Ulysses, if Homer is to be believed, was the first mariner to escape the temptations of the Bay of Naples. According to 

, Ulysses had heard of the bay’s infamous sirens — part women, part bird or nymph-like creatures — that lured sailors to their death by singing so beautifully that no one could sail on without succumbing. Thus, when returning from the Trojan War via the bay, Ulysses plugged the ears of his crew with beeswax and bound himself to the mast until they had sailed safely out of range of the sirens’ audible temptation. Angry over their failure to seduce their prey, one of the sirens, Parthenope, drowned herself in the sea. The original settlement on the bay was said to have grown on the spot where she washed ashore, claiming her name as its own (the area is now part of the city of Naples, Italy).

Various communities huddled around the Bay of Naples date, in one incarnation or another, back to the second millennium before the birth of Christ. Ever since, this urban area has remained one of the world’s great cultural fulcrums. The bay’s environment is so perfect that local residents have rarely been forced to be enterprising; they simply lived off the land and sea in the mild Mediterranean climate, as safe harbor, turquoise sky, and indigo sea sustained lush vegetation boosted by a deep layer rich volcanic soil and an easy growing season.

Yet all was not quite idyllic. The inhabitants of this earthly paradise faced the constant possibility of near-instantaneous annihilation by Mount Vesuvius. Categorized as a “red” volcano for the lava that periodically spews from its crater, Vesuvius has erupted cataclysmically over the centuries, an ever-present reminder of the transitory folly of human existence.

This combination of natural appeal and peril has nourished a lively culture marked from the time of its original settlers, the Epicureans, by a distinctive blend of sensuous, joyful hedonism and rigorous, stern sanctity — of paganism and piety. Thus, Naples has been home both to the inventors of pizza and chocolate ice cream, on the one hand; and to countless religious orders, on the other.

This fusion of heaven and hell — of so-called high and low cultures — stands at the center of the Neapolitan creative impulse. Since its founding, Naples has been a city of sudden and disconcerting juxtaposition of opposites, the sort of place that creates and recreates over and over again the kind of delirious urbanism that constantly bursts forth with invention and creativity. This creative impulse has been visible in many forms, not the least of which is music. As sage Neapolitan observer Barringer Fifield has suggested, Naples is a city that was founded, after all, on a song.

Music’s hold over the city has remained omnipresent throughout its history. This was never truer than during the seventeenth century, when Naples remained under its Spanish viceroys and became the music capital of Europe.

Viceregal Naples was dominated by an endless number of religious institutions — churches, chapels, monasteries, convents, hospitals, orphanages, schools — connected to various orders within the Roman Catholic Church. These oases of calm and magnificence contrasted with the chaos of the streets outside their high, protective walls.

Many of these establishments required choral and instrumental music to celebrate God’s glory. As a result, baroque-era Naples consumed musicians of talent. The musicologist Dinko Fabris argued that the hiring of musicians rested more on merit than in other European cities because the Spanish viceroys remained for more-or-less fixed terms. Consequently, permanent patterns of patronage associated with a dominant family could not be sustained as the preferences of successive viceroys changed over time. A hierarchy of privilege and power evolved, often becoming linked to the changing status of the religious institutions at which a musician worked.

Musicians in Naples, as elsewhere, were artisanal employees of their patrons. The local love of the theatrical, music, and dance greatly impressed visitors from the North. The seventeenth-century 

English diarist John Evelyn recorded that the city’s

 “women are generally well-featured but excessively libidinous. The country people [are] so jovial and addicted to music that the very husbandmen almost universally play on the guitar, singing and composing songs in praise of their sweethearts, and will commonly go to the field with their fiddle.”

Communal musical forms were immediately incorporated into the increasingly popular performance art of opera, as librettists drew on such stock comedic characters as nurses, pages, magicians, and allegorical figures in their works. However, the Neapolitan environment — like that of Venice — was dominated by institutions rather than by wealthy families. This system created a stable demand for musical talent, with employers hiring outsiders as well as musicians from socially unacceptable groups who demonstrated talent. Some of the most important contributors to Neapolitan opera, such as the Sicilian-born Alessandro Scarlatti (who moved to the city from Rome) came from elsewhere because they could compete more or less fairly to earn appointment in a relatively open system. Others were products of the city’s remarkable conservatories, which, with the exception of Venice, were unmatched.

According to some estimates, there were seven conservatories and 617 religious institutions (including 248 churches) in mid-seventeenth-century Naples, offering musical education to 368 boys in 1660, a number that later increased. The four most-prominent conservatories — the I Poveri di Gesù Cristo (founded in 1589), Sant’Onofrio a Capuana (1578), Pietà dei Turchini (1583), and Santa Maria di Loreto (1537) — fell under civic and viceregal control. Once again, Venice was Naples’ primary competitor, with several vibrant conservatories of its own. However, Venetian musical education was concentrated at orphanages for girls, whereas Neapolitan conservatories catered to boys. This meant that, upon reaching adulthood, the graduates of the Neapolitan conservatories were more likely to pursue professional careers in music.

Orphanages sponsored conservatories in order to provide their boys with a livelihood. As in the famous orphanages for girls in Venice, some parentless children were the illegitimate offspring of the wealthy and notable. Poor families often attempted to send their sons to the conservatories because they provided free room and board. Some conservatories recruited from particular regions around the kingdom — Apulia provided the most students — while others specialized musically.

Boys who had been castrated were of particular value given the popularity of virtuoso castrated vocalists — the 

 who were thought to supercharge female vocal ranges with male lung capacity. Perhaps the most famous, Carlo Maria Broschi (known by his stage name, Farinelli), followed precisely this path from Apulia to Naples on to trans-European eighteenth-century rock star status.

Some of the best musicians in the city earned their living by teaching at the conservatories. The opera master 

, for one, taught at two of the four conservatories during a 40-year career. At its height, this system produced a stream of innovative musicians who transformed the musical landscape of the era, including, among many, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Francesco Provenzale, as well as Alessandro and Domenico Scarlati.

Many graduates of Neapolitan conservatories had significant eighteenth-century professional careers as performers and composers across Europe. They came from a variety of backgrounds, and rose through recruitment and educational networks that reached from the top to the bottom of Neapolitan society. The city’s musicians formed what became known as the Neapolitan School, whose members were avidly sought by impresarios and aristocrats from Paris to Saint Petersburg, from Madrid to Vienna to London.

Such energy could not last forever, however. Over the course of the eighteenth century, political and economic crises eviscerated the Neapolitan institutions’ capacity to employ musicians. Faculty members remained in place too long to allow replenishment of their ranks from below, so dozens of highly sought-after conservatory graduates spread across the face of Europe. Nonetheless, by the early nineteenth century the Neapolitan music community was still renowned for its technical virtuosity.

As the music world’s center of gravity moved to Paris, Naples and the Neapolitan music machine would be “reformed.” In 1806, Joachim Murat, appointed to the Neapolitan throne by his brother-in-law, Napoleon Bonaparte, consolidated the conservatories into a single school as part of a general rationalization and reform of local artistic institutions. This school, the San Pietro a Mailella, inherited the remarkable music libraries and manuscript collections of its predecessors and continues to train musicians today.

Though Neapolitan music became embedded in these larger Italian and European trends, it retained a considerable degree of distinctiveness and reputational excellence. Across the 28 centuries of its existence, Naples reveals the wisdom of the urbanist Rem Koolhaas, who famously argued in 

 his evocation of New York during the 1970s, that “the Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.” Since its founding, Naples has been such a city of sudden and disconcerting juxtaposition of opposites — the sort of place that creates anew the kind of delirious urbanism that bursts forth with invention and creativity. It has done so, singing and playing music all the while.

 is vice president for programs at the Wilson Center and director of the Center’s Urban Sustainability Laboratory. He is the author of 

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Music’s hold over Naples, Italy, has remained omnipresent throughout its history. It is, in a sense, a city founded on song.

How Naples became Europe’s great musical machine

Eighty years ago, on October 20, 1935, New York’s Alvin Theatre hosted one of the most important performances in the history of American musical theater: the Broadway premiere of Porgy and Bess, an “American folk opera,” with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin and based on Charleston literary notable Dubose Heyward’s

Those in attendance knew that they were witnessing history. Gershwin’s reputation and ambition suggested that his opera could be a work for the ages, and everyone who was anyone in the New York cultural and social scene wanted to be present for it. The opera’s creators sat nervously toward the back of the orchestra-level seats that first night, trying to discern how others were reacting to their creation. They waited until the finale brought an explosion of boisterous curtain calls that seemed to last forever.

