George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, Three Preludes, 10 Songs

Description

The greatness of an artist can be assessed as his or her capability to innovate a tradition of which they are fully part, within a chain of transmission marked by clear relationships of belonging such as those between teacher and student. There are “schools” of compositional style, in which there can actually be direct discipleship, but also, more loosely, the influence of a particular musical context on a young composer, and the inspiration derived from senior musicians and their core values.
There are other artists whose greatness depends more pronouncedly on their originality. They have brought something exquisitely innovative in their times and fields of action, and without them new horizons might never have been discovered and explored. This is, probably, the case with George Gershwin.
Gershwin’s figure is that of an outsider from the very beginning. He represents the sound of America – at least at a particular time of its history – but his family had but recently emigrated from Europe; he embodies the encounter of the Western classical tradition with the new genres of American (and especially African-American) music, but he was neither a classically-trained musician, nor a Black. He is best known for works which were not entirely authored by him, and in which the arranger’s hand is at times heavy (and necessarily so). Some iconic landmarks of his music, such as the clarinet glissando which opens Rhapsody in Blue, or this piece’s very title, were not entirely of his own creation. In spite of this, nobody can deny his status as one of the pivotal figures of twentieth-century music. And if music critics and musicologists at times seem to be rather reluctant to acknowledge Gershwin’s role, it is entirely undisputed by listeners, who – a century after their creation – keep coming back to his creations and enjoying them.
This Da Vinci Classics album collects some of George Gershwin’s absolute masterpieces, many of which are extremely well known, and which contributed deeply to his long-lasting fame.
George Gershwin was an American by birth, but not by family. His parents were Russian Jews who had emigrated to the US. The process of assimilation of this European/Jewish family within the welcoming American melting-pot started by the Americanization of their names – not only those of the parents, but also the children’s. Their family name was changed from Gershowitz to Gershwin; George had been originally called Jacob Bruskin (Bruskin being his mother’s maiden name), and his father, Moishe, opted for a more neutral Morris when arriving to the US.
George had a pronounced musical talent, but no musical training, even though music was an integral component of his family’s life (as it was for many European Jews). When still in his teens, George started earning a living through his piano performances and improvisations; he can be said to embody the American dream in music. His first job was to play the newly issued scores for customers of the Jerome H. Remick & Co., a music publishing house of some importance within the Tin Pan Alley galaxy. In between two such demonstrations, George found time for improvising and composing pieces of his own; the first ones went practically unnoticed, but already at 18 Gershwin was writing songs for the Broadway scene. Encouraged by this success and by that of some solo piano pieces he recorded solo, Gershwin embