George Gershwin: an American rhapsody

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1998 by Edward Oxford

Midnight would find George Gershwin seated at his Steinay piano in pajamas and bathe, cigar clenched in his mouth, the shimmer of Manhattan as his backdrop. Such was the penthouse setting in which Gershwin best liked to compose, alone at the keyboard, seeking out yet another eloquent melody.

Gershwin expressed not only himself, but an American era, in his music--whether fast-paced, melodious, amorous, sentimental, light-hearted, or deep-toned. It sang of the Big City, the Big Boom, and the Big Depression. The years between World Wars I and II were a time of gangsters, Prohibition, millionaires, poverty, high hopes, and despair. With the nation reaching toward a new tomorrow, it was, in the words of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, "an age of miracles, an age of excess, an age of the arts."

Gershwin succeeded as both a popular songwriter and a concert-hall composer. The glittering numbers he turned out, with lyrics by brother Ira, for Broadway and Hollywood--such as "'S Wonderful," "Fascinating Rhythm," "The Man I Love," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Embraceable You," "I Got Rhythm," "They Can't Take That Away From Me," and "Our Love Is Here to Stay"--live vibrantly on.

George Gershwin powerfully influenced the future of the American musical stage with his exhilarating scores for around 30 shows, including "Lady, Be Good!"; "Oh, Kay!"; "Funny Face"; "Strike Up the Band"; "Girl Crazy"; and "Of Thee I Sing." His "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris" remain vivid concert works, and "Porgy and Bess" is a singular operatic achievement in the realm of American culture.

Gershwin's creative star was to gleam for less than two decades. Yet, he would write about 600 songs--spirited, smooth, daring, languorous, and dazzling. Some continue to rank among the century's very best. As one admirer put it, "Gershwin had that rare gift of being able to transfix in a slender song the timely, yet timeless, image of an era." For all the fanfare, Gershwin remains something of a musical enigma. No finely schooled prodigy, he was, rather, a "natural." The sophisticated personification of America's Jazz Age was born on Sept. 26, 1898, in an inauspicious two-story house in Brooklyn that rented for $14 a month. His musicality seemed to come out of nowhere. His father sometimes would listen to records on a Victrola or play tunes on a comb wrapped in tissue paper. Such was the extent of George Gershwin's musical heritage.

"His real keyboard was the pavements of New York," an acquaintance noted. Roaming amid the pushcarts, ice wagons, and trolley cars of Coney Island, Harlem, and the Bowery, the young Gershwin moved to the tempos of a tumultuous city--its jazz, blues, and ragtime.

One spring day in 1910, a piano was lifted in through the front windows of the Gershwins' second-floor flat on Second Ave. It was intended for the use of Ira, George's older brother, but Ira preferred books. George took to the upright at once, and so began one of the most remarkable musical careers in American history. For 50 cents a lesson, he studied music with a teacher who saw in him "a genius, without doubt." The youngster became acquainted with the works of Bach, Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy. Years later, Gershwin said: "Studying the piano made a good boy out of a bad boy. I was a changed person after I took it up."

Show business lured the youngster away from his classical hankerings. Gershwin stuck with high school for just a year. At the age of 15, he became the youngest song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley--that raucous row of music publishers on Manhattan's West 28th St.

Then came "Swanee," the biggest single song hit of Gershwin's career. Gershwin worked out the music and Irving Caesar the words in less than an hour. Quickly becoming identified with singer Al Jolson, arguably the top entertainer of the era, "Swanee" swept the country. At the age of 21, Gershwin seemed to be living out a script written for a happy-ending musical.

Fortuitously, Gershwin had arrived on the musical scene at the dawn of the Golden Age of Songwriting, which would flourish throughout the 1920s and 1930s. He soon joined the select circle of composers--Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Sigmund Romberg, and Harold Aden--whose songs lifted the hearts of America.

Indeed, in less than five years, Gershwin's songs proved sufficiently fresh, natural, and schmaltzy to command wide attention. His scores for the "George White's Scandals" of 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1924 helped make those frothy extravaganzas major successes. "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," the first-act finale for the 1922 revue, often is cited as the true beginning of the Gershwin style.

It was on Feb. 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall in New York that Gershwin became lastingly famous with the introduction of "Rhapsody in Blue." The afternoon's program of new composition had aimed to prove that jazz was respectable music. Gershwin thought out his creation while riding on a train: "I heard it as a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, of our metropolitan madness." He composed the piece in 20 days.