For the next eight decades, one question has hung over everything that transpired on stage that evening: What, precisely, is 

? A musical? An opera? Is it high art or middlebrow culture? A sympathetic and path-breaking treatment of African American life, or a racist regurgitation of demeaning stereotypes.

What, precisely, is Porgy and Bess? A musical or an opera? High art or middlebrow? A sympathetic treatment of African American life, or a regurgitation of racist stereotypes?

Enthusiastic audiences aside, critics were divided about the show, often disparaging George Gershwin as little more than an overly ambitious pop music parvenu. If he had written an “opera,” why was it being staged in a music hall like the Alvin Theatre? One undeniable dimension of the 

as soon as Abbie Mitchell launched into the opening notes of the show’s first melody, “Summertime.”

 No one could deny the transcendental beauty of George Gershwin’s score.

Theater is a product of collaboration among many artistic associates. This was especially true of 

The story’s original creator, DuBose Heyward

, inherited considerable social prominence and little wealth from his distinguished Charleston family (his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Heyward Jr., signed the Declaration of Independence). Deciding to become a writer, Heyward tossed aside a career in selling insurance to devote time to his new craft.

Looking for a tale to tell, he picked up a local 

 on his way to have breakfast one morning at his sister’s place down the street from “Cabbage Row,” an 18th-century courtyarded building inhabited by African American workers and servants. In the paper, Heyward read a story about how a crippled beggar named Samuel Smalls — well-known for getting around town in a cart drawn by a goat — had been arrested for aggravated assault after having attempted to shoot Maggie Barnes. The tale inspired the plot of Heyward’s novel.

DuBose and his wife Dorothy collaborated in writing what became one of 1925’s top literary hits, the novel 

’s theatrical potential and adopted the tale for the stage. Produced by New York’s prominent Theatre Guild, the play proved to be one of the great successes during Broadway’s successful 1927–28 season.

’s accomplishments rested on more than a compelling, if melodramatic, story. Since childhood, DuBose had been fascinated by the African Americans on whom every white person in Charleston depended in any number of ways. His mother Jane had become something of an amateur specialist on 

the region’s distinctive “Gullah” language and culture

, handed down from generation to generation among the descendants of West African slaves who had been brought to South Carolina to farm rice. The term “Gullah,” probably derived from the word “Angola,” refers to a form of English infused with vocabulary and grammatical structures preserved from several West African languages. Like all Charleston children of his social station, DuBose grew up surrounded by Gullah-speaking nannies, servants, and workers.

DuBose’s stories, which included other African American oriented works as 

 (1929), and the screenplay for Eugene O’Neill’s 

 (1933), appeared at a time when white Americans knew little or nothing about African American life and culture. Although DuBose’s works are now dated and have long been open to charges of promoting derogatory stereotypes, they stand out among other white writings of the era as unusually knowledgeable about and sympathetic to African American culture.

Around that same time, George Gershwin, set on writing an American opera, began looking for a story to put to music. One night, unable to fall asleep, he picked up 

. The next morning, he wrote to the Heywards, initiating a creative journey that would last nearly a decade. Gershwin labeled his masterpiece a “folk opera,” a term that has deeply confused American critics ever since. Slavic creators like Modest Mussorgsky would have needed no explanation for the concept, as they simultaneously drew on local “folk” music and traditions to create distinctive national operatic traditions. Gershwin was well aware of these connections, 

 (indeed, the plot of Gershwin’s opera closely tracks that of Bizet’s 

 had gained greater recognition following World War II — having been validated enthusiastically on the stages of Milan, London, and Paris through touring performances — Americans could no longer deny its significance. After circling the globe and being performed across the United States, George Gershwin’s monumental “folk opera” finally entered the repertoire of New York’s exalted Metropolitan Opera in 1985, more or less simultaneously with its first performance in Charleston and a full half-century after it premiered. Three decades later, there is no longer any question about the importance of this work. 

 is vice president for programs at the Wilson Center and director of the Center’s Urban Sustainability Laboratory. He is the author of

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What, precisely, is “Porgy and Bess”? A musical? An opera? High art, or middlebrow culture? A sympathetic and ground-breaking treatment of African American life, or a racist regurgitation of demeaning stereotypes? 

