russian-language reviews are my own, though based on translations provided to the company following their performances in Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The translator of these reviews is unnamed. “Porgy and Bess Reviews,” box 3.114, folder 7, Robert Breen Archives. 52 Yuri Kovalev, “Porgy and Bess,” Smena, December 29, 1955. The review read, “In the music of Porgy and Bess the native Negro folk melodies and rhythms are easily traced. They form the basis for the best musical performance scenes in the production. These include the funeral song of Serena Robbins (performed with the chorus and orchestra), Porgy’s aria in the second act, the scene of the storm, and others.” 53 Leonid Baratov, “Porgy and Bess,” Vechernyaya Moskva, January 12, 1956. The review read, “The chorus parts are especially good—dramaturgically effective, conveying with great force the atmosphere of individual scenes and the emotional state of the participants. The fishermen’s song, the chorus during the hurricane scene, the dirge that follows Robbins’s widow’s lament, the religious songs of the Negros testify to the composer’s mastery of choral music.” 54 Grigorʹev, “Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,” Novoye Vremya, January 2, 1956. 55 Michael Sy Uy makes a similar argument about the opera’s broader reception in the Soviet Union. See Sy Uy, “Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union.” 56 Marina Frovola-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 290. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 155 by the composer which have roots in folk art are better and more easily absorbed by listeners than the more complicated rhythmic and sound effects to which he sometimes resorts.”57 Further, the composer’s reliance on folk materials resonated with Soviet expectations that national identity be communicated through music; Baratov praised the opera’s “fresh national color,” which, he wrote, could be explained by “its nearness to the Negro folklore.”58 B. Zagoursky went further, explaining that “Before George Gershwin composed his opera, he made a thorough study of Negro music.” The impact of Gershwin’s engagement with African American musical traditions, Zagoursky claimed, “can be spotted not only in the arias and ensembles of the opera, which are very near to the wonderful Negro melodies, but also in the style, the fresh lyrical feeling, the humor, the folk dances, and also in recitatives which can be heard in the way people talk on stage, the street vendors’ cries which sound like melodies, and in the religious ceremonies.”59 Just as Eva Jessye had praised the sincerity of Gershwin’s spirituals, Russian reviewers felt that the opera was an authentic reflection of Black Southern musical traditions.60 Although Soviet reviewers were, on the whole, positive about the Breen-Davis production, some noted the absence of a prominent American performer and Russian celebrity: Paul Robeson. A concert artist and actor who rose to international fame for his cultural accomplishments as well as his political activism, Robeson had appeared as Crown in the 1927 theatrical adaptation of Porgy as well as Joe in the London premiere of Show Boat in 1928, his breakout role. In the early 1930s, Robeson became increasingly interested in African history, anti-imperialism, and, like many other liberals in this period, communism.61 But while the majority of American liberals distanced themselves from communism in the 1940s and 1950s as reports of Stalin’s totalitarianism came to light, Robeson remained a steadfast supporter of the Soviet experiment and an outspoken critic of US race relations. Beginning in the late 1940s, Robeson was increasingly excluded from cultural life in the United States, and in the summer of 1950, his passport was revoked for his forthright criticism of the US government.62 57 Sergei Morshchikhin, “American Opera in Leningrad,” Leningradskaya Pravda, January 5, 1956. 58 Baratov, “Porgy and Bess.” B. Zagurskii, “Porgy and Bess—Visit of Everyman Opera Company to U.S.S.R.,” Izvestii͡ a (Moscow), January 12, 1956. 60 In his December 29, 1955 review for Smena, Kovalev wrote that, “Gershwin called Porgy and Bess a folk opera. And the fact is, not only that the work portrays the life of simple people. In his music the composer draws heavily from the native genius of the Negro people. It is possible that the singular combination of the melody and movement in Negro art (ragtime, blues) prompted Gershwin to create a synthetic genre where movement, music, and singing would be fused together organically.” 61 Robeson visited the Soviet Union in December 1934 at the invitation of Sergei Eisenstein, and in early 1936 decided to send his son to school in the Soviet Union in order to shield him from racist attitudes in the United States. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 182–85. Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: An Artist’s Journey, 1898– 1939 (New York: Wiley, 2001), 280–81. 62 Criticism of the United States was the reason cited by the US State Department when Robeson’s attorney Nathan Witt inquired about the suspension of his international travel privileges—but Robeson’s vocal support of Soviet policies and his alignment with the communist Party as well as his support on behalf of the colonialized peoples of Africa seemed to have played a role as well. 59 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 156 Leson He could not travel internationally, but Robeson was nevertheless a forceful presence on the Breen-Davis Soviet tour. He was a particularly revered figure in the Soviet Union during the years his passport was revoked, as Soviet writers and critics of the United States seized upon the image of a much-maligned Black performer held hostage by his own government.63 According to Truman Capote, even translators provided by the Ministry of Culture questioned the cast about the celebrated singer’s absence, accusing them (presumably referring to the US government the cast was meant to represent) of denying him a passport.64 Unlike the cast of Porgy and Bess, Robeson had chosen the “wrong” politics—but he refused to let the production have the last word on Black life in the United States. In an address printed in Pravda in early January 1956 titled “My New Year’s Wishes,” Robeson, ever attentive to Soviet cultural expectations, wished the cast a Happy New Year rather than a Merry Christmas. Although the US press focused on the cast’s Christmas celebrations, discussed in detail later, the Porgy and Bess performers also observed this secular holiday and the major winter celebration of the Soviet calendar during their Leningrad engagement.65 Presided over by “Grandfather Frost” (Ded Moroz), a Slavic figure closely resembling Father Christmas, Novy God, as the Soviet New Year’s celebration is called, coopted Christmas rituals and traditions to undermine private commemoration of the holiday and religion’s role in cultural life.66 The cast’s Novy God festivities included a New Year’s Eve party with local artists and a children’s “Fir Tree” fête held at the Palace of Pioneers, the former Anichkov Palace and Tsar Nicholas II’s childhood home in Leningrad.67 Unsurprisingly perhaps, US news outlets were less eager to describe these secular celebrations than they were to cover Christmas services in Leningrad, and there is little more than a handful of snapshots from the Novy God party in the Robert Breen Archives. Robeson’s letter demonstrated his knowledge of Soviet culture, but his primary concern was with US race relations, rather than religious politics. Highlighting inequality that the Porgy and Bess program and other promotional materials tried to downplay, Robeson declared that the cast members “are proud of the heroic struggle of their people who fight for equality and human dignity in Mississippi and in South Carolina, where the events performed in their play unfold.”68 Robeson’s passport would not be restored until June of 1958, the result of the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Kent v. Dulles, which ruled that the US government could not restrict travel with the imposition of rules that abridge First Amendment rights. 63 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, 231. 64 Capote, The Muses Are Heard, 69–70. Robeson’s failed passport appeal in the summer of 1955, which made international news and reinvigorated Soviet interest in the matter, likely played some role in the tenor of this exchange as well. 65 The Soviet government reintroduced the popular tsarist-era practice of decorating a fir tree to celebrate the secular New Year in 1935. Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 85–87. 66 Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades, 92. 67 “Porgy and Bess—Daily Log,” box 3.31, folder 1, Robert Breen Archives. 68 Paul Robeson, “Moi novogodnie nadezhdy” (“My New Year’s Wishes”), Pravda, January 3, 1956, 3. Quoted in Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, 204. It is unlikely the cast read Robeson’s message, and I was unable to find a copy of it in the Robert Breen Archives, but discussion of it appeared prominently at the top of Baratov’s Vechernyaya Moskva review published on Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 157 Robeson’s message went unreported in the United States, but it highlighted for Soviet readers the racial tensions simmering beneath the surface of Breen’s Porgy and Bess. The cast’s expensive fur coats and custom-tailored dresses spoke of the opportunities available to people of color in the United States, but Robeson’s conspicuous absence told a more complicated story of US race relations in the mid-1950s. Holy Matrimony: A Wedding on Tour Russian reviews of the Breen-Davis production frequently praised the work’s newly composed spirituals, but the production’s well-oiled publicity machine also stressed the cast’s faith-based activities offstage. One of the most widely reported stories involved the marriage of Helen Thigpen, playing Serena, to Earl Jackson, a Sporting Life.69 A happy corrective to the tragedy of the opera, in which Serena’s husband Robbins is killed by a drunken Crown and Sporting Life seems destined to abuse and abandon Bess, the wedding projected midcentury American attitudes toward marriage—as a “ticket of admission to a full family life” and a status symbol that increasingly incorporated religious ceremonies in addition to community celebrations.70 The couple’s Moscow wedding warranted a half-page notice in Ogonek, a weekly magazine published by Pravda, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, and a fullpage spread in Life magazine in addition to copious smaller notices in US and Russian publications. Their wedding was also a subplot in Truman Capote’s story for The New Yorker, in which he portrayed Thigpen and Jackson as status-obsessed clotheshorses hoping to amplify their international celebrity with a high-profile wedding. Aware of the publicity value