The conductor Serge Koussevitsky once described seeing George Gershwin in full flow at the keyboard. ‘As I watched him, I caught myself thinking, in a dream state, that this was a delusion; the enchantment of this extraordinary being was too great to be real.’
Gershwin may never have learnt to read music fluently, but that didn’t matter. His keyboard wizardry was an alchemy of finger dexterity, memory, and a phenomenal capacity for instant invention.
He was a compulsive performer. At parties, he would commandeer the piano and play variations on his show-tunes into the night. When even his mother told him not to overdo it, he just said, ‘If I don’t play at a party I don’t have a good time!’
Gershwin’s listeners might be society celebrities and starry-eyed flappers, draped around his piano in Manhattan during the Prohibition years of the Twenties. Equally, they could be Ravel and Prokofiev in Paris, or Alban Berg in Vienna. Open-minded towards the newest trends, these composers made a point of asking Gershwin to play for them – and duly experienced the ‘Koussevitsky effect’.
When did Gershwin start performing?
Having left school at 15, George Gershwin became the youngest ‘piano pounder’ (someone who has to publicise the publisher’s tunes by performing them) on Tin Pan Alley. But he never performed the sheet music as printed. This gave his playing extra ‘zip’ and provided an arsenal of pianistic tricks to use in his own pieces. He abandoned his job because ‘the popular song racket began to get definitely on my nerves.’ On the way to achieving part of his ambition – to write hit musicals – he won fame and fortune through his one true ‘pop’ song, ‘Swanee’, popularised by Al Jolson.
‘One of the few composers with a sense of humour’
Established as a major figure on Broadway by his early twenties, Gershwin became a truly ‘hands-on’ pianist and composer. At rehearsals he would effortlessly change key to suit his vocalists, tailor his material at the whim of a producer, or craftily rescue a song from a failed musical and re-invent it for another. He ‘played’ with notes in the truest sense – he had fun with his music, improvising witty variations on his show-tunes by the hour. The songwriter Burton Lane remarked: ‘He was one of the few composers who had a real sense of humour.’
Gershwin had listened to ragtime pianists in Harlem as a boy, assimilating their styles and mannerisms along with the blues-laden soulfulness and rhythmic ingenuity of jazz. He wanted to extend the potential of jazz into larger forms, but he was not the first to use it in concert music.
George Gershwin and jazz
French composers Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie, not to mention the great Igor Stravinsky were among the European composers who were attracted by ragtime and American dance crazes such as the foxtrot. They had flirted with jazz before 1924, when Gershwin’s jazz-classical marvel Rhapsody in Blue climaxed an experimental jazz concert by bandleader Paul Whiteman.
Whiteman’s publicity machine dubbed him ‘The King of Jazz’, but neither he nor Gershwin were close to the black folk roots of jazz. Whiteman’s was an all-white band; his carefully rehearsed, sometimes brash arrangements were intended for dancing, and they allowed little room for the improvised spontaneity of real jazz.
‘I regard jazz as an American folk music’
In a 1933 article called ‘The Relation of Jazz to American Music’, George Gershwin defined his fundamental creed behind his concert works: ‘Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of music. I believe that it can be made the basis of serious symphonic works of lasting value, in the hands of a composer with talent for both jazz and symphonic music.’
‘My people are American. My time is today.’
Thirty-five years earlier, Antonín Dvořák had addressed the same issue. His three years spent in America gave rise to a String Quartet and a String Quintet both nicknamed ‘American’, and to the New World Symphony – all superficially inspired by what he took to be ‘Negro’ music.
Dvořák was of the firm opinion that American concert music could not thrive as an indigenous entity if it slavishly imitated European models. No, it needed to find its own musical idiom. Gershwin put this into focus in one of his most oft-quoted statements: ‘Music must reflect the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are American. My time is today.’
Which are George Gershwin’s most famous works?
Once Gershwin made the connection between jazz and the concert hall (beginning with Rhapsody in Blue), there was no stopping him. It led to a dual career; his concert works span exactly the same years as his Broadway musicals, ending when he got busy on his opera Porgy and Bess. After Rhapsody in Blue came the Piano Concerto in F (1925), An American in Paris (1928), the Second Rhapsody (1931), the Cuban Overture (1932) and Variations on ‘I Got Rhythm’ (1934).
