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As a major figure in the history of American music, George Gershwin succeeded brilliantly in creating a synthesis of Jazz with Classical music genres in a manner that has endured the test of time. Gershwin produced serious works that were daring for their time but which today have become classics of piano, orchestral, and opera literature. However, at their first performances, Gershwin’s bold and innovative works confounded the New York critics, and they were, more often than not, coldly reviewed. It has been said that Gershwin bridged the musical gap between Tin Pan Alley and the great concert halls of New York through his unique musical style. Gershwin’s works in Classical genres, though small in number compared to his songs for Broadway musicals and Hollywood, were interspersed throughout his relatively brief career. They were not conceived during a single period of his life. One can only imagine what Gershwin might have achieved in serious music had he lived a normal life span. However, his existing concert works elevated American music to new heights of artistic merit, and he is remembered around the world today as a true genius of early Twentieth Century music.
George Gershwin, named Jacob Gershovitz at his birth on September 26, 1898, was the second of four children born to Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russian immigrants who had married in America. George’s brother Ira (older by two years) was expected to become the musician in the family, but George surprised his parents when he appropriated the piano his mother purchased for Ira when he was twelve, and George was given piano lessons as well as his brother. In 1912 he began studying piano with Charles Hambitzer who was undoubtedly Gershwin’s strongest musical influence and who introduced him to the music of Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel, along with the early works of Arnold Schoenberg, and a broad spectrum of other classical piano literature. Hambitzer turned George over to Edward Kilenyi for additional lessons in theory and composition. Both Hambitzer and Kilenyi encouraged George to pursue musical experimentation. This is when Gershwin wrote his first ragtime songs within classical forms, entitled Since I Found You and Ragging the Traumerei. These were rough in style but demonstrated a merge between the two forms. Gershwin greatly admired the songs of Irving Berlin, and among his earliest musical heroes were Franz Liszt and the great pianists who were then appearing in New York, such as Josef Lhevinne, Josef Hoffmann, and composer-pianist Ferrucio Busoni.
But in 1914, Gershwin struck out on his own musically, dropping out of high school, and he turned to the practical musical world close to his home when he went to work for Jerome H. Remick & Co., a music publishing firm on Tin Pan Alley, for a salary of $15.00 per week, while he continued living with his parents and his brother Ira. Until March 1917, Gershwin worked for the Remick Company as a song plugger: a salesman who promoted the firm’s songs by playing and singing them for performers. As a result of many hours each day spent at the keyboard, his playing improved greatly, and he cut his first piano rolls in 1915. By 1926, Gershwin had made more than 100 piano rolls, and he became a highly skilled vocal accompanist. He also began to compose songs and piano pieces of his own, but without any encouragement from his employers. So he eventually decided to move from Tin Pan Alley, with its emphasis on songs written to commercial formulas, to the Broadway musical stage, where men like Jerome Kern were applying a more highly developed musical artistry, writing musical scores for entire shows.
In July 1917, Gershwin began working as the rehearsal pianist for a Broadway show by Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert: Miss 1917. After the show opened in November at the Century Theater, Gershwin stayed on as the organizer of and accompanist for a series of popular concerts held there on Sunday evenings. His talent as a composer began to be noticed by influential people. Although he had previously published little, in early 1918 Max Dreyfus, the head of Harms Publishing Company, offered him a weekly salary for the rights to any songs he might compose in the future. Before the year was out, three Broadway shows carried songs by Gershwin. Soon afterwards, in collaboration with Arthur L. Jackson and Buddy De Sylva, Gershwin composed his first full Broadway score: La La Lucille, which opened on Broadway in May 1919. Before he had reached his 21st birthday, Gershwin was known, not only as an outstanding pianist, but he could also claim the composition of a Broadway show to his credit, several songs in print, and a steady income from a well-known publisher for his future works.
During the 1920s, Gershwin’s fledgling career as a Broadway composer flourished. His popular song, Swanee, recorded in 1920 by the popular singer Al Jolson, was his first hit song, yielding him some $10,000 in composer’s royalties in that year alone. He signed a contract with the producer George White, under which he composed the music for five annual Broadway reviews from 1920-1924. And under separate agreements with other producers, he composed the scores for three Broadway shows and two shows in London. Primrose, his second London show, produced in 1924, was a great success, and it was followed in the same year by Lady Be Good!, starring Fred and Adele Astaire. This was the first of his shows for which his brother Ira Gershwin wrote all the lyrics. The latter included the songs Fascinating Rhythm and Oh, lady, be good!, both of which became and remain today standards in the American song repertory.