of selecting the Russian capital for their nuptials, Jackson reportedly mused to Capote that, “the first couple of Negro Americans married in Moscow” was “bound to be a big story. . . . That’s front page. That’s TV.”71 Correspondence in the Robert Breen Archives details the speedy planning of the high-profile nuptials, coordinated by Breen and Nikolai Savchenko, the Soviet Ministry officer in charge of the tour. Breen wrote to Savchenko about the arrangements on January 12, 1956—only five days before the couple’s wedding on January 17. Breen’s letter states that Thigpen and Jackson wished to be married at the “Patriarch’s Cathedral (‘Yelokhovsky’)” by the Metropolitan of Moscow in January 12, 1956, which the production team received a translated copy of along with other Russian-language reviews. There are, however, no dates for the translated materials and no certainty about whether or not they were received before the production left Moscow on January 17, 1956. 69 The couple got engaged several months before the Russian tour while performing in São Paulo, Brazil. There is no evidence that the decision to hold the wedding in Moscow was made at the suggestion of Breen or another member of the production’s administrative staff, but some of Breen’s requests to Savchenko at the Soviet Ministry of Culture are at odds with the couple’s own plans for their wedding, particularly with regard to dress. 70 Andrew J. Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (November 2004): 852. A 1984 study of 459 ever-married women in the Detroit metropolitan area indicated a 6 percent increase in religious weddings from 1925 to 1984, with women in a number of similar studies generally in agreement that a civil ceremony did not constitute an “acceptable” wedding. My thanks to Gabriela Cruz for her observation that Thigpen and Jackson’s wedding served as a corrective to the opera in which they appeared. 71 Capote, The Muses are Heard, 36. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 158 Leson traditional Russian dress.72 The Epiphany Cathedral of Yelokhovo, as the vicarial church of the Moscow Patriarchs is known, became the largest cathedral in Moscow and the chair of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late 1930s after the Kremlin Cathedrals were shuttered in 1918 and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Dorogomilovo Cathedral were destroyed in 1931 and 1938, respectively.73 Asking to be married in what was then the Russian Orthodox Church’s most sacred place of worship was no small request, however, so Breen proposed a backup: a wedding at the Baptist Church of Moscow performed by the church’s pastor or, if necessary, Moses LaMarr, a fellow castmate and clergyman.74 Ultimately, a compromise was struck: Thigpen and Jackson were married in the Baptist Church of Moscow by the Reverend Alexi N. Karpov. Breen’s request for a church wedding presided over by a clergyman conveyed the religious significance of marriage to the couple, but their celebration included a ceremony that many US papers assiduously ignored: Thigpen and Jackson were first married in a civil service in Moscow’s Soviet Registry Office on January 16 beneath an enormous portrait of Joseph Stalin (Figure 1). Shortly after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks created a bureaucratic system to wrest administrative control of weddings and other life-cycle events away from “the hands of the church, the prey of ancient superstitions and clerical domination.”75 Civil marriage, like the registration of births and deaths at the Department of Registration of Civil Statuses, commonly known as ZAGS, made these events the jurisdiction of the state. As a result, for Soviet citizens, the celebration of a marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one was closely linked to the registration of this event in a civil office. But, like Thigpen and Jackson, many of them supplemented this bureaucratic task with a private celebration or even a religious ceremony, contradicting Soviet edicts on marriage and the role of religion in ordaining such a union.76 The couple’s Baptist ceremony reflected the importance of religious rites to midcentury American newlyweds, but also reflected the challenges Soviet authorities faced in attempting to replace long-held life-cycle rituals.77 72 Metropolitan refers to the archbishop of a metropolis in the Russian Orthodox Church. The suggestion that the couple wear traditional Russian costumes seems to have been Breen’s, as Jackson describes his brown tailcoat with champagne satin lapels to Capote on the train to Leningrad weeks before Breen’s letter to Savchenko was sent. 73 Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorij Kozlov with Sylvia Hochfield, The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 121–25. 74 Robert Breen to Nikolai Savchenko, January 12, 1956, box 1.37, folder 14, Robert Breen Archives. 75 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), 8. The goal of weakening religion by transforming marriage into a civil institution was made explicit in this introduction to Soviet family law published by the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, an unofficial diplomatic organization established by the Russian Soviet Federalist Socialist Republic (RSFSR) in the United States during the Russian Civil War. The pamphlet states that “by substituting civil registration for the religious ceremony as the required form, a formidable blow was struck at clerical control.” 76 Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, 166. 77 Although there is no requirement in the United States for a wedding ceremony to include a religious rite, religious marriage increased throughout the twentieth century, as many couples felt that civil ceremonies lacked important rituals and status symbols denoting stability and comfort. Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,” 857. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” Figure 1. 159 Helen Thigpen and Earl Jackson at their civil ceremony on January 16, 1956. Most US publications mentioned the civil ceremony in passing or overlooked it altogether, but Thigpen and Jackson’s religious service was described in great detail in both the US and Russian press. Attempting to report on the celebrity wedding while eschewing any mention of religion, the image of the Baptist service included Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 160 Leson in Ogoniok’s half-page notice avoids depicting either the pastor or the banner at the back of the church that read, “God Be With You All”—something the Life magazine photo editor was quick to draw attention to in the caption that accompanied an image of Thigpen walking down the aisle with company manager Robert Dustin in a yellow brocade gown and veil, flanked by her dutiful bridesmaids.78 The biracial bridal party—note the prominence of Dustin, a white man, acting as a surrogate father figure to Thigpen in the image below—offered a powerful opportunity to counter Soviet critiques of US race relations while celebrating American faith in a nation that had, at times, sought to eliminate or undermine religious belief (Figure 2). The Chicago American called Jackson and Thigpen’s wedding “one of the grandest ceremonies Muscovites have seen in years.”79 Always dressed to the nines in operalength gloves, tailored dresses, and elegant suits, the cast looked no more glamorous at the Baptist service than they had for receptions at the US Embassy or other events they were photographed attending during their visit to Russia.80 But if they did not stand out quite so obviously when pictured beside Soviet Party elites at official functions, the cast’s luxurious attire was deeply incongruous when they stood beside the twenty-five hundred Muscovites reported to have attended the Baptist service. Photographs from the Life story highlighted the stark difference between Moscow’s faithful denizens and the opera’s fashionable stars, with the cast wrapped in extravagant furs and the Russians wearing cloth coats and kerchiefs. The intersection of race, religion, and class in the Moscow Baptist church is illustrated by images that suggested not only the rising status of devout African Americans in the United States, but also the perceived abuse of religious adherents in the Soviet Union. This very public display of religious devotion and marital commitment organized by Savchenko and the Ministry of Culture was one of several events on the tour that seems intended to demonstrate the Soviet government’s tolerance. But state authorities also had little in the way of alternatives to offer the couple to a religious ceremony in early 1956. It was only in the late 1950s, during the larger of Khrushchev’s two short-lived anti-religious campaigns, that party leaders and Komsomol officials began to design new life-cycle rituals to supplant traditional religious ceremonies like baptisms, weddings, and funerals.81 The first Soviet wedding palace was built in Leningrad and opened on December 1, 1959. Moscow opened its first two wedding places in 1960 and 1962, and over the next three decades, dozens more wedding —along with baby and funeral—palaces were built throughout the USSR.82 78 The caption in the Life feature read: “Bride was escorted by company manager Robert Dustin. Sign reads “God Be With You All.” “A Social Note from Moscow,” Life, February 6, 1956, 47. 79 “Porgy Pair Wed in Style,” Chicago American, January 17, 1956. 80 C. D. Jackson, President Eisenhower’s special assistant for Cold War operations, recognized that opportunities for dialogue between the cast members and Soviet citizens would be limited, but believed that verbal exchanges were secondary to the striking image the cast would present: “their clothes will be visible, and touchable, and their freedom from fear will be visible.” Ellen Noonan explores the cast’s clothing and, through these furs, gloves, and gowns, their performance of a middle-class, nonoppressed status in the Soviet Union. See Noonan, The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess,” 210. 81 Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, 176–77. A brief campaign in the summer of 1954 was followed by a more extensive anti-religious campaign from 1958 to 1964. 82 John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 47. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 161 Figure 2. Thigpen walking down the aisle with company manager Robert Dustin at her Baptist wedding to Jackson in Moscow, as pictured in Life magazine. These ritual spaces, in addition to providing a more elegant backdrop for weddings, baptisms, and the like, also offered floral arrangements, sparkling wine, wedding rings, and even modest receptions—a one-stop shop for every Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 162 Leson celebration.83 Although in 1956, coordinating Thigpen and Jackson’s Moscow celebration allowed the Soviets to counter US critiques of religious policy, by 1964 when Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as the Communist Party’s General Secretary, these new socialist life-cycle rituals were among the party’s most powerful tools to expunge religion from Soviet society.84 Politicizing Christmas in Leningrad The marriage of Thigpen and Jackson gave US newspapers a celebrity wedding and a spiritual ceremony to cover, but for Cold War religious crusaders, the cast’s celebration of Christmas in Russia was the most important story.85 It wasn’t just Christmas that mattered to American reporters; it was Christmas in the Soviet Union, a nation that had targeted faith and the American Way of Life, that sold the story.86 In US dailies and on the radio, the cast was constructed as an example of American piety in the face of their host nation’s insidious faithlessness. But the Soviets simultaneously undermined such criticisms by demonstrating Russia’s own religious tolerance, just as they had by coordinating Thigpen and Jackson’s Baptist wedding. The religious incursion began with Christmas carols and a holiday message recorded on December 23 in Leningrad, recalling the USIE’s directive and the State Department’s use of radio to spread religious propaganda and emphasize the spiritual dimension of major holidays. A handwritten note in Breen’s papers shows a draft of the good tidings to be broadcast across the airwaves; the cast sent holiday wishes to Dorothy Heyward, Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, co-producer Blevins Davis, their early patron former President Truman, and President Eisenhower.87 In addition to the Christmas messages, the radio broadcast featured performances of “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World” recorded by the cast. Although this holiday program was clearly intended for American listeners—the broadcast began at 3:15 a.m. in Leningrad, or 8:15 p.m. in New York—US newspapers gleefully announced that “Americans Serenade Reds with Christmas Carols,” 83 Edmund Stevens, “Love and Marriage—Soviet Style,” New York Times, April 26, 1964. Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, 192. 85 Among these crusaders was prominent publishing magnate Henry R. Luce, the son of Christian missionaries, who strongly believed that Americans could defeat communism as much through religious faith as by military or economic measures. He encouraged his magazines, and particularly Life, to frame the Cold War conflict with religious rhetoric and articulate the need for American religious consensus during the Cold War period. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, 144–49. 86 The importance of the Soviet Union to this narrative is evidenced in part by the failure of the cast’s 1954 Christmas, which they celebrated on a boat traveling from Alexandria to Greece, to merit similar attention. 87 Undated memo, box 1.37, folder 14, Robert Breen Archives. Although the memo only includes language for President Eisenhower’s holiday greeting, its title “Xmas Messages—Leningrad” in Wilva Breen’s hand suggests that the cast did not acknowledge the Jewish faith of Ira Gershwin or others listed, demonstrating the continued marginalization of non-Protestant groups even in an era of increasing religious pluralism in the United States. 84 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 163 reporting that it was “the first time since the 1917 revolution that such songs have been broadcast [read: heard] in the Soviet Union.”88 Notice of the landmark broadcast of Christmas carols appeared in hundreds of local newspapers, but the US press would have much more to report from Russia. On December 26, Americans read about the holiday celebrations of the Porgy and Bess cast, which mingled familiar festivities and foreign traditions. After a rehearsal on the evening of December 24, the cast returned to the Hotel Astoria for a Christmas party coordinated by Savchenko and a delegation from the Soviet Ministry of Culture. Gifts and good wishes were exchanged around “a giant, brightly lighted Christmas tree” and “a lavish supper with vodka and wines” was followed by carols and spirituals sung by the cast, according to innumerable reports of the festivities published in both the US and Soviet press.89 This Christmas party offered Savchenko and the Ministry of Culture an opportunity to counter US propaganda by portraying the USSR as religiously tolerant and even accommodating—something Lee Gershwin noted when riding to a diplomatic briefing with Truman Capote. Touched by the Soviets’ display of hospitality, Mrs. Gershwin gushed, “Oh, love, have you heard about the Christmas tree? The Russians are giving us a Christmas tree. In Leningrad. I think that’s so sweet of them. Since they don’t believe in Christmas.”90 Capote also described the yuletide merriment in detail, with director Robert Breen offering this toast to their Soviet host: “Let’s all drink to the man we can thank for this wonderful party, one of the best friends we have in the world, Nikolai Savchenko.” According to Capote, Savchenko replied with his favorite maxim, “To the free exchange of culture between the artists of our countries. When the cannons are heard, the Muses are silent. When the cannons are silent, the Muses are heard.”91 But beyond Capote’s colorful telling of the Christmas festivities, Savchenko and his colleagues got little credit for the fête from American reporters covering the tour. In fact, the caption that accompanied photos of the merrymaking in Life magazine