All of these came under attack from critics eager to pounce on structural deficiencies. Gershwin was well aware of his situation – a largely self-taught song-plugger now putting works called ‘Rhapsody’ or ‘Concerto‘ before the public. ‘When my critics tell me now and then I betray a structural weakness,’ he said, ‘they are not telling me anything I don’t know.’
How Rhapsody in Blue put American concert music on the map
Whatever his technical limitations, George Gershwin was the first to put American concert music on the map. The patriotic anthem ‘My Country! ‘Tis of Thee’, or Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, might have seemed the most appropriate climax for the razzmatazz opening ceremony at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. But the spine-chiller proved to be neither of these. It was the synchronous sound of 84 pianists at 84 white pianos playing Rhapsody in Blue.
Gershwin always hankered after tuition from famous musicians. It is hard to see why those he approached – Ravel, Glazunov, Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger – should take time out to tutor this fast-track product of Tin Pan Alley, with his frenetic lifestyle.
‘Why be a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?’
His quest led to famous stories (proved to be true). Ravel said: ‘Why be a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?’ Stravinsky, when told how much Gershwin earned, said: ‘Then maybe I should be taking lessons from you.’
Gershwin’s creativity was phenomenal
When he did take lessons from the American Henry Cowell, Gershwin would tart-up an exercise in the style of Palestrina, that 16th-century master of polyphony, with what Cowell called ‘juicy ninth chords’ – as much an essential to Debussy as to Duke Ellington, but definitely out of place in strict counterpoint.
Gershwin’s creativity was phenomenal. ‘I have more tunes in my head than I could put down on paper in a hundred years,’ he said. When he checked out of a hotel and realised he had left behind sketch-books containing about 40 song ideas, he shrugged it off: ‘There are plenty more where those came from.’
He once said that he liked to write six tunes a day to get the bad ones out of his system. In a unique fraternal partnership, his elder brother Ira – already nicknamed ‘The Jeweller’ because of his polished lyrics for other songwriters – became George’s devoted collaborator.
He liked to write six tunes a day – to get the bad ones out of his system
The George and Ira Gershwin dream team
When Ira was asked which came first, the words or the music, he liked to reply: ‘The contract.’ George made the crafting of their songs sound easy: ‘Usually the music comes first. I hit on a new tune, play it for Ira, and he hums it all over the place for a while until he gets an idea for the lyric. Then we work the thing out together.’
For Ira, however, it was not so simple. A tune that flowed from George’s fingers as he amused himself at the piano might mean days of hard grind. Having memorised it, Ira would often work through the night on numerous drafts to arrive at a preliminary lyric.
Then would come stage two. With George at the piano, Ira would set up a bridge table at the top end of the keyboard, spread out his papers, and another Gershwin song would painfully emerge line by line.
What shows did George and Ira Gershwin write?
Not all their shows were hits, and most of them remain difficult to revive because they were so much part of their time. Their first collaboration, Lady, Be Good! in 1924, helped redefine the Broadway musical. Its musical numbers were more integrated within a storyline than the sort of frothy revues the Gershwins inherited.
By 1927 they were offering sharp, political satire in Strike Up The Band – initially a failure, but revived in 1930 to great success. Theatre-goers had been through the Wall Street crash and had no illusions about bungling financiers and politicians. Of Thee I Sing (1931), satirising an American presidential campaign, was their greatest triumph. Its jokes about the White House could have come out of today’s newspaper.
George Gershwin must have been concerned that his songs might not live once the shows had closed. Of the tune in Rhapsody in Blue, he said, ‘If I had taken the same themes and put them into songs they would have been gone years ago.’ Concert music seemed to have a future, compared with the fragility of Broadway. He need not have worried: so many of his songs are immortal, and jazz performers never tire of spinning improvisations on them.
What was George Gershwin’s best work?
His crowning achievement, Porgy and Bess, is the most successful American opera of our century. It took a long time to achieve this status, for musical and ethnic reasons. Premiered in 1935, it closed after 124 performances. For an opera, this would be the equivalent of many seasons.
