The last time Porgy and Bess was staged in Seattle, I could not afford to see it. It was 1995, I was writing a novel at the time, and unpublished novelists are generally broke. However, I was able to buy the show's poster, designed by Fremont-based artist Phil Brazeau in rich, earthy, moody colors. I hung the poster on the wall near the foot of my bed—Bess in Porgy's big brown arms, her looking blue while he tries to be strong and reassuring—and often wondered which moment in the opera it captured. What song were the two singing right then and there? I would remain in the dark about this for 16 years.

"Summertime," "I Loves You, Porgy," "It Ain't Necessarily So," "Bess, You Is My Woman Now"—I can't even remember when I first heard these pieces. They've always been there for me: on jazz radio stations, in my father's album collection, my cousin's cassette tapes, my own CDs and MP3s. I memorized Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's versions of the tunes. I worshipped Nina Simone's "I Loves You, Porgy," as well as Bill Evans's. I closely studied Miles Davis's studio album of Porgy and Bess, which was arranged by Gil Evans and experimented with "modal jazz," a jazz liberated from the dense chords of bebop. But despite this familiarity with the individual pieces, I had a poor idea of the place they occupied in the work.

Then came Saturday, then rose the curtain, and there finally was the whole damn thing, performed and produced by Seattle Opera and conducted by none other than John DeMain, the man responsible for resolving one of the two problems that have dogged Porgy and Bess since its inception in 1935—its artistic status. Was it a silly musical or a serious opera? After DeMain revived it with the Houston Opera in 1976, no one doubted its legitimacy; it was high above a musical, it was an authentic opera, it was composed by a genius, George Gershwin.

Now I know what is what: Bess is in Porgy's arms when singing "Bess, You Is My Woman Now." Porgy is a beggar ("I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'"); Bess is a loose woman ("Oh Bess, Oh Where's My Bess?"). The two are part of a love triangle completed by Crown, a rough and manly longshoreman. Early in the opera, a craps game happens. But the pleasures of gambling do not last long. A fight erupts. Crown kills another man, Robbins. Crown flees before the police arrive. Bess, who is hated by the other women of the ghetto, moves in with the only man, Porgy, who will offer her protection from the law. Porgy falls in love with her; Bess fails to fall totally in love with him. The opera has a sad ending: "Oh, Lawd, I'm On My Way."

The best thing about this performance is undoubtedly Mary Elizabeth Williams's rendition of "My Man's Gone Now," the lament of a widow at her husband's wake. Her voice seizes the entire hall and pulls it down to the dark depths of that piece: A man is dead. His footsteps will never be heard again. He will be nothing more than a ghost to her heart. The next best thing is Jermaine Smith's portrayal of the drug dealer Sportin' Life—the way that man slides and glides around the stage is really something else. All together, the production (lighting, set, direction) is solid and the music impeccable.

Now for the second thing that has dogged Porgy and Bess since its inception—racism. Is it racist? Let's begin by turning to something that the cultural critic Stanley Crouch once wrote: "Porgy and Bess is little more than a coon show, albeit a glorious one in its way." By "coon show," he means it portrays blacks as lazy, superstitious, and incapable of speaking unbroken English. By "glorious" he means it's much, much more than a mere coon show. Crouch, like so many black critics, can easily point out the racism, but he also finds it difficult not to recognize its artistic greatness. This is the contradiction at the core of Porgy and Bess, one that will probably never be resolved. Even if Gershwin did his best to ensure the roles were performed by black artists (and not whites in blackface) and spent time in the South researching the material, it's still about the same old, same old: drug dealers, prostitutes, and criminal behavior. Gershwin would have really shocked the world and won the eternal respect of black Americans if the opera had been about black doctors, scientists, and teachers.

But there is something else about Porgy and Bess that needs to be considered. We must not forget that Gershwin, a Jew, composed it in the early 1930s, as the Nazis established power in Germany. The music in Porgy and Bess might be beautiful, but the story is very bleak. It seems reasonable to conjecture that this bleakness—death, murder, the dangers constantly besetting the ghetto—is not entirely drawn or sourced from the black American experience, but also from the worsening political and social conditions in Europe. What's strangely lacking in Porgy and Bess is African laughter. What's strangely present is European dread. recommended