reads, “Continuing high jinks took place at hotel when troupe threw its own Christmas party [emphasis mine].”92 For many Americans, the cast’s holiday celebrations at the Hotel Astoria were framed as an example of American religious commitment, rather than an expression of Soviet hospitality and tolerance. The cast’s religious observance of the holiday in Leningrad’s Baptist and Catholic churches was the most important Christmas celebration for the American press. Attendance at these services merited, in addition to countless mentions in US dailies and magazines, a two-page photo spread in Life. Given the magazine’s regular framing of communism as a dangerous religion, and its calls on Americans’ faith to defeat it, it is hardly surprising that Life should have been the vehicle for so many 88 “Americans Do It: Carols Filled Red Radio,” State Journal (Lansing, MI), December 25, 1955. The United Press wire story was printed in newspapers across the United States on December 25 and 26, 1955. 89 “‘Porgy and Bess’ Troupe’s Songs Greet Yule in Russia,” Boston Herald, December 26, 1955. 90 Capote, The Muses Are Heard, 3. 91 Capote, The Muses Are Heard, 136–37. 92 Clark, “They Don’t Sound Like Khrushchev—Russians Lionize ‘Porgy’ Cast,” 19. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 164 Leson of these reports of faith and fellowship.93 Devout Russians appeared on its pages with the well-dressed African American cast who had been bussed to Baptist and Catholic services by their Soviet hosts—yet another way in which the Ministry of Culture attempted to counter criticism of religious repression in the USSR, while Americans simultaneously proclaimed their religious pluralism.94 Though such gestures by the Soviet government would seem to demonstrate their religious tolerance, Life editors were nevertheless careful to distinguish between the state atheism of Soviet ideology and the religious devotion of the Russian people. In their coverage of the cast’s Christmas in Leningrad, the magazine noted that, “The Baptist Church has over three million adherents in Russia,” approximately two thousand of whom attended afternoon worship services with thirteen Porgy and Bess cast members.95 This Christmas service was led by Mikhail Orlov, a principal figure in the Soviet Evangelical movement. He held important administrative roles in several Soviet-era Christian organizations, including the Union of Evangelical Christians, founded in 1931, and the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), which was formed in 1944 under the direction of the Soviet state.96 Orlov and other Evangelical Christian-Baptist leaders succeeded in preserving their churches during intermittent anti-religious repression throughout the Soviet period—but were accused of collaboration with the Communist regime and betraying evangelical principles to do so.97 Orlov supported the Soviet state most visibly during World War II. In an interview with American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White that appeared in her 1942 book, Shooting the Russian War, Orlov reported (through a state-sponsored translator) that he “considered the social program of Lenin very close to that of 93 Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, 147. Marsha Siefert, “From Cold War to Wary Peace,” in The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 192. 95 Clark, “They Don’t Sound Like Khrushchev—Russians Lionize ‘Porgy’ Cast,” 21. Such distinctions between the Soviet government and the Russian people are typical of anti-communist propaganda of this period. The creation of a single Soviet people from a diversity of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds was an aim of the Soviet state, and proscribed as a common goal of the construction of communism by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the 22nd Communist Party Congress in 1961. English-language publications that identified Soviet citizens by their ethnic backgrounds therefore rejected this political construct of homogeneity while casting these individuals as victims of Russification efforts and political manipulation. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, Introduction to A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–13. 96 Alexander Popov, “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), 51–53. The merging of Evangelical Christian and Baptist leadership, along with the creation of the Councils for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (CAROC) and the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC), allowed for greater regulation and state oversight of religious organizations in the postwar period. 97 Popov, “The Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union as a Hermeneutical Community,” 3. 94 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 “I’m on My Way to a Heav’nly Lan’” 165 the Bible.”98 Like many other religious leaders, Orlov also encouraged the faithful in occupied zones to side with the Soviets; for this, Walter Sawatsky reported that he received a state peace medal in 1960, five years after ministering to the Porgy and Bess cast.99 But other interactions between the preacher and the state suggest a more complex relationship. Orlov was at one point arrested and then released shortly thereafter, a technique Soviet authorities used to compromise individuals and engender mistrust of them in their communities.100 Such tactics indicate the difficult position leaders in state-sanctioned religious organizations faced, as their oversight by the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC) left them vulnerable to this sort of intermittent mistreatment. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of archives related to the subject, the precise nature of the relationship between the AUCECB, the CARC, and the Committee for State Security, commonly known as the KGB, remains unclear—though historians of Soviet church-state relations do note that many commissioners of the CARC came from the ranks of the KGB.101 By the 1960s and 1970s, following the short-lived anti-religious and atheist campaigns under Khrushchev, religion achieved a relatively stable presence in Soviet society. Ideological efforts once dedicated to the eradication of religion were redirected to the social sciences, which mapped patterns of secularization and religious modernization in the USSR to better understand the ideological challenges facing Soviet atheism.102 Bussing cast members to both Catholic and Baptist Christmas services may have contradicted American ideas about religious repression in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but it was just one of many examples of religion’s constantly negotiated role in Soviet society, as decision-makers weighed the political capital tolerance could earn them against the party’s commitment to ideological purity. Thrilling tension between American piety and Soviet religious repression in Leningrad’s churches, however, was the story US newspapers and magazines were selling, even if it vastly oversimplified the reality of the cast’s Christmas in Russia. Faith in Cold War Cultural Exchange Brigadier General Dale O. Smith, a Cold War strategist and enthusiastic supporter of the Breen-Davis production, declared that, “It is through operations such as Porgy and Bess that World War III can be won without a fight. This means that you are saving lives and keeping our country free with every performance.”103 In an era 98 Margaret Bourke-White, Shooting the Russian War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), 153. Walter Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II (Kitchener, ON: Herald Press, 1981), 159. 100 Popov, “The Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Soviet Union as a Hermeneutical Community,” 53. 101 Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 37. 102 Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, 142. 103 Dale O. Smith to Robert Breen, April 30, 1955, box 1.64, folder 7, Robert Breen Archives. Smith was an Air Force officer assigned to the staff of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) in 1954 who assisted the interdepartmental body with coordinating actions recommended by the National Security Council (NSC) until his return to the Pentagon in 1956. 99 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 34.238.148.72, on 22 Jun 2021 at 01:22:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000018 166 Leson in which Americans were told that democracy’s most powerful weapon was faith, many felt that the cast’s Soviet success rested, at least in part, on their ability to communicate the United States’ religious unity both onstage and off to its irreligious Cold War enemy—a nation that contested the United States’ proclaimed superiority by demonstrating its own religious tolerance by throwing holiday parties, organizing religious weddings, and coordinating Christmas services for the cast. While acknowledging this tour’s attempts to counter Soviet criticism of US race relations, this article has explored how Breen-Davis’s Porgy and Bess illuminates both American and Soviet ideas about religion’s role in cultural exchange in the mid-1950s. American coverage of the landmark performances framed the work as a rebuke of the Soviet Union’s atheism and anti-religious sentiment, but downplayed or altogether ignored ways the Soviet Ministry of Culture seemed to assert the state’s religious tolerance. This generosity of spirit may have impressed the cast of Porgy and Bess, but it did little to change the minds of Americans reading about the tour back home, ultimately reflecting the ideological deadlock of the Cold War conflict. This exploration of faith on the Breen-Davis Soviet tour enriches our understanding of a celebrated American opera and significant midcentury revival, but the continued popularity of Porgy and Bess and the tour’s impact on future cultural exchanges broadens the implications of such research. Many American scholars of Cold War propaganda have emphasized racial dimensions of cultural exchange, but an examination of religious elements in this production suggests that other US exports may be similarly in need of reevaluation. In the case of the mid-century Porgy and Bess, the opera and its cast were positioned as a censure of Soviet atheism and a celebration of American faith, but the Soviet government challenged this criticism, bussing performers to Baptist and Catholic worship services and planning religious celebrations to contest anti-communist propaganda and the United States’ perceived championing of religious pluralism. Studies of representation and reception in Porgy and Bess have to date focused on race, but our understanding of the work and its impact in mid-century cultural exchange is richer when we consider objectives beneath the opera’s most visible identity politics. References Archival Sources The Robert Breen/ANTA Theatre Collection. 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