“Porgy and Bess” at 80

Witold Rybczynski, the author of more than a dozen extraordinarily popular treatises on cities and architecture, is a master of making professional quarrels—over the value of the American suburban landscape, the relative importance of psychological comfort and technical perfection in home design, and others—accessible to nonspecialist readers. In 

, which grew out of a 2007 lecture at the National Building Museum, he seeks to place contemporary American city planning within the context of American life past and present. This slim and elegant book is just the thing for readers who want to acquaint themselves with the American planning tradition during an evening by the fireplace.

Rybczynski’s core argument is that the United States does indeed have a worthy planning tradition that often is ignored or denied by those who promote an image of a country shaped by individualist capitalists who function absent state control. He makes his case with profiles of well-known urban visionaries of the past—such as Washington, D.C., planner Pierre L’Enfant and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as 20th-century urban landscape critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. He also highlights those who are little known beyond professional circles, such as Charles Mulford Robinson, who promoted the City Beautiful movement at the turn of the 20th century, and Robinson’s English counterpart, Raymond Unwin. And he reaches back to recognize largely forgotten figures, including Washington, D.C., surveyor Joseph Ellicott and Francis Nicholson, who helped establish colonial Annapolis and Williamsburg.

In Rybczynski’s view, residents—rather than planners—ultimately determine a plan’s success when they decide whether to live, shop, play, and linger in the space the designer has created. Rybczynski demonstrates his point that people drive the process by tracing the movement of America’s retail spaces from streets to covered arcades, the latter of which launched the department stores that eventually migrated from downtowns to anchor suburban shopping centers, only to be usurped in recent years by big-box stores. Cities and their surrounding regions are makeshift creations that build up incrementally, as coral accretes on a reef.

The collective expression of individual preference through the market, however, is insufficient to create the sorts of cities required for 21st-century life. The metropolitan regions that constitute many of our modern cities are larger than any single planning entity can handle. Still, metropolitan development requires government support and intervention in myriad ways. Rybczynski cites architect Moshe Safdie’s design for Modi’in, a town in Israel that encourages private development of an overall plan that emphasizes access to public space, as a hopeful vision for the urban future.

 with descriptions of two very different projects that illustrate Americans’ new fascination with waterfronts, which only a generation or two ago were avoided by anyone who sought respectability. He begins with Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City, a two-decade effort to convert deserted piers into recreational and park land. I was living in Brooklyn Heights when discussions of the project began in 1988, and have followed its evolution since. A rough-and-tumble political and consulting process delayed, but probably perfected, the final plan. I quite agree with Rybczynski that this initiative is likely to grace the pages of planning and urban design textbooks a century from now.

Rybczynski ends with an examination of The Yards, a new office-condominium development adjacent to Washington, D.C.’s new baseball stadium, next to the Navy Yard. He sees in The Yards an attractive high-density plan that doesn't rely on towering apartment buildings. But to me it feels like an etiolated variation on the ever more popular waterfront development scheme. It fails to promote with serendipity and surprise the texture of life as it is actually lived. In a way, however, my misgivings about The Yards underscore Rybczynski’s larger point: Only the passage of time and the accumulation of thousands of individual decisions can reveal a plan as a success or failure.

Rybczynski quotes Edward G. Rendell, when Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia. “We can’t simply let our cities decline,” he declared in 1996 to a group of developers and investors. “After all, you can’t have a society without cities.” And Rybczynski makes a compelling case that you can’t have cities—even sprawling, automobile-oriented cities—without planning, albeit of a makeshift kind. That planning must be humble in its ambitions, fostering multiple projects and urban visions rather than striving to impose just one from above. Fortunately, Americans have a planning tradition worthy of pride. We also have Witold Rybczynski to help lead the way.

, the director of the Kennan Institute and the Comparative Urban Studies Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, is the author of several books about cities, most recently 

 "Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities" 

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Residents, rather than planners, ultimately determine a city plan's success when they decide whether to live, shop, play, and linger in the space a designer has created. 

Blair A. Ruble