1898–1937 · United States · 20th century
George Gershwin (1898–1937) was an American composer and pianist. He wrote jazz, popular and classical music: songs and musicals for Broadway, Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris and the opera Porgy and Bess. Players find him interesting for joining jazz and classical styles, and the site carries his piece Rialto Ripples.
George Gershwin was born on 26 September 1898 in Brooklyn, a borough of New York, into a Jewish immigrant family that had come from the Russian Empire. His birth certificate names him Jacob Gershwine; his parents called him Yakov, but the name George soon stuck. He settled on the spelling Gershwin once he was working as a professional musician, and the rest of the family followed him.
His father, Morris Gershwin, went to America because he did not want to do compulsory military service. His mother, Roza Bruskina, had settled in New York a few years earlier. They married on 21 July 1895. Their eldest son, Ira, was born on 6 December 1896, and George was the second of four children; his brother Arthur and sister Frances were born later.
His father gave up his earlier job and went into business. Some of his ventures failed, and the family then went through hard times. The family moved often: by 1917 about thirty times. George and Ira often went to the local Yiddish theatres, and George sometimes appeared on stage there as an extra.
He grew up like many children in New York's crowded tenement districts, running about with friends and roller-skating. Music did not interest him until he heard a young violinist play, and the playing captivated him. Around then a piano arrived in the house, bought for Ira, but his parents were surprised, and Ira relieved, to find that George was the one who kept returning to it.
George spent roughly two years with a succession of piano teachers. He was then introduced to Charles Hambitzer, who remained his mentor up to the time of his death in 1918. Hambitzer taught Gershwin conventional piano technique, opened up the European classical tradition to him and urged him to go to orchestral concerts. Gershwin studied harmony with Rubin Goldmark.
In the first half of the 1910s Gershwin began working for the New York music publisher Jerome H. Remick. His first published song appeared in 1916 and was called “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em”. The public received it without much enthusiasm, but it brought him to the attention of several Broadway producers and directors of the day. Sigmund Romberg, for example, included his music in his revue The Passing Show of 1916. At that time Gershwin was also studying harmony and orchestration and earning extra money as a restaurant pianist.
From 1916 Gershwin recorded and arranged music for companies that made rolls for mechanical pianos, making dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rolls, some signed with his own name and others with assumed ones. For a short time he also worked in vaudeville as pianist to Nora Bayes and Louise Dresser. In 1917 Rialto Ripples, a novelty rag of his, achieved commercial success.
In 1918 and 1919 a great deal of Gershwin’s music was heard on Broadway. Al Jolson heard Swanee when Gershwin played it at a party and chose to include it in his shows; it was an overwhelming success, and Jolson recorded it many times and sang it in several films. The 1919 production La La Lucille was based entirely on Gershwin’s compositions.
Between 1920 and 1924 Gershwin wrote several dozen numbers for the revue George White’s Scandals. In 1922, together with Buddy DeSylva, he created Blue Monday, a one-act jazz opera set in Harlem, which is regarded as a forerunner of Porgy and Bess. After its premiere Gershwin was invited to join Paul Whiteman’s jazz band as a composer.
For Whiteman’s orchestra, in 1924, Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue, a work for piano with orchestra. Ferde Grofé orchestrated it, and Whiteman’s band gave the first performance in New York. It became Gershwin’s most popular work. A year later came his Concerto in F, also for piano and orchestra.
In the same year, 1924, George and Ira produced the musical Lady, Be Good, the composer’s first real success on Broadway. Ira wrote all the lyrics. The show contained the future standards Fascinating Rhythm and Oh, Lady Be Good! For the next decade the brothers worked very productively, and their shows were in great demand on Broadway.
Funny Face (1927) and Oh, Kay! (1926) were their next stage hits, and Strike Up the Band was staged in 1927 and again in 1930. In 1929 the brothers created Show Girl, and Girl Crazy came the following year: Ginger Rogers sang “Embraceable You” in it, and “I Got Rhythm” was heard there too. Of Thee I Sing (1931) became the first musical stage work to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
In Paris Gershwin asked Nadia Boulanger to take him as a pupil. She refused: she knew his music and feared that a rigorous schooling would harm his own style. Maurice Ravel, whom he had also approached, answered with similar concerns. Gershwin then made the same request of Jacques Ibert, who also declined.
