Blue Monday (opera)

Blue Monday
Cover of the Gregg Smith Singers' recording
Music	George Gershwin
Lyrics	Buddy DeSylva
Book	Buddy DeSylva
Productions	1922 Broadway

Blue Monday (Opera à la Afro-American) was the original name of a one-act "jazz opera" by George Gershwin, renamed 135th Street during a later production. The English libretto was written by Buddy DeSylva. Though a short piece, with a running time of between twenty and thirty minutes, Blue Monday is often considered the blueprint to many of Gershwin's later works, and is often considered to be the "first piece of symphonic jazz"^[1] in that it was the first significant attempt to fuse forms of classical music such as opera with American popular music, with the opera largely influenced by Jazz and the African-American culture of Harlem.