A child of immigrant Brooklyn
George Gershwin was born on 26 September 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, the second son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His birth was registered under the name Jacob Gershwine, the family surname pronounced in the Yiddish manner of the immigrant neighbourhoods where he grew up. His parents, Morris and Rose, had come from the Russian Empire seeking a freer and safer life, and the family moved frequently around the Lower East Side and Brooklyn as his father tried one small business after another. It was not a musical household, and nothing in George's early years suggested a future composer. He was a restless, street-wise boy more interested in roller-skating and stickball than in study. Yet the city around him was alive with sound, the songs of vaudeville, the music of synagogue and street, ragtime drifting from open windows, and that immigrant, polyglot New York would become the raw material from which Gershwin built an entirely new kind of American music.
A piano arrives
The turning point came around 1910, when the family acquired a second-hand upright piano, intended for George's older brother Ira. To everyone's surprise it was George who took to it, revealing a fluency that seemed to have been waiting for an instrument. He began formal lessons and eventually found a serious and sympathetic teacher in Charles Hambitzer, who introduced him to the European classical repertoire and recognised an unusual talent; Hambitzer is said to have been so impressed that he would not always charge for lessons. Gershwin absorbed everything, classical and popular alike, with an appetite that would never leave him. At fifteen he left school to work as a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley, the New York music-publishing district, demonstrating new songs to performers and customers for hours each day. It was an intense, unglamorous education in what made a melody catch, and it sharpened instincts that no conservatory could have taught him.
From song-plugger to songwriter
Gershwin was not content to sell other people's songs; he wanted to write his own. He began placing numbers in shows and revues, and in 1919 his song Swanee, performed by the popular entertainer Al Jolson, became a runaway success, selling enormous quantities of records and sheet music. Almost overnight Gershwin was a name. Through the 1920s he turned out a steady stream of songs and stage scores, and a crucial partnership took shape with his brother Ira, a witty and meticulous lyricist whose words fitted George's tunes with rare precision. Together the Gershwin brothers became one of the great songwriting teams of the American theatre, producing songs that combined sophistication with directness and an unmistakable rhythmic snap. George worked at extraordinary speed and with evident joy, equally at home at a Broadway piano and a Manhattan party. Yet even amid this success he was reaching for something larger than the popular song could hold.
Rhapsody in Blue
That larger ambition crystallised in 1924. The bandleader Paul Whiteman announced a concert billed as An Experiment in Modern Music, and Gershwin agreed, on short notice, to contribute a substantial new work for piano and orchestra. The result was Rhapsody in Blue, premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York on 12 February 1924, with Gershwin himself at the piano and Whiteman conducting. From its famous opening clarinet wail, the piece fused the harmonies and gestures of the concert hall with the rhythms and blue notes of jazz, and it electrified its audience, which reportedly included some of the most celebrated classical musicians of the day. Rhapsody in Blue made Gershwin internationally famous and announced, more powerfully than any manifesto, that American popular idioms could carry serious musical weight. It remains one of the most recognisable pieces of music ever written, a portrait in sound of the energy and optimism of the modern city.
Reaching toward the concert hall
Rhapsody in Blue opened a path that Gershwin pursued with determination for the rest of his life. He composed the Concerto in F, a full-scale piano concerto, and in 1928 produced An American in Paris, a vivid orchestral tone poem inspired by a European trip, complete with the sound of Parisian taxi horns; it was first performed in New York that December under Walter Damrosch. Eager to deepen his technique, Gershwin sought lessons from established figures and famously approached the French composers of the day. The story is often told that Maurice Ravel admired him, and that Nadia Boulanger declined to teach him, reportedly fearing that formal training might dampen the originality of his natural gift. Whether or not such advice was decisive, Gershwin kept studying throughout his career, taking lessons and filling notebooks. He never accepted the idea that popular success and serious craft were opposites, and his concert works steadily grew in scope and confidence.
Porgy and Bess
Gershwin's most ambitious undertaking was an opera. He had long been drawn to DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy, set among African American residents of the fictional Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, and he worked closely with Heyward and with Ira to fashion a libretto. To prepare, Gershwin spent time in the South absorbing the music and speech of the Gullah communities of the Carolina coast. The result, Porgy and Bess, opened in Boston on 30 September 1935 and reached Broadway in October that year. Gershwin called it a folk opera and wrote his own spirituals and songs rather than borrowing existing ones, producing numbers, among them Summertime, that have entered the permanent fabric of American music. The work was performed by a cast of classically trained African American singers, a deliberate and significant choice. Its initial reception was mixed and its commercial return modest, and it has since prompted serious discussion about the representation of Black life by white creators.
A career cut short
After Porgy and Bess, Gershwin and Ira moved to Hollywood to write for film, contributing songs to several pictures and finding the work rewarding. By early 1937, however, Gershwin began to suffer headaches, dizziness and disturbing episodes, sometimes accompanied by the sensation of a strange smell. For a time these symptoms were not correctly understood. His condition deteriorated rapidly that summer, and he collapsed; doctors discovered a malignant brain tumour. George Gershwin died in Hollywood on 11 July 1937, following surgery, at the age of thirty-eight. He had not quite reached his thirty-ninth birthday. He was at the height of his creative powers, still composing, still studying, still reaching toward new forms. The suddenness of his death stunned the musical world on both sides of the Atlantic and left an unmistakable sense of a great career interrupted in mid-sentence, its fullest possibilities forever unknown.
The man behind the music
Those who knew Gershwin described a man of immense vitality, charm and self-assurance, happiest at the piano in a room full of people. He loved to play his own music for friends and would do so for hours, and his confidence occasionally struck observers as vanity, though it rarely seemed to wound. He was a passionate collector of modern art and an amateur painter of genuine ability. Beneath the social brilliance lay a serious and self-critical artist who never stopped trying to learn, conscious of the gaps in his formal training and determined to close them. His partnership with Ira was both professional and deeply fraternal, a lifelong collaboration of complementary temperaments. Gershwin's Jewish immigrant background, his ear shaped by the synagogue, the theatre and the street, was woven through his music, and he understood his art as fundamentally American, the voice of a particular people in a particular time.
A new American sound
Gershwin's central achievement was to dissolve the supposed boundary between popular and serious music. Before him, jazz and the Broadway song were widely regarded as light entertainment, separate from the dignified world of the concert hall. Gershwin treated the popular idioms of his country, its blues, ragtime, jazz rhythms and Tin Pan Alley craft, as legitimate materials for ambitious art, and he did so with such melodic generosity that audiences followed him gladly. He gave the United States a recognisably national musical voice at a moment when American composers were searching for one. He showed that sophistication need not be solemn and that accessibility need not be shallow. His songs, written mostly with Ira, became standards performed by generations of jazz and popular musicians, endlessly reinterpreted because their harmonic structures invited improvisation and reinvention.
Impact and legacy
Nearly a century after his death, George Gershwin's music is everywhere. Rhapsody in Blue is among the most performed and instantly recognised concert works of the twentieth century, used in films, advertisements and ceremonies, a kind of musical shorthand for American modernity. Porgy and Bess, once doubted as neither true opera nor true musical, is now staged by major opera houses around the world and is widely regarded as a landmark of American theatre, while songs such as Summertime have been recorded thousands of times. The Gershwin songbook remains foundational to jazz, a body of material that musicians return to in every generation. Beyond specific works, Gershwin's example reshaped expectations: he made it possible to imagine a serious American concert music rooted in vernacular sources, and countless later composers built on that freedom. From an immigrant family in Brooklyn, in fewer than forty years, he gave his adopted country some of the music by which it knows itself.
Sources & further reading
George Gershwin, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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