It was there that he wrote his tone poem An American in Paris. It was first performed at Carnegie Hall on 13 December 1928. The reviews were mixed, but the piece soon took a firm place in concert programmes on both sides of the Atlantic. Critics said Gershwin’s Concerto in F was closer to Debussy than to jazz, but this did not stop him from exploring French styles.
The largest and most ambitious work of Gershwin’s career was the “folk” opera Porgy and Bess (1935), based on the novel by DuBose Heyward, who also took part in writing the libretto. The composer worked on it with Ira. In the summer of 1934 Heyward invited Gershwin to Folly Island in South Carolina, and it was there that the composer found his inspiration for the music. At first Porgy and Bess was not a commercial success, and critics could not decide whether it was an opera or an ambitious Broadway musical. It was later regarded as among the most significant American operas of the twentieth century, and it includes the hit Summertime.
After the commercial failure of the opera Gershwin moved to Hollywood. There he became friends with Arnold Schoenberg and played tennis with him. In 1936 RKO Pictures commissioned from him the score for Shall We Dance, a film with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The score combines ballet and jazz in a fresh way and lasts more than an hour, and writing and orchestrating it occupied him for several months. George and Ira also provided songs for A Damsel in Distress (released in 1937, like Shall We Dance) and for part of The Goldwyn Follies.
In early 1937 Gershwin began to suffer from severe headaches and to imagine, again and again, the smell of burning rubber. On 11 February 1937 he played his Concerto in F in San Francisco with the city’s symphony orchestra, conducted by Pierre Monteux, and during the performance he had trouble with coordination and blackouts. For a long time the doctors could not work out the cause of his condition. On 9 July 1937 he suddenly became very ill and collapsed, and he was taken to a hospital. A brain tumour was suspected, and the operation to remove it was carried out in the early hours of 11 July 1937, and that morning Gershwin died in Hollywood at the age of 38, without regaining consciousness.
The composer was buried in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, at Westchester Hills. A concert in his memory took place at the Hollywood Bowl on 8 September 1937; there Otto Klemperer conducted the second of the Three Preludes by Gershwin, in his own orchestration. The film about the composer, Rhapsody in Blue, came out in 1945. In 1983 the Uris Theatre on Broadway took the name Gershwin Theatre, and in 1985 George and Ira were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. The annual Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, which bears their name, was established by the Library of Congress in 2007.
Gershwin’s music spans jazz, popular and classical styles. He is remembered above all for songs such as Swanee and Fascinating Rhythm, for Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, for the Piano Concerto, for standards like Embraceable You and I Got Rhythm, and for Porgy and Bess, an opera that includes the song Summertime. He joined the rhythms and tonality of the jazz he met on Tin Pan Alley to the popular songs of his day, and in this way made jazz part of the musical mainstream.
For piano and orchestra Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue (1924), the Concerto in F (1925), the Second Rhapsody (1931), originally titled Rhapsody in Rivets, and the Variations on “I Got Rhythm” (1934). Among his orchestral pieces are the Cuban Overture (1932), originally titled Rumba, and the suite Catfish Row (1936), drawn from the music of Porgy and Bess. For solo piano there are the Three Preludes and the collection George Gershwin’s Song-book (1932), with arrangements of 18 songs.
The brothers’ three film scores gave many hits that later became standards, among them “Nice Work If You Can Get It” and “A Foggy Day” (A Damsel in Distress), “Love Is Here to Stay” (The Goldwyn Follies), and “They All Laughed”, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (Shall We Dance). His music has more than once been reworked for film and television, and many pieces became jazz standards.
In 1970 the New York City Ballet gave the premiere of Who Cares?, a ballet by George Balanchine set to sixteen Gershwin songs, orchestrated by Hershy Kay. Woody Allen’s film Manhattan (1979) uses nothing but Gershwin on its soundtrack, from Rhapsody in Blue to “Love Is Sweeping the Country” and “But Not for Me”.
Rodney Greenberg writes that Gershwin’s music blends bluesy and ragtime turns, Spanish rhythms and the cadences of Jewish chant, while its classical side draws on the harmony of Chopin, Liszt and Debussy. Gershwin took a good deal from French composers active at the start of the twentieth century: the orchestration of his symphonic works often resembles Ravel’s, and Ravel’s two piano concertos show Gershwin’s influence. From 1932 to 1936 Gershwin studied composition with Joseph Schillinger, who gave him a method of composing.
For those who want to start small, the site has Rialto Ripples, a rag from 1917 that was a commercial success. In the catalogue it is marked at the “Medium+” level and is given in a version for solo guitar.