BUDAPEST — The Hungarian State Opera’s new staging of the Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess” is raising eyebrows here and abroad. The production, which opened on Saturday and runs for three more performances, features a predominantly white cast in a work whose authors intended it to be staged by black performers.

This landmark 1935 opera, based on a novel and a subsequent play, is set in the fictional African-American community of Catfish Row in Charleston, S.C. It is the love story of a beggar with a disability and a drug-addicted woman in an impoverished community, struggling with violence and racism. In the new production here in Budapest, the action has been transplanted to a refugee camp in an airplane hangar, at an unspecified time and place.

The decision to use white singers is contrary to the clear wishes of George and Ira Gershwin, whose estates stipulate that the opera be performed only by black casts. It raises questions about race and representation, and shows how differently the opera is regarded in the United States and here in Central Europe.

In 1935, George Gershwin turned down a hefty commission to have the Metropolitan Opera produce “Porgy and Bess,” and he rebuffed Al Jolson’s interest in performing the work, because both would have done it in blackface. The Hungarian State Opera did, however, present the opera using blackface in the 1970s and 1980s, for a total 144 performances. Although the current production features mostly white performers, they do not present themselves as black.