Gershwin, George

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George Gershwin

Personal

Born Jacob Gershvin, September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, NY; son of Moshe (a businessman) and Rose (Bruskin) Gershvin; died of a brain tumor, July 11, 1937, in Beverly Hills, CA. Education: Studied music with Charles Hambitzer, Edward Kilenyi, Rubin Goldmark, Wallingford Reigger, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Schillinger.

Career

Composer and pianist. Orchestral and classical works include Rhapsody in Blue, 1924; Concerto in F for Piano, 1925; An American in Paris, 1928; Second Rhapsody, 1931; Cuban Overture, 1932; Variations on I Got Rhythm for Piano and Orchestra, 1934; Porgy and Bess, a folk opera, with libretto by Dubose Heyward and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Hayward, 1935; and Three Preludes, 1936. Musical scores include The Passing Show, 1916; La La Lucille, 1919; George White Scandals, 1920-24; A Dangerous Maid, 1921; Blue Monday (operetta), 1922; The Rainbow, 1923; Sweet Little Devil, 1924; Primrose, 1924; Lady, Be Good!, 1924; Tell Me More!, 1925; Tip-Toes, 1925; Song of the Flame, 1925; Oh, Kay!, 1926; Funny Face, 1927; Strike up the Band, 1927 (revised 1930); Rosalie, 1928; Treasure Girl, 1928; Show Girl, 1929; Girl Crazy, 1930; Of Thee I Sing, 1931; Pardon My English, 1933; and Let 'Em Eat Cake, 1933. Film scores include Delicious, 1931; Shall We Dance, 1937; A Damsel in Distress, 1937; Goldwyn Follies, 1938; The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, 1946; and Kiss Me, Stupid, 1964. Composer of approximately 700 popular songs, including "Swanee," "The Man I Love," "But Not for Me," "Embraceable You," "A Foggy Day," "I Got Rhythm," "It Ain't Necessarily So," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "Nice Work If You Can Get It," "'S Wonderful," "Someone to Watch over Me," "Summertime," and "They Can't Take That Away from Me."

Awards, Honors

Pulitzer Prize (with George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind), 1932, for Of Thee I Sing; honorary membership, St. Cecilia Academy, Rome, Italy, 1937; Academy Award nomination for Best Song (with Ira Gershwin), 1937, for "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" from Shall We Dance?

Writings

(With Ira Gershwin) The Songs of George and Ira Gershwin: A Centennial Celebration, two volumes, Warner (New York, NY), 2001.

Sidelights

George Gershwin was, as David Schiff wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, "a man without a past [who] created music that comes to life—and demolishes the distinction between serious and trivial." Bridging the worlds of classical music and popular jazz, Gershwin composed some seven hundred popular songs during the short career that preceded his early death, including such famous toe-tapping tunes as "Swanee," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "Someone to Watch over Me," "'S Wonderful," and "I Got Rhythm." Such songs are, according to James A. Van Sant writing in the American Record Guide, "so memorable, so catchy and loveable, they survive almost any reasonable treatment."

While Gershwin's musicals—many written in collaboration with his brother Ira—packed houses on Broadway for two decades, with works such as Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess, the composer proved he was equally adept at creating pieces for the orchestra hall and opera house. As music scholar Robert Kimball noted to Richard Jerome of People magazine on the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth, "Gershwin had brought something electrifying to the concert hall. Rhapsody in Blue was to music very much what Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic was to aviation.… It was an extraordinary event that bridged the gap between classical and popular music." For Time reviewer Wilfrid Sheed, Gershwin succeeded in a threefold accomplishment: he took jazz "upmarket with his Rhapsody in Blue and his Piano Concerto in F Major," and then captured the imagination of the American public at large "by weaving it back into folklore with Porgy and Bess." For Sheed, "maybe Gershwin's greatest legacy" is his third: establishing "how to use jazz in songs." Through such talent, Gershwin quickly became one of the great American composers of the twentieth century. Whether writing for the musical stage or the opera hall, Tin Pan Alley or orchestras, Gershwin's music consistently achieved, as Stanley Green wrote in the Encyclopedia of the Musical Theater, an "agile wit, originality of phrases, and rhyming ingenuity." His premature death at age thirty-eight from a brain tumor left critics and fans alike stunned, and wondering "What if … ?"