In 1926 after reading DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy he knew he had found his material. It took until 1934 for Gershwin to begin serious work on the story about Bess and the cripple Porgy, buffeted by fate in the black ghetto of Charleston’s Catfish Row. By then his dramatic skills had been strengthened through Strike Up the Band (1927), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and its darker sequel Let ’Em Eat Cake (1933): satirical musicals featuring big ensemble scenes, on the Gilbert and Sullivan model. Porgy and Bess, a work of much deeper emotions, added the easy flow of song, chorus and recitative found in Puccini. Further infusions came from African-American gospel and spirituals, and the modernities of Berg.
Porgy and Bess: troubled beginnings
Gershwin mounted Porgy and Bess on Broadway, because he wanted ‘to develop something that would appeal to the many rather than the cultured few.’ Todd Duncan, who created the role of Porgy, remembered Gershwin being ‘caught between’, believing opera-lovers stayed away because they did not think he could write one, while Broadway thought: ‘Georgie’s gone high-hat on us.’ Gershwin was criticised for producing a hybrid that fluctuated between opera, operetta and musical comedy.
From its premiere in 1935, the opera had other hurdles to overcome. Before opening night Gershwin consented to substantial cuts, only restored in full in 1976. Over time, changes in sensitivities and the social fabric have made the libretto’s broad characterisations susceptible to charges of racial stereotyping. But the big songs, topped by ‘Summertime’, remain unassailable, and Gershwin’s exuberantly dramatic effects often take one’s breath away.
There was also widespread black opposition. The foremost complainer was Duke Ellington, who had started his own black opera (called Boola) in 1930, but never completed it. He said that ‘no Negro could possibly be fooled by Porgy and Bess‘. Nonetheless, the Gershwin brothers and author DuBose Heyward had tried to get away from the whoring, gambling, superstitious black stereotypes portrayed all too often.
Fifty years after its premiere, the opera finally reached the stage of the Met. It has since been acclaimed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, while numerous centenary-year productions around the globe included a complete performance at the BBC Proms. If only Gershwin had lived to see the triumphant progress of what he called his ‘labour of love.’
What is George Gershwin’s musical style?
Rhythmic and melodious, Gershwin’s music fuses popular elements from the American melting-pot: the flattened notes and syncopations of African-American blues and ragtime; Hispanic rhythms; the aching cadences of Hebrew chant. More classical ingredients range from the harmonies of Chopin, Liszt and Debussy to the sprightly patter of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Little of this frothy broth appeared in Gershwin’s first hit song ‘Swanee’ (1919), but the ordinary tune and simple lyrics went with a swing, especially when sung by Al Jolson. Five years later came the leap into the audacious with Rhapsody in Blue, composed for bandleader Paul Whiteman’s ‘Experiment in Modern Music’ concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall. Popular jazz collided with Lisztian rhetoric and a melody worthy of Tchaikovsky.
He straddled the popular and classical divide
Most of the music world delighted in the odd mix, and wanted more. Gershwin obliged, and spent what remained of his life straddling the popular and classical divide with an ease no other American of his generation could match. Irving Berlin characterised him as ‘the only song-writer I know who became a composer’. At his death Gershwin was widely mourned, and he’s continued to be indispensable.
Yet Gershwin’s output has numerous hidden corners. In some ways he’s been taken for granted, not least by academia.
In 2006 music scholar Howard Pollack delivered George Gershwin: His Life and Work, 884 pages of objective research. But a hole remains in the lack of any critical edition of the scores. Rhapsody in Blue alone exists in multiple versions, each with its own anomalies or cuts. The recorded legacy is equally tangled, and many key recordings remain out of print, among them Houston City Opera’s 1976 Porgy and Bess (the most generally satisfying).
Was Gershwin a victim of musical snobbery?
Corporate blindness and shaky finances have no doubt played a part. But might there perhaps be lingering high-brow suspicion of the chameleon Gershwin?
Peering down at his concert works in 1929, the American commentator Paul Rosenfeld found ‘second-hand ideas and ecstasies’, ‘brutal calculated effects’, and no structural solidity. Britain’s Wilfrid Mellers made similar, if more gentle, remarks some 30 years later.
