George Gershwin

• 1. Introduction

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  George Gershwin's last words were "Fred Astaire." He spoke them on the night of the 9th of July 1937, as he collapsed in a borrowed house in Beverly Hills, working on the score of The Goldwyn Follies. He was 38. Two days later, in the early hours of Sunday the 11th of July 1937, he died at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles after surgeons removed a large brain tumor. His friend John O'Hara put the loss this way: "George Gershwin died on the 11th of July 1937, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to." He was born Jacob Gershwine on the 26th of September 1898, in a second-floor apartment on Snediker Avenue in Brooklyn. He cared nothing for music until he was ten. How did a tenement boy who roller-skated through the streets become, by one newspaper's reckoning, the wealthiest composer who ever lived? How did he braid jazz and the concert hall together so tightly that critics could never agree which one he belonged to? And why did two of Europe's most celebrated composers turn him away as a student, each insisting he was already too good to teach?

• 2. A Brooklyn Inheritance

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  Jakov Gershovitz, George's paternal grandfather, served 25 years as a mechanic for the Imperial Russian Army to earn the right of free travel and residence as a Jew. Born in Odessa, he finally retired near Saint Petersburg. His son Moishe, a leather cutter for women's shoes, met Roza Bruskina in Vilna, where her father worked as a furrier. Rising anti-Jewish sentiment pushed Roza and her family to New York, where she changed her name to Rose. Moishe, facing compulsory military service if he stayed in Russia, arrived in America on the 14th of August 1890 and became Morris. He worked as a foreman in a women's shoe factory and married Rose on the 21st of July 1895. Their first child, Ira, was born on the 6th of December 1896. George followed in 1898, named for his grandfather and, against American custom, given no middle name. His birth certificate reads Jacob Gershwine, the surname pronounced "Gershvin" in the Yiddish-speaking community. Two more children came, Arthur in 1900 and Frances in 1906. The family moved often, since Morris changed homes with each new business venture, and the children grew up mostly in the Yiddish Theater District. There George sometimes stepped onstage as an extra, never guessing the instrument that would change him sat waiting in his own apartment.

• 3. The Piano That Was Ira's

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  In 1908, a ten-year-old George heard his friend Maxie Rosenzweig play a violin recital, and the sound captivated him. His parents had bought a piano meant for his older brother Ira. To everyone's surprise, and to Ira's relief, it was George who claimed it. He studied with various teachers for about two years before Jack Miller, pianist in the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra, introduced him around 1913 to Charles Hambitzer. Until his death in 1918, Hambitzer remained Gershwin's mentor, teaching him piano technique, opening the European classical tradition to him, and urging him to attend orchestral concerts. The household held more than one musician. His sister Frances was the first in the family to earn a living through musical talent, though she married young, turned to homemaking, and later took up painting instead. Arthur, too, became a composer of songs, musicals, and short piano pieces. George alone would carry the family name onto the world's concert stages, but first he would have to leave school for a job that paid fifty cents a song.

• 4. Tin Pan Alley

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  In 1913, at fifteen, Gershwin left school to work as a "song plugger" on Tin Pan Alley, earning $15 a week from Jerome H. Remick and Company. His first published song, in 1916, carried the title "When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em," and it earned the seventeen-year-old fifty cents. That same year he began recording and arranging for the Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls. He produced dozens, perhaps hundreds, of rolls under his own name and pseudonyms such as Fred Murtha and Bert Wynn. His first song on Broadway, "Making of a Girl," was written in 1916 with Sigmund Romberg for The Passing Show of 1916. His 1917 novelty rag "Rialto Ripples" sold well. Alongside the music, he and Ira took over management of the well-known gay bathhouse Lafayette Baths. The breakthrough came in 1919 with "Swanee," lyrics by Irving Caesar. The Broadway star Al Jolson heard Gershwin play it at a party and put it into one of his own shows, turning a party piece into a national hit.

• 5. Brothers And Collaborators

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  In 1924, George and Ira Gershwin wrote the stage comedy Lady Be Good, which gave the world "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Oh, Lady Be Good!" They followed with Oh, Kay! in 1926, Funny Face in 1927, and Strike Up the Band in 1927 and 1930. The 1930 show Girl Crazy introduced "Embraceable You," sung by Ginger Rogers, and "I Got Rhythm." In 1931, Of Thee I Sing became the first musical comedy to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the prize going to George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin. The collaborators reached well beyond Ira. In the late 1910s Gershwin met songwriter and music director William Daly, who worked on Piccadilly to Broadway in 1920, For Goodness Sake in 1922, and Our Nell in 1923, and who became a frequent arranger, orchestrator, and source of musical advice. From the early 1920s Gershwin worked with lyricist Buddy DeSylva, and in 1922 the two made the experimental one-act jazz opera Blue Monday, set in Harlem. That small Harlem experiment is widely seen as a forerunner to the work that would consume him a decade later.