Coming of Age in New York

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898, Jacob Gershvin was the second son of Russian immigrants whose family name morphed from Gershovitz to Gershvin, and finally became anglicized as Gershwin. Young Jacob was, according to William G. Hyland in his George Gershwin: A New Biography, "frankly, a bad child who might have become a gangster." A child of the streets, he became impressed with music when he heard a player piano rendition of Anton Rubinstein's Melody in F as a six year old. Jazz music filtering out of a Harlem club formed another early musical experience, and as a boy Gershwin returned again and again to the club, lingering outside and taking in the sounds. At school he befriended future concert violinist Maxie Rosenzweig, who taught Gershwin about serious music. Soon Gershwin was plunking out tunes on another friend's piano after school.

Gershwin's interest in music became a secret passion that shielded him from the peripatetic lifestyle of his family: his father changed both jobs and family addresses more than once a year during Gershwin's youth. Meanwhile Gershwin's older brother Ira was becoming known as the studious, artistic son, reading all the time and staying close to the family nest. Younger brother George was, at the same time, out on the streets, learning about music firsthand. In 1910 the family acquired a piano, which was intended for Ira, but it was George who sat down at the keyboard and pounded out the first melody. Soon it became clear to his parents that George was music crazy, and lessons were arranged in 1912 with Charles Hambitzer. This instructor recognized his young charge's genius, and ensured that Gershwin learned not only the jazz tunes of the day, but also the classical repertoire of composers such as Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Claude Debussy. At the same time, Gershwin continued taking virtual lessons from the jazz greats of the day, imbibing their styles, riffs, and swinging rhythms. Another early influence was the musical theater of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern; George and brother Ira visited the musical theater weekly.

In 1913, at age sixteen, Gershwin dropped out of school to take a job in Tin Pan Alley, the area of New York City where most music publishers were located. Working for sheet-music publisher Remick, Gershwin became a "song plugger," someone who played the company's music for prospective customers. He also began writing his own music, and by 1916 had his first song published, "When You Want 'Em You Can't Get 'Em." Another of his early songs, "The Making of a Girl," appeared in a Broadway production. In 1917 Gershwin left Remick to work as a rehearsal pianist on Broadway, and within a year he had landed a job with Max Dreyfus, head of Harms Publishing, who hired Gershwin at the then high rate of thirty-five dollars a week to compose songs exclusively for his company. Gershwin was on his way.

Got Rhythm and Blues

Gershwin's first big hit was the 1919 song "Swanee," which became a signature tune for singer Al Jolson, who introduced it in the musical Sinbad. The song went on to sell a million copies in sheet music and made Gershwin's name as a songwriter not just of promise but of prominence. In that same year, Gershwin's first full musical, La La Lucille, opened on Broadway and ran for over a hundred performances, quite an achievement for a young man at age twenty-one.

The 1920s were a time of hectic creativity for Gershwin. From 1920 to 1924 he composed the music for the annual George White Scandals, producing songs such as "Stairway to Paradise," "Do It Again," and "Somebody Loves Me." In 1921 he and his brother Ira, who had quietly been working as a lyricist all the while, collaborated on their first show together, the unsuccessful Dangerous Maid. The following year Gershwin wrote his first opera, the jazz-inspired one-act Blue Monday, which he later retitled 135th Street. The show was introduced in one of the George White Scandals, but proved unpopular for its rather somber tone. Though not quite an opera, Blue Monday was an important and ambitious step for Gershwin, blending the popular with the highbrow. Meanwhile he continued to compose for the popular stage, scoring musicals such as Our Nell, Sweet Little Devil, The Rainbow, and The Primrose. He quickly established a name on Broadway similar to that of the famous Irving Berlin.

Gershwin became acquainted with the well-known jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman as a result of Blue Monday, which Whiteman conducted. So impressed with the young man's work was Whiteman that he invited Gershwin to contribute a piece to a concert of modern music to be performed in New York's Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924. Gershwin, forgetting the commission until the last moment, composed the jazz concerto Rhapsody in Blue in three weeks. Scored for orchestra by Whiteman's arranger, the piece features a clarinet solo, a trilling, jazzy glissando opening that caught the attention of music critics and classical musicians who had been invited to the concert and who had been, until that time, unimpressed with the evening's fare of jazz dance music. The reception to Rhapsody in Blue was immediate and positive; overnight Gershwin became famous as not simply a song writer, but also as a serious composer whose works deserved attention from the world of high art and culture. In its first decade the piece earned more than a quarter of a million dollars in recordings and performances and has become part of the standard American repertoire in concert halls around the world. Gershwin's blending of jazz techniques in a classical framework created a cross-over piece that revolutionized American composing, inspiring composers such as Kurt Weil, Maurice Ravel, Paul Hindemith, and Aaron Copland to try their own experiments mixing jazz with serious music. Rhapsody in Blue, even more than his songs and musicals, made Gershwin not only famous but wealthy.

