Summertime
Sign in to savearia from the opera Porgy and Bess, composed by George Gershwin, lyrics by DuBose Heyward
Key facts
- Language
- English
- Released
- 1935 ( 1935 )
- Genre
- Opera jazz
- Composer
- George Gershwin
- Lyricist
- DuBose Heyward
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Genre
- opera
- Composer
- George Gershwin
- Performer
- Booker T. & the M.G.'s
- Tonality
- A minor
- Lyrics by
- Ira Gershwin
Show 8 more facts
- form of creative work
- aria
- title
- Summertime
- language of work or name
- English language
- publication date
- 1935-00-00
- first line
- Summertime and the livin' is easy
- different from
- Summertime
- music created for
- Porgy and Bess
- has characteristic
- jazz standard
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~5 min read
Encyclopedic overview
"Summertime" is an aria composed in 1934 by George Gershwin for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The lyrics, in two stanzas, are by DuBose Heyward, the author of the novel Porgy on which the opera was based.
The song soon became a popular and much-recorded jazz standard, described as "without doubt ... one of the finest songs the composer ever wrote ... Gershwin's highly evocative writing brilliantly mixes elements of jazz and the song styles of Black people in the southeast United States from the early twentieth century". Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim characterized Heyward's lyrics for "Summertime" and "My Man's Gone Now" as "the best lyrics in the musical theater".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Summertime” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.