GeorgeGershwin

In May 1914 a fifteen-year-old pianist went to work for Jerome H. Remick and Company in New York, playing songs to sell them. George Gershwin earned fifteen dollars a week. He could sight-read, transpose and keep a tune attractive through another repetition. Four years earlier his family had bought a piano for his elder brother Ira, and George surprised them by sitting down and playing it; he had been experimenting on the piano at a friend’s house. He was born in Brooklyn on 26 September 1898 to Russian-⁠Jewish immigrants. His first professional work was at a publisher’s keyboard, where a song had to sell to a customer standing beside the piano.

Charles Hambitzer was his piano teacher. Gershwin later called him “the first great musical influence in my life”. He attended concerts by pianists including Leopold Godowsky and Josef Lhévinne, and studied theory with Edward Kilenyi. After leaving school he went on studying, and in the summer of 1921 he took courses in Romantic music and elementary orchestration at Columbia University.

1919–⁠24Swanee and songs with Ira

In 1919 he and Irving Caesar wrote Swanee. Its first appearance in the Capitol Revue attracted little attention; Al Jolson heard it at a party, put it into Sinbad, and made it a hit. Gershwin had already moved from song plugging to theatre rehearsals and a job as a staff composer at T. B. Harms. In December 1924 Lady, Be Good! opened, the first complete Broadway show by George and Ira together. Fred and Adele Astaire danced in it.

1924Rhapsody in Blue, Aeolian Hall

On 4 January 1924 the New York Tribune announced that Gershwin was writing a jazz concerto for Paul Whiteman. The concert was on 12 February, and the piece had not yet been written. Gershwin worked in a two-piano score and handed the pages to Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé, who knew the players and made the band parts. At Aeolian Hall, Gershwin played the piano while Whiteman conducted Rhapsody in Blue.

The opening was partly the work of the clarinettist Ross Gorman. Gershwin had written a rising run; Gorman turned it into the sliding ascent that reaches a high concert B♭ after a low trill. Piano solos alternate with passages for the band, and the piece includes a broad singing tune. On 10 June Gershwin and Whiteman recorded it for Victor. About a third of the score was cut to fit the two record sides.

1925–⁠32Concerto in F, An American in Paris, Cuban Overture

Walter Damrosch commissioned the Concerto in F for the New York Symphony Society and conducted its première at Carnegie Hall on 3 December 1925, with Gershwin as soloist. “The first movement employs the Charleston rhythm,” Gershwin explained in his note on the concerto. The movement opens with percussion and uses displaced accents, bringing the dance into a three-movement concert work. The slow movement begins with winds and brass; a muted trumpet enters before the piano. Late in that movement, piano and flute together recall the opening introduction.

In Paris in 1928 Gershwin shopped for taxi horns. He had begun thinking about An American in Paris on an earlier visit, and the horns allowed the city’s traffic to be heard in the orchestra. In Musical America that August he called the score “the most modern music I have yet attempted”. He also described its homesick American drinking in a café, succumbing to the blues and then going back out into the street. Damrosch conducted the première in December. The work has no solo piano part.

Gershwin took a holiday in Havana in February 1932 and came back with another set of instruments. For the Cuban Overture, first performed that August under the title Rumba, he placed claves, maracas, güiro and bongos at the front of the orchestra, directly in front of the conductor. That year he also began studying with Joseph Schillinger, whose teaching used mathematical patterns and graph paper. Of Thee I Sing, the Gershwins’ political musical with George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The award named the book writers and Ira, but not the composer.

1935Porgy and Bess

Gershwin read DuBose Heyward’s Porgy in 1926. Serious work on the opera began in 1933. In the summer of 1934 he stayed on Folly Beach, near Charleston, where the Heywards also had a cottage. DuBose prepared the libretto and worked with Ira on the lyrics, and the opera drew on Dorothy Heyward’s stage adaptation. The score includes lullaby, street cries, prayer and dance in its setting of Catfish Row. Summertime is sung by a woman to a child; My Man’s Gone Now is sung by a widow.

Porgy and Bess opened in Boston on 30 September 1935 and in New York on 10 October. Todd Duncan and Anne Brown played the title roles; the Eva Jessye Choir was among the named original performers. The production ran for 124 Broadway performances and lost money. Its Black cast was admired, and its portrayal of Black life drew objections to stereotyping. On the 1936 tour, a protest by the cast forced Washington’s National Theatre to admit an integrated audience.

1936–⁠37The last film songs

George, Ira and Ira’s wife Leonore moved to Los Angeles in August 1936. The brothers wrote for films including Shall We Dance, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Its songs include They Can’t Take That Away from Me and Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, a duet built on small differences in pronunciation. Gershwin was working on The Goldwyn Follies when he died of a brain tumour on 11 July 1937. He was thirty-eight. Ira lived until 1983. He continued to work with other composers and preserved his brother’s manuscripts.