One day in early January of 1924, Ira Gershwin noticed a small newspaper ad announcing that his brother George had agreed to write a “Jazz Concerto” to be performed by Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra at New York’s Aeolian Hall the following month. To his horror, Ira realized that George had not started working on the composition, and the work was already receiving attention from the press. The next day, George sat on a train on his way to Boston, and he began to listen to the steady rhythms of the train wheels and the movements of the cars. This helped him start his composition. He continued to write at an upright piano at home. Later, at a party, he was seated at a piano when suddenly his fingers moved into a broad, almost hymn-like melody that came mysteriously from somewhere inside him, the very theme for which he had been searching. The night of the concert arrived, and Gershwin was nervous because he felt that he might not have anything of lasting merit to offer the audience.
On February 12, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue was placed near the end of Whiteman’s concert program. Gershwin appeared onstage, took his place at the piano and started. As the clarinet player let out the now famous, slowly ascending wail which begins the Rhapsody, the excitement in the audience could be sensed. Gershwin played on, improvising the notes he left out in haste during his previous weeks of composition. The band stayed with him. “Somewhere in the middle of the score I began crying,” he recalled later. “When I came to myself, I was eleven pages along, and to this day I cannot tell you how I conducted that far.” The audience rose to its feet and gave him a wild ovation. The Rhapsody had been billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music” in which Jazz was elevated by the “symphonic” arrangements in which Whiteman’s band specialized. The audience included such notables as Jascha Heifitz, Fritz Kreisler, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Rachmaninov, and Igor Stravinsky. Gershwin’s performance of his own work won both the audience’s approval and the critics’ attention. Generally, music critics were at a loss as to where to place Gershwin’s Classical music in the standard repertoire, some dismissing his work as banal and tiresome, but these negative voices were trumped by the fact that his music always found favor with the general public. Performed and recorded repeatedly, the work won renown for its composer, labeling Gershwin as the man who had brought Jazz into the concert hall.
To most casual observers, Rhapsody in Blue was viewed as a new departure for the young songwriter, but in reality, it was a new manifestation of Gershwin’s continued involvement with Classical music genres. In 1915 he had begun to study harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and musical form with Kilenyi, and these lessons continued at least until 1921. His first Classical piece, Lullaby for string quartet, written around 1919, was likely composed as a harmony exercise for Kilenyi. His second such work, a brief opera called Blue Monday, opened the second act of George White’s Scandals for 1922, but it was withdrawn after its first performance. Previously, on November 1, 1923, Gershwin performed in a recital at Aeolian Hall given by the Canadian mezzo-soprano, Eva Gauthier. This recital helped to set the stage for Whiteman’s concert less than three months later. In a program that ranged from songs by Purcell and Bellini to works by Schoenberg and Bartók, Gauthier included compositions by Gershwin, Kern, Irving Berlin and Walter Donaldson. Gershwin accompanied the singer in the latter song group. Therefore, Rhapsody in Blue stemmed from an aesthetic sensibility that never fully accepted a separation between popular and Classical genres, and Gershwin continued to create works in both musical spheres.
In 1925, as a result of his newly gained affluence from the artistic and financial success of Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin moved his family to a townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood on New York’s upper West Side. About the same time he began to develop a strong interest in the visual arts, collecting paintings, sculptures, and drawings and taking up painting himself. He also became known as a figure in New York theatrical and literary circles, often dominating parties with his piano playing. New patterns emerged in Gershwin’s compositions, as he continued to write scores for the musical theatre, though at a somewhat slower rate. He gave more and more attention to concert music, studying with a succession of teachers including Rubin Goldmark, Riegger, and Cowell. Much of the summer of 1925 was devoted to the composition of the Concerto in F for piano and orchestra, commissioned by Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra.
The (now famous) Preludes for Piano were first performed by the composer in December of 1926 as part of a recital in which Gershwin accompanied the contralto Marguerite d’Alvarez. During most of 1928, Gershwin was occupied with the composition of the tone poem, An American in Paris, which he began to create during a trip to Europe from March to June of that year. Traveling with his family, Gershwin was welcomed as a musical celebrity, and he met many outstanding composers during this holiday, such as Prokofiev, Milhaud, Poulenc, Ravel, Walton, and Berg. Additionally, as part of this memorable time abroad, he heard both Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F played in his honor by French musicians.
The following summer (1929), Gershwin made his début as a conductor in an outdoor concert at Lewisohn Stadium in New York where conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in An American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, playing the piano part of the latter himself before an audience of more than fifteen thousand people. During October 1929, he signed a contract to compose a “Jewish opera,” to be called The Dybbuk, for the Metropolitan Opera, but that operatic work was never completed. While in Hollywood from November 1930 to February 1931, Gershwin maintained his commitment to concert music, as he and Ira wrote the musical score for the film Delicious, and they began work on the Broadway musical Of Thee I Sing. Gershwin also composed most of his Rhapsody No. 2 for piano and orchestra during this period.
