George Gershwin's An American in Paris painted a city

Person: George Gershwin
Lived: 1898–1937
Field: Music
From: American

The story

In the mid-1920s George Gershwin, the son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, was already famous for Rhapsody in Blue and his Concerto in F. He wanted to deepen his classical training. On an earlier visit to Paris he had written a short melodic fragment called Very Parisienne as a gift for his hosts, Robert and Mabel Schirmer, and it later became the seed of a new orchestral work.

When Maurice Ravel toured the United States in 1928, Gershwin attended a birthday party for him in New York, and the meeting rekindled his wish to return to Paris. He and his brother Ira soon went back. Gershwin applied to study with the renowned teacher Nadia Boulanger, but she told him she could not teach him, asking what she could give him that he did not already have. Ravel, too, is said to have declined. Both feared that rigorous classical study would spoil his distinctive jazz-influenced style.

Instead, Gershwin wrote about the experience. His tone poem An American in Paris portrays, in his words, the impressions of an American visitor strolling about the city, listening to the street noises and absorbing the French atmosphere. Gershwin said the opening was developed in a French style, in the manner of Debussy and Les Six, though the tunes were his own. A slow blues section brings on a wave of homesickness before the walking themes return. He scored it for full orchestra plus saxophones, celesta and real Parisian taxi horns, four of which he brought back for the premiere.

He finished the orchestration on 18 November 1928, less than four weeks before the first performance, given on 13 December at Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic under Walter Damrosch. Critics were divided, and Gershwin answered that it was not a Beethoven symphony but a light, humorous set of impressions. Audiences responded with genuine enthusiasm, and the piece quickly became part of the standard repertoire in Europe and the United States.

It later inspired the 1951 film An American in Paris and a Broadway musical that ran from 2015 to 2016, and it remains part of the standard orchestral repertoire on both sides of the Atlantic.