- Person
- George Gershwin
- Lived
- 1898–1937
- Field
- Music
- From
- American
The story
George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershwine in Brooklyn in 1898, the son of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. He left school to work as a song plugger in Tin Pan Alley and was soon writing hit songs for Broadway. In 1922 he wrote a short jazz opera, Blue Monday, which greatly impressed the bandleader Paul Whiteman.
After an experimental concert mixing classical music and jazz in November 1923, Whiteman planned a more ambitious event to show that jazz could be serious music, and he asked Gershwin for a concerto-like piece. Gershwin declined, saying there was not enough time. Then, on 4 January 1924, Ira read him a newspaper item announcing that George was already at work on a jazz concerto for Whiteman. Whiteman persuaded him to go ahead.
With only five weeks to go, Gershwin set to work, beginning on 7 January. On a train journey to Boston, he later said, he heard the whole construction of the piece in his head, as a musical kaleidoscope of America, of its melting pot and its metropolitan madness. Ira suggested the title after seeing paintings by Whistler. Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé finished the orchestration on 4 February, eight days before the concert.
At a rehearsal, Whiteman's clarinettist Ross Gorman played the opening scale as a swooping, playful glissando as a joke; Gershwin loved it and asked him to keep it, with as much of a wail as possible. That opening is now as recognisable to concert audiences as the start of Beethoven's Fifth.
The piece premiered on 12 February 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York, with Gershwin at the piano, in a concert titled An Experiment in Modern Music. Much of the long programme had bored the audience, but the Rhapsody brought tumultuous applause. Gershwin partly improvised his solo, and only wrote it down afterwards. Critics were divided, but by the end of 1927 Whiteman's band had played it about 84 times and its recording had sold a million copies.
It became one of the most popular of all concert works and defined the Jazz Age. Gershwin went on to write the Concerto in F, An American in Paris and the opera Porgy and Bess.
Why it matters
Rhapsody in Blue showed that American popular music and the classical tradition could enrich each other, opening the door for generations of composers.
About George Gershwin
Composer of "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Porgy and Bess"; bridged jazz and classical, defining American 20th-century music.
More about George Gershwin
- George Gershwin's An American in Paris painted a cityGeorge Gershwin wrote his tone poem An American in Paris in 1928 after a stay in Paris, where Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel declined to teach him for fear of spoiling his style.
- George Gershwin's Concerto in F joined the classical canonGeorge Gershwin followed Rhapsody in Blue with his Piano Concerto in F in 1925, a work that has become an established part of the classical repertoire.
- George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess became an American classicGeorge Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, written for a cast of classically trained African American singers, is now staged by opera houses around the world.
Sources
- Rhapsody in Blue Wikipedia
- George Gershwin Wikipedia
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