Gershwin followed this concert-hall success up with the 1925 work Concerto in F for solo piano and orchestra. While this composition is much closer to the traditional concerto form and style than Rhapsody in Blue, its second movement displays jazz influence. Further works by Gershwin for the concert hall or opera house include Three Piano Preludes, from 1926; the tone poem An American in Paris, from 1928 and inspired by Gershwin's own time in the French capital; Second Rhapsody and Cuban Overture, both from 1932; Variations on I Got Rhythm, from 1934; and the folk opera Porgy and Bess, from 1935. Of these, An American in Paris is easily Gershwin's second most popular piece, while Porgy and Bess has become part of the standard repertoire of many opera houses, with songs such as "Summertime" and "I Loves You, Porgy" transcending the stage to become popular standards in their own right. As Patrick J. Smith noted in Opera News, Gershwin's Porgy and Bess "is a sort of way-station between the musical and opera, but it is quite clearly an opera, and a grand one at that." However, at the time of its initial 1935 production, this opera about life among the black inhabitants of "Catfish Row" in Charleston, South Carolina, failed to play long enough to recover the investors' money. Thus, as Richard Crawford noted in Grove Music Online, "in spite of Gershwin's vaunted record of success, his last and most ambitious work for the stage was at first a financial failure."

King of Songs and Musicals

Such failures were rare occurrences amid Gershwin's many successes. For the musical stage he and his brother Ira had a string of successes, including Lady, Be Good!, Tell Me More!, Tip-Toes, Oh, Kay!, Funny Face, Rosalie, Treasure Girl, Show Girl, Strike up the Band, Girl Crazy, Pardon My English, and Let 'Em Eat Cake. Another musical from the early 1930s, Of Thee I Sing, earned the first Pulitzer Prize for a musical. Gershwin not only made himself famous, but also helped advance the careers of those who he and his brother wrote for. Featured in a production of Lady, Be Good!, Fred Astaire and his sister Adele became Broadway stars singing "Fascinating Rhythm." Much the same happened with Gertrude Lawrence when she sang "Someone to Watch over Me" in the 1926 hit, Oh, Kay! That same year the Astaires made another hit with tunes such as "'S Wonderful" and "How Long Has This Been Going On" from Funny Face, and the 1930 musical Girl Crazy thrust both Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers into stardom with their renditions of "I Got Rhythm" and "Embraceable You" respectively.

Although the brothers also collaborated with others, their best work—Ira as lyricist and George as composer—was produced as a team. They approached life that way, also. Even after Ira married, George, the perennial bachelor and lady's man, continued to live with his brother and the new bride. Deena Ruth Rosenberg, writing in her Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin, felt that the reason for the success of the brothers' teamwork was clear: "At this point, George, thirty-eight, and Ira, forty, were so deeply in tune with each other that in less than a year they produced one standard after another—a concentrated stream of songs written from a more mature sensibility and reflecting the sound and themes of the late thirties. In the twenties, the elements of the Gershwins' love ballads cohere to produce a sense of loneliness and longing; in the thirties, they cohere to produce a sense of tenuous celebration and affirmation of life amid a shifting and unstable world."

Writing in Commentary, William G. Hyland similarly attempted a partial explanation of George Gershwin's popularity. For one thing, Hyland noted, the composer was "helped immeasurably by [Ira's] witty and sophisticated lyrics." For another, as a pianist, Gershwin had a brilliant sense of harmony and rhythm. As Hyland further commented: his "abilities at the piano were truly extraordinary and were the secret of his success as a composer.… [He] reveled in rhythm, in part because he played the piano so well." Hyland went to call Gershwin a "superb manipulator of harmony" and one who "deliberately sought out the most advanced progression of chords" due to his "unusual feel for the blues." Crawford, writing for the Grove Music Online, reflected this view: "Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Gershwin's melodies is their reliance on blue notes. Sometimes they function as blatant dissonances.… At other times they soften the melodic contour with a sinuous grace." Crawford further noted that "throughout his professional life Gershwin was first and foremost a songwriter, composing hundreds of songs for Tin Pan Alley, the Broadway stage and Hollywood films.… [Gershwin] was also a leader among Broadway songwriters in exploring the possibilities of a rhythm that was at once relaxed, flexible and driving, showing the influence of black American dance."