Unlike any American composer before him, Gershwin managed to broaden the musical scope of his craft without sacrificing his popularity, and by the early 1930s, the range of his works caused him to be viewed as a major figure in modern music. Thus established as a composer of considerable talent, he maintained his place on Broadway by writing some of his most successful musicals, including Strike up the Band, premiered in 1927 and revised in 1930, Girl Crazy from 1930, and the afore-mentioned Of Thee I Sing from 1931, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Gershwin also continued his concerts and tours, and from 1934–1935, he hosted and played on a radio program broadcast by CBS, entitled “Music by Gershwin.”
In June of 1936, George and Ira signed a contract with RKO Film Studios, and by August they had moved to Hollywood. The songs they supplied for such films as Shall we Dance? and A Damsel in Distress in 1937 and The Goldwyn Follies, released in 1938, were among their best collaborative works. In between these projects, Gershwin maintained his study of harmony and composition, and while taking lessons with Joseph Schillinger from 1932–1936, he wrote the Cuban Overture (1932), a set of Variations for piano and orchestra on the song I Got Rhythm, and his magnum opus, the opera Porgy and Bess.
Since 1926, when he first read the novel, Gershwin had considered the idea of composing a full-length opera based on DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, a story about life among the black inhabitants of “Catfish Row” in Charleston, South Carolina. After many delays, Dubose Heyward and the Gershwin brothers signed a production contract in October of 1933 with the Theatre Guild of New York, and their collaboration on this project was under way. Gershwin began the score in February of 1934, and during the next summer he stayed in South Carolina, composing and absorbing local influences at Folly Beach, located on a barrier island about ten miles from Charleston. From this location, the Gershwins could observe the Gullahs, an isolated group living on adjacent James Island, who became the prototypes of the Catfish Row residents. It was a happy collaboration as DuBose Heyward wrote the libretto, and Ira Gershwin and Heyward wrote the lyrics. Heyward’s contributions included the lyrics to Summertime and My Man’s Gone Now.
By mid-August the Gershwins left Charleston, and George applied himself to finishing the recitatives and orchestrating the opera. When it was finally completed in July, 1935, the 700 pages of music represented Gershwin’s most ambitious creation and his favorite composition. According to David Ewen, he “never quite ceased to wonder at the miracle that he had been its composer. He never stopped loving each and every bar, and he never wavered in the conviction that he had produced a work of art.” Billed as “an American folk opera,” Porgy and Bess opened in New York in October of 1935 in a Broadway theatre and not an opera house. The opera ran for 124 performances, and it closed without earning enough to recover the original investment, and therefore it was considered a financial failure.
Today, Porgy and Bess is revered by many as one of the finest examples of grand opera ever penned by an American composer. Gershwin was obviously influenced by black spirituals, gospel music, and African-American dance rhythms, which pervade this intriguing story of love, murder, and longing in a manner unparalleled in opera history. Although criticized in some quarters as presenting a negative view of African-American life, Gershwin succeeded in giving a musical voice, an operatic voice, to African-Americans for the first time. The sublime beauty of his melodies bestows a great nobility upon his black characters in a uniquely American operatic setting, resonating universal human themes. Among all of his works, Porgy and Bess is undoubtedly his greatest musical achievement, frequently performed in opera houses around the world and regarded as a masterpiece of Twentieth Century opera. George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward talked of collaborating on a second opera to be entitled Porgy in New York, but sadly, within two years and before the project could materialize, both men died unexpectedly.
Gershwin’s untimely death was a truly shocking and unexpected event, since he was seemingly on the threshold of even greater musical achievements. At the beginning of 1937, Gershwin complained of intermittent dizzy spells and feelings of emotional despondency, but he continued to perform in public and to compose. On July 9, 1937, he fell suddenly into a coma. A brain tumor was diagnosed and emergency surgery performed. However, on the morning of July 11, 1937, Gershwin died at the age of thirty-eight. Four days later, after memorial services in New York and Hollywood, he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
On the surface, Gershwin is often remembered primarily as a songwriter, composing hundreds of songs for Tin Pan Alley, the Broadway stage, and Hollywood films. But it must be stated that Gershwin was not content to compose only in the medium of popular music. With each successive Classical composition, he further honed his skills as an accomplished composer of serious music. In Gershwin’s view these two musical worlds were not mutually exclusive, and he achieved his greatest personal satisfaction by composing music for audiences in both spheres. During his lifetime European composers were far more sympathetic to Gershwin than were his American contemporaries. Maurice Ravel and Kurt Weill paid him the highest compliment: large-scale imitation. Ravel quoted Rhapsody in Blue in his Piano Concerto in G, and Weill, who after Gershwin’s death collaborated with Ira Gershwin, modeled his opera Street Scene on Porgy and Bess. Prokofiev and Berg also expressed admiration, and Schoenberg, who played tennis with Gershwin in Hollywood, defended him as a “man who lives in music and expresses everything, serious or not, sound or superficial, by means of music, because it is his native language.“