• 6. Crossing The Barriers

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  In 1924, Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue for orchestra and piano. Ferde Grofé orchestrated it, and Paul Whiteman's Concert Band premiered it in New York. It became his most popular work and set his signature style, blending jazz and classical music. In the mid-1920s he stayed briefly in Paris and applied to study composition with the celebrated Nadia Boulanger. She turned him down, afraid that rigorous classical study would ruin his jazz-influenced style. Maurice Ravel raised similar objections when Gershwin asked to study with him. While in Paris he wrote the tone poem An American in Paris, which drew mixed reviews at its first performance at Carnegie Hall on the 13th of December 1928 before entering the standard repertoire. Gershwin spent the summer of 1934 on South Carolina's Folly Island, invited by DuBose Heyward, author of the novel Porgy. There he found the music for his opera Porgy and Bess, written with Ira and Heyward and introduced in 1935. The work baffled the reviewers. As theater historian Robert Kimball put it, "It crossed the barriers. It wasn't a musical work per se, and it wasn't a drama per se." Initially a commercial failure, it came to be regarded as one of the most important American operas of the 20th century.

• 7. A First-Rate Gershwin

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  "Why be a second-rate Ravel, when you are a first-rate Gershwin?" Ravel reportedly said during Gershwin's 1928 visit to France. Arnold Schoenberg, with whom Gershwin later played tennis in Hollywood, refused him lessons in nearly the same spirit: "I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you're such a good Gershwin already." The teaching he did accept came from Russian Joseph Schillinger between 1932 and 1936, who gave him a method of composition. Critics liked to trace his lines elsewhere. His Concerto in F was faulted for owing more to Debussy than to jazz, a comparison that did not deter him. Rodney Greenberg described the mixture in his music as the flattened notes and syncopations of African-American blues and ragtime, Hispanic rhythms, the aching cadences of Hebrew chant, and harmonies reaching from Chopin and Liszt to Debussy. Gershwin was especially struck by Alban Berg, who handed him a score of the Lyric Suite, and he attended the American premiere of Berg's Wozzeck under Leopold Stokowski in 1931. He rarely explained himself, but once said, "true music must reflect the thought and aspirations of the people and time. My people are Americans. My time is today."

• 8. The Burning Rubber

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  As early as February 1934, Gershwin said he smelled burning garbage at the Detroit railway station, though those with him smelled nothing. Early in 1937 came blinding headaches and the recurring impression that he smelled burning rubber. On the 11th of February 1937, performing his Piano Concerto in F with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux, he suffered coordination problems and blackouts. He was living with Ira and Ira's wife Leonore in Beverly Hills. Leonore, disturbed by his mood swings and his inability to eat without spilling food, suspected mental illness and had him moved to lyricist Yip Harburg's nearby quarters, in the care of his valet Paul Mueller. When he collapsed in Harburg's house, doctors finally suspected a brain tumor. The race to save him was extraordinary. Leonore called Emil Mosbacher, who reached retired neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing in Boston. Cushing recommended Walter Dandy, then fishing on the Chesapeake Bay with Maryland's governor Harry Nice. A Coast Guard cutter was sent to find the governor's yacht, and a chartered plane flew Dandy toward Newark. Before he could arrive, surgeons removed the tumor, believed to be a glioblastoma, and Gershwin died that morning. He was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, and on the 8th of September 1937 a memorial concert at the Hollywood Bowl saw Otto Klemperer conduct his own orchestration of the second of Gershwin's Three Preludes.

  Gershwin died intestate, and his estate passed to his mother. It still collects royalties on his post-Rhapsody in Blue work and backed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which added 20 years to U.S. protection. The copyrights on his solo works expired at the end of 2007 in the European Union under its life-plus-70-years rule, and his pre-1925 work entered the U.S. public domain on the 1st of January 2020. His private life left its own mark on the music. He had a ten-year affair with composer Kay Swift, whom he often consulted, and the 1926 musical Oh, Kay! was named for her. Her granddaughter, Katharine Weber, suggested they never married because George's mother Rose was "unhappy that Kay Swift wasn't Jewish." After his death Swift arranged and transcribed his music and collaborated with Ira. The honors have not stopped. Broadway's Uris Theatre was renamed the Gershwin Theatre in 1983, and in 2007 the Library of Congress created the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarding the first to Paul Simon on the 1st of March 2007. In 1998 a special Pulitzer Prize marked the centennial of his birth, honoring the boy from Snediker Avenue who once spent more time at his brother's piano than anyone expected.