A Career Cut Short

Gershwin began composing for Hollywood films in the 1930s, collaborating with his brother on Delicious, Shall We Dance, A Damsel in Distress, and The Goldwyn Follies. It was while working on that last-mentioned film that he began to experience health problems. Terrible headaches plagued him and he began to lose his balance and coordination. Initially it was thought that Gershwin's high-pressure lifestyle was causing too much stress, but finally it was discovered that he had a large brain tumor that had gone undiagnosed too long. On July 9, 1937, the composer fell into a coma. While emergency surgery was performed to remove the tumor, it failed, and Gershwin died on July 11, at the age of thirty-eight. "Few events in the history of American music were more shocking than Gershwin's death," wrote Crawford, noting that the composer was "on the threshold of new musical achievements." Indeed, Gershwin had plans for a new opera and concerto underway, as well as numerous songs and ideas for more musicals. The musical world and fans were shocked, but none were harder hit than Gershwin's brother, Ira, who stopped writing for the next three years. Ira Gershwin lived on until 1983, but his best work, most critics agree, was accomplished in collaboration with his brother.

If you enjoy the works of George Gershwin

you may also want to check out the following:

The stage and film musicals of Jerome Kern, including Show Boat, 1936; Irving Berlin, including Holiday Inn, 1942; and Aaron Copland, including Appalachian Spring, 1944.

Gershwin's work had a powerful influence on other composers, and his struggles to integrate audiences for jazz and serious music were also important in music history. But in the end, for a composer it is all about the music. And by those standards, it is clear that Gershwin's legacy will live on. Several posthumous movies were filmed using his music, including Rhapsody in Blue, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, An American in Paris, and Kiss Me Stupid. His compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris continue to be concert-hall favorites, and have been recorded by musicians worldwide, while Porgy and Bess draws crowds whenever it is staged. His songs and serious music continue to be used on television advertisements and in movie scores. Thus, as Crawford declared in Grove Music Online, more than his bridging of popular and classical traditions, "it was the sheer musical satisfaction that his compositions—songs and concert works alike—still provide for listeners … that is [Gershwin's] legacy." For David Ewen, writing in the Dictionary of American Biography, Gershwin remains "one of the most significant creative figures, and one of the most potent influences, that American music has produced."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Armitage, Merle, editor, George Gershwin, Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Carnovale, Norbert, George Gershwin: A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2000.

Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940, American Council of Learned Societies (New York, NY), 1944-1958.

Ewen, David, George Gershwin: His Journey to Greatness, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT) 1977.

Furia, Philip, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Green, Stanley, Encyclopedia of Musical Theater, Da Capo Press (Boston, MA), 1976.

Greenberg, Rodney, George Gershwin, Phaidon Press (London, England), 1998.

Hyland, William G., George Gershwin: A New Biography, Praeger Publishers (Westport, CT), 2003.

Jablonski, Edward, Gershwin: A Biography, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1987.

Johnson, John Andrew and Robert Wyatt, editors, The George Gershwin Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Peyser, Joan, The Memory of All That, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY), 1993.

Reef, Catherine, George Gershwin: American Composer, Morgan Reynolds (Greensboro, NC), 2000.

Rosenberg, Deena Ruth, Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin, Dutton (New York, NY), 1991.

Schneider, Wayne, editor, The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Schwartz, Charles, George Gershwin: A Selective Bibliography and Discography, Harmonie Park Press, 1974.

Whiting, Jim, The Life and Times of George Gershwin, Mitchell Lane (Elkton, MD), 2004.

Wilder, Alec, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1972.

Wood, Ean, George Gershwin: His Life and Music, Sanctuary Publishing, 1998.

PERIODICALS

American Record Guide, September, 2001, James A. Van Sant, review of "Gershwin: Song Book; Rhapsody in Blue," p. 121.

Atlantic Monthly, April, 1984, William H. Youngren, "Gershwin's Genius," p. 132; October 1, 1998, David Schiff, "Music: Misunderstanding Gershwin," p. 100.

Commentary, October, 1990, William G. Hyland, "The Best Songwriter of Them All."

New Republic, March 18, 1985, Edward Rothstein, "George Gershwin's Heav'nly Lan'," p. 28.

Opera News, August, 1998, Patrick J. Smith, "George Gershwin at 100," p. 4, Steven Blier, "You Say Eether … and I Say Eye-ther," p. 16.

People, November 9, 1998, Richard Jerome, "Born 100 Years Ago, George Gershwin Set the Music World on Its Ear with a Rhapsody and Rhythms That Still Fascinate," p. 73.

Time, September 21, 1987, Stefan Kanfer, review of Gershwin, p. 76; October 5, 1998, Wilfrid Sheed, "Setting the Standards," p. 90.