When George Gershwin's "An American in Paris" got its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1928, Oscar Thompson, music critic for the New York Evening Post, was not impressed. Complaining of its "blunt banality and ballyhoo vulgarity," Thompson predicted the piece would soon be forgotten.
Although he admitted that its opening-night audience found the work to be "good fun," Thompson dismissed Gershwin's attempt to bring the jazz idiom into symphonic music as a mere fad. "To conceive of a symphonic audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty years from now, when whoopee is longer even a word, is another matter," he sniffed.
Oh, Oscar. How wrong you were.
Seven decades have passed since that Carnegie Hall debut, and "An American in Paris" shows no sign of fading from memory. Indeed, as America gears up to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the composer's birth this Saturday, Gershwin's musical legacy seems more vital than ever.
It isn't just that Gershwin's orchestral works -- "Rhapsody in Blue," "Piano Concerto in F," "An American in Paris" and others -- are now basic repertory, or that "Porgy and Bess" is considered the greatest of all American operas. What makes Gershwin such a singular talent is that his legacy looms equally large in popular music, where his songs and stage shows have had an enduring impact.
Amazingly, he managed to conquer both worlds in a career that lasted less than two decades. He completed his first Broadway score in 1919, when he was just 20 years old; in 1937, two years after the premiere of "Porgy and Bess," he was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. Emergency surgery was performed, but within days, the 38-year-old composer was dead.
Naturally, Gershwin's birthday is being celebrated with galas galore. There will be orchestral tributes everywhere, from Carnegie Hall to the Kennedy Center (where Michael Tilson Thomas will conduct "An American in Paris," scenes from "Porgy and Bess," and other pieces on Saturday), as well as a host of lectures and exhibits (including "Kickin' the Clouds Away," which opens Thursday at the Peabody Archives' Galleria Piccola). All in all, there's ample evidence of Gershwin's permanent place in the classical repertoire.
But the symphony hall isn't the only place Gershwin's music may be heard. His earliest fame came as a Broadway composer, and he grew rich off the success of such tunefully ingenious titles as "Strike Up the Band," "Someone To Watch Over Me" and "Embraceable You," all of which are considered standards today.
His musicals, once deemed frothy and frivolous, have recently returned to favor. Not only are revivals of "Girl Crazy" and "Of Thee I Sing" hitting the boards on a regular basis, but productions of "Lady, Be Good," "Oh, Kay!" and "Pardon My English," drawn from material from the Gershwin archives, have returned these shows to the repertoire.
Cabaret singers invariably include a number of his songs in their arsenal; some, like Michael Feinstein, even do whole evenings of Gershwin. But jazz musicians are also big Gershwin fans, in part because he had such a firm grasp on the jazz vernacular, but mainly because tunes like "I Got Rhythm" are so well-suited to improvisation. (The Baltimore Jazz Orchestra with Ethel Ennis will offer an all-Gershwin evening at the Miriam Friedberg Concert Hall tomorrow.)
Even rock stars have recognized how great these songs are. Gershwin songs have been recorded by everyone from Janis Joplin to Al Green to Sting. There's also a new benefit album out, called "Red, Hot and Rhapsody," that offers versions of Gershwin songs by artists ranging from soul singer Bobby Womack to the trip-hop band Morcheeba.
Why have Gershwin's songs had such enduring appeal? Probably because they draw from such a broad range of influences while retaining an utterly singular sense of voice.
"He's really the first crossover figure," says jazz musician Marcus Roberts, a conservatory-trained pianist who has not only performed "Rhapsody in Blue" and the Concerto in F, but has also improvised on many Gershwin standards. "He had a pop appeal to a big, general public that carried over into film and a lot of other things.
"But he also was somebody who wanted to be taken seriously by the classical world. He wanted to have an impact on as many things as he could."
Certainly, Gershwin had a solid grounding in popular music. Born Jacob Gershvin on Sept. 26, 1898, in New York City, he was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, a background he shared with such Tin Pan Alley songwriters as Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. He was something of a prodigy, learning enough piano in three years to get a job at 15 as a song-plugger with the music publisher Jerome H. Remick & Co.
Before long, he had gone from trying to sell other people's songs to writing his own, and by the early 1920s he had built a name both as a pop tunesmith -- his earliest success, "Swanee," was a huge hit for Al Jolson -- and Broadway composer.
There's no denying that Gershwin totally understood the popular song form. As a melodicist, his work for Broadway and Hollywood clearly ranks with the best of Berlin, Kern and Cole Porter.
Songs like "The Man I Love" or "They Can't Take That Away from Me" are blessed with tunes that would tempt any listener to hum along. Even better, almost anyone can carry these tunes.
"Gershwin's songs -- without speaking about 'Porgy and Bess' -- are indeed written very well for the voice," says Audra McDonald (who will be performing excerpts from "Porgy and Bess" at the Kennedy Center Saturday with Tilson Thomas). "Certainly, Gershwin was much easier for me to sing than some early [Hugo] Wolff songs I sang in college."
But Gershwin's greatest genius can be found in what lay below the melody, in the harmonic structure of his songs. Where most of the songwriters of his day were content to write harmonies that merely supported the verse and chorus, Gershwin's chord structures had an extra degree of dynamism, adding a sort of melodic momentum to the song.
Perhaps the ultimate example of this is "I Got Rhythm," a song whose harmonic structure is so brilliant that is has become as much a jazz archetype as the 12-bar blues.
"It ultimately comes down to the way that the chords move from one to another and how the melody ties the chords together," says Roberts. "That's really the essence of what makes a song good material for improvisation. The rhythm, the harmony and the melody converge to produce this tension that has tremendous possibility."
That connection to jazz is significant. Although Gershwin made a lot of money on Broadway (and, later, in Hollywood), his interest in pop song forms wasn't restricted to the musical theater. He was also fascinated by jazz and blues. While in New York, he studied stride piano with James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith and played rent parties with Fats Waller. When working on "Porgy and Bess," he traveled to South Carolina to gain $l first-hand experience of the blues and the people who sang it.
"Gershwin was obviously somebody who knew the value of information from a cultural source," says Roberts. "He clearly had a mission of investigating the blues and a lot of the people who were, in his perception, involved in its development."
Roberts thinks Gershwin's greatest genius was in recognizing the potential of American folk forms like jazz and blues. "What, in my opinion, he wanted to do was to organize that sound, which he knew was unique," he says.
"As Dvorak had pointed out to the American cultural community in 1893, we already had folk material to draw from. We don't really need to borrow it [from Europe]. Gershwin keyed in on that and wanted to take that folk material and just play around with it, within different musical structures."
But it would be wrong to suggest that Gershwin merely gussied up his sources, taking directly from jazz and blues and dressing them in the respectability of European composition.
Gershwin's music may have been informed by jazz and blues, but he was never guilty of out-and-out appropriation; his melodic ideas were always too ingenious and individual to have been the work of anyone other than George Gershwin.
Compare "Rhapsody in Blue" with a work like Darius Milhaud's "Le Creation du Monde," and it's easy to hear the difference. Milhaud's jazz touches are stiff and inert, more the work of a fan who wanted to share his enthusiasm for New Orleans jazz than of a musician who truly understood the milieu. By contrast, Gershwin's "Rhapsody" is an entity unto itself, one that evokes the fiery excitement of an improvising jazz band, but without trying to imitate it. Instead, what we're given is a sort of panoramic view of this musical new world, much as Brahms offered when he wove Magyar folk themes into his "Hungarian Rhapsody."
As Roberts puts it, "He definitely had an agenda of his own." Moreover, it was the personal nature of that vision that made his music so singular.
Before his death, Gershwin was contemplating a number of ambitious works, including a ballet, to have been called "Swing Symphony," and an opera based on Jewish folklore, called "The Dybbuk." We can only wonder how much more he might have achieved had he lived longer and written more.
Gershwin concerts
What: Gershwin Centenary Concert featuring Ethel Ennis and the Baltimore Jazz Orchestra
When: Wednesday, 8 p.m.
Where: Miriam Friedberg Concert Hall, Peabody Institute, 1 E. Mount Vernon Place
Tickets: $22; $11 for seniors, $8 with student ID
' Call: 410-659-8134
What: 100th Anniversary Gershwin Birthday Celebration
When: Saturday, 5 p.m.
Where: Concert Hall at Kennedy Center, off Virginia and New Hampshire Avenues N.W., Washington
dTC Tickets: $15-$65
' Call: 202-833-9800
What: Gershwin SuperPops concert featuring harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, conducted by Marvin Hamlisch
When: 2 p.m. Oct. 1; 8 p.m. Oct. 2-3; 3 p.m. Oct. 4
Where: Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 Cathedral St.
Tickets: $20-$57
Call: 410-783-8000
Pub Date: 9/22/98