George Gershwin Bio

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George Gershwin
(1898-1937)

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"Popular songs and musical comedies as well jazz-flavored orchestral works and opera won international fame for the American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937). His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, and he grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan. As a boy, he taught himself to play hit tunes on a neighbor's piano; when he was thirteen, he began studying with a teacher who recognized his talent and introduced him to piano works ranging from Bach to Liszt to Debussy.

"At fifteen. he left school to become a pianist demonstrating new songs in the salesrooms of a music publisher; three years later, he started his won career as a songwriter, and in 1919 (at the age of twenty) he wrote La, La, Lucille, his first complete Broadway musical. The next year, his song Swanee was a tremendous hit; during the 1920s and 1930s he wrote one brilliant musical after another-including Lady, Be Good (1924), Funny Face (1927), and Of The I Sing (1931)--usually with his brother Ira as lyricist.

"Gershwin was not only a creator of the golden age of American musical theater but also a successful composer of music for the concert hall, beginning with the triumphant premiere of Rhapsody in Blue in 1924. He gave the first performance of his Concerto in F at Carnegie Hall in 1925 and traveled to Europe in the 1920s (meeting Berg in Vienna and Ravel and Stravinsky in Paris); part of his symphonic poem An American in Paris (1928) was composed on one of these visits. His most extended work is the opera Porgy and Bess (1935), which deals with the lives of poor black people in Charleston, South Carolina; it has been performed all over the world.

"Gershwin was outgoing, a sportsman, an art collector and amateur painter and irresistible to women; he was also wealthy, from royalties, concert fees, and his weekly radio show. During the last year of his life, he lived in Hollywood, were he wrote the music for several movies (and played tennis with Arnold Schoenberg in his spare time). He died of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-eight.

Rhapsody In Blue (1924)

"Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin's most famous composition, is a one-movement work for piano and orchestra. The title reflects its free, rhapsodic form and blues flavor. But it is not true jazz, though it employs jazzlike rhythms and melodies and the orchestration suggests the distinctive sounds of jazz. There are three main sections and a coda; the extended piano solos in the main sections reflect Gershwin's own dazzling pianism and his genius as an improviser.

"Rhapsody in Blue opens with a now-famous clarinet solo that stars from a low trill, climbs the scale, and then slides up to a high 'wailing' tone. The blueslike opening theme, which grows out of the clarinet slide, is marked by the syncopations so typical of Gershwin's style."

The above is from Music an Appreciation by Roger Kamien, Third Brief Edition, McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. Pages336-338.