George Gershwin

Composer

• Born: September 26, 1898
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: July 11, 1937
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

Composer and musician

Gershwin wrote compositions that bridged the gap between popular and symphonic music. His works reflect the optimism and vitality of American life in the early years of the twentieth century and celebrate the contributions of other cultures to the United States.

Areas of achievement: Music; theater

Early Life

George Gershwin (GURSH-wihn) was the second child of Morris (Moishe) Gershovitz and Rose (Rosa) Bruskin, who emigrated from Russia to New York City in the early 1890’s and married in 1895. Gershwin’s father was a successful restaurateur, and the children enjoyed a comfortable upbringing. The family moved frequently within the city but generally gravitated to Jewish communities on the lower East Side and in Harlem. Like many immigrant Jewish families in America, they lived a largely secular life.

Although music was not particularly important in his family’s household, Gershwin grew up hearing opera on phonograph records. He also attended occasional classical music concerts at the Educational Alliance and became familiar with Jewish popular and liturgical melodies in his daily life. In 1910, Gershwin’s parents bought a piano for his older brother, Ira Gershwin, but it was George Gershwin who excelled on the instrument. He had been experimenting on a friend’s player piano and had even been notating musical ideas in a notebook. Subsequently, he took lessons from several neighborhood teachers, but he made the most progress under Charles Hambitzer, who introduced him to the music of such composers as Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, and Edvard Grieg. Gershwin began keeping a scrapbook of concert programs and magazine clippings about classical music, but he also maintained an interest in popular music. Soon after beginning his studies with Hambitzer, he asked his teacher for help with a song he had written, “Since I Found You.”

As Gershwin’s music studies progressed, he developed from a rambunctious child into a much more disciplined one, yet he chose to follow an independent course. Although he had been attending New York public schools, he dropped out in 1914 at the age of fifteen in order to work. His employer was Jerome H. Remick and Company, a popular music publisher that had, like many similar firms, once maintained its offices in the district known as Tin Pan Alley. Gershwin continued to live with his parents and would do so until he was thirty-one.

Life’s Work

After leaving Remick in 1917, Gershwin worked briefly as a rehearsal pianist, but by this time he had begun selling songs. His revue Half-Past Eight (1918) closed after a week in Syracuse, New York, but La La Lucille (1919) proved to be the first of many successes on Broadway. Gershwin’s mother had long encouraged him to compose songs to Ira’s lyrics, and in the musical comedy Lady Be Good! (1924) the brothers produced one of the most highly regarded theatrical works of the decade. The two would remain a successful team for the rest of Gershwin’s life.

The year 1924 also saw the premiere of what would prove to be Gershwin’s most popular symphonic work, Rhapsody in Blue, which he composed at the suggestion of bandleader Paul Whiteman. Since Gershwin’s experience as an orchestrator was limited, he allowed Ferde Grofé to arrange his piano sketches for jazz orchestra. Premiered as part of what Whiteman billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” the work was an immediate success and is regarded as a landmark in American musical history. Shortly afterward Gershwin composed his Concerto in F (1925), which in the opinion of many critics surpasses Rhapsody in Blue in its successful incorporation of jazz elements into a classical music structure. Having grown surer of his skills, Gershwin orchestrated this work himself. He became so well known that he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, becoming the first American composer to be so honored.

Gershwin conceived his next large-scale orchestral work, An American in Paris (1928), on a visit to the French capital in 1926. A tone poem describing a tourist’s impressions of Paris, the work alternates passages of gaiety and of melancholy as the tourist’s moods swing between enjoyment of the city’s sights and sounds (including automobile horns in the Place de la Concorde) and homesickness for his native land. The work’s rich sound and exuberant spirits proved irresistible to audiences, but critics differed over the work’s merits. On the other hand, Of Thee I Sing (1931) pleased critics and audiences alike. A musical for which George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind wrote the book and the Gershwin brothers the music, it won a Pulitzer Prize for drama.

In 1929, Gershwin had begun work on an operatic version of the play Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn (1914; The Dybbuk) by Szymon Ansky. The play is based on a Jewish folktale, and the opera would have been Gershwin’s only overtly Jewish work, but he abandoned the project when the rights were assigned to another composer. Three years later, however, he signed a contract to turn DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy (1925) into an opera. The resulting work, Porgy and Bess (1935), came to be recognized as his masterpiece.

Gershwin clearly enjoyed the wealth and fame he had earned, and he had always been known for his emotional and physical vitality. In early 1937, however, he began to suffer from headaches, depression, and lapses of memory. His condition worsened quickly, and he fell into a coma in early July. An emergency operation revealed the presence of a brain tumor, and he died without regaining consciousness.

Significance

Although the United States had produced many distinguished composers, most had studied in Europe. Gershwin, on the other hand, learned to write music in his native land, and while he was thoroughly familiar with European music, old and new, he viewed it from an American perspective. Whether writing for the theater, the concert hall, or the opera house, he made extensive use of the ethnically rich mixture of musical styles he grew up hearing on the streets of New York City, including the African American music known as jazz. His works were distinguished by jaunty rhythms, lilting melodies, and infectious good humor, and struck listeners as uniquely American. When Gershwin died, suddenly and unexpectedly, he was mourned by friends and strangers alike. Even the normally reserved American novelist John O’Hara felt the loss deeply, writing a few years later, “George died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe that if I don’t want to.”

Bibliography

Hamm, Charles. “Towards a New Reading of Gershwin.” In The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin, edited by Wayne Joseph Schneider. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Argues that Gershwin’s reputation has suffered because his works do not fit conveniently into the standard categories devised for European orchestral music.

Hyland, William George. George Gershwin: A New Biography. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Concise, sympathetic biography written for readers without a background in music. Concludes with an analysis of Gershwin’s growing reputation.

Pollack, Howard. George Gershwin: His Life and Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Exhaustive critical biography devoting extensive detail to the structure and the composition of Gershwin’s works.

Rimler, Walter. George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Well-illustrated biography drawing upon Gershwin’s words and accounts by his contemporaries.

Rosenberg, Deena Ruth. Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Accessible analysis of the dozens of musicals and hundreds of songs that the brothers produced together.

Wyatt, Robert, and John Andrew Johnson, eds. The George Gershwin Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Generous collection of letters, articles, reviews, and reminiscences by Gershwin and others.