In the Rhapsody and its successors, linking material can indeed be weak, but the relationship between melodies and context is subtler than critics have suggested. And even when our heads might agree with their comments, our hearts don’t. We keep on listening, keep finding sustenance, keep humming the tunes.
At the back of this gibing lies the notion of Gershwin as a force of nature, someone who created magic from the sounds of New York but lacked the schooling to expand the magic further. This is distorting. His passions in classical music ranged widely, from Bach to Alban Berg.
Who taught George Gershwin?
Musical training may have been piecemeal, but he sought out tutors throughout his life. His piano teacher Charles Hambitzer was an early influence; Gershwin said he made him ‘harmony conscious’. In the 1930s, Joseph Schillinger helped lighten his orchestrations; he also, more controversially, proposed mathematical formulae as a means of controlling material.
Gershwin requested help from 20th-century gods such as Ravel, Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger and Schoenberg. Henry Cowell and Wallingford Riegger, American experimentalists, also agreed; most others declined, not wishing to damage his natural gifts.
Debussy’s presence hovers round the harmonies of the placid Lullaby of 1919 for string quartet. The gestures of Italian verismo opera influence the 20-minute Blue Monday, doomed to one performance on Broadway in George White’s Scandals of 1922, though an important step toward Porgy and Bess. Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Chopin make their mark on Rhapsody in Blue, though not on its famous opening gambit, with the solo clarinet twiddling its notes then slithering and accelerating into the first theme.
Rhapsody in Blue and Gershwin as concert composer
Much of the Rhapsody’s colour range derives from its original orchestration by Ferde Grofé for Whiteman’s band. But the blue mood is embedded in Gershwin’s notes. The writer Carl Van Vechten told him he’d written ‘the foremost serious effort by an American composer’. An exaggeration then; an exaggeration now. Yet its passing fissures and banalities seem of no avail. Other American symphonic jazz from the 1920s belongs in a museum; only Rhapsody in Blue lives.
Despite the work’s success, Gershwin’s daily round continued unchanged. Always practical, he tailored his stage musicals to different star performers. The Broadway shows Lady Be Good! (1924) and Funny Face (1927) hung on the delightful pegs of Fred and Adele Astaire, crisply elegant dancers and singers.
His concert profile advanced alongside. In the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra (1925), the work’s abstract character emphasises its structural problems. But there’s still the lovely middle movement, a smoky, nocturnal beauty, featuring one of his most irresistible melodies.
Sections in the orchestral tone poem An American in Paris (1928) are more suavely knitted. Gershwin’s complex personality seems ever reflected in his music’s brash energy, its innocent narcissism and braggadocio, also its lonely dark shadows.
Where did Gershwin live?
Gershwin ended his days in Hollywood writing film music. Living in Los Angeles, he enjoyed strenuous games of tennis with Arnold Schoenberg, who had left Nazi Germany in 1933 and was as fanatical about tennis as he was. He put Schoenberg firmly in his sights as a possible tutor. But it was George’s friend, the film star and pianist Oscar Levant, who became a Schoenberg pupil.
Levant’s nervy, one-movement piano concerto – a schizophrenic mixture of blues, jazz and Alban Berg – is available on CD. It gives a taste of what Gershwin might have written had he tried to follow the same road – although it is most unlikely he could ever have been at home with the Schoenberg aesthetic.
How did George Gershwin die?
Gershwin died of an undiagnosed brain tumour, 11 weeks short of his 39th birthday. Schoenberg paid simple homage: ‘He expressed musical ideas; and they were new – as is the way he expressed them.’ The songwriter Harold Arlen said: ‘There was nothing phoney about him. He knew he had it and he celebrated it.’ Each, in his own way, succeeded in defining Gershwin’s place in the music of our century.
What were Gershwin’s last words?
The composer’s final words before his death were ‘Fred Astaire’. Why? Well, turns out that the great composer and the great dancer had long had a connection. Gershwin had been hired to play songs for a music publishing house and the Astaires were teenagers in a successful vaudeville act. The Astaires eventually asked Gershwin to write the music for a show they would star in. Gershwin and Ira Gershwin also wrote the song ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ with the Astaires.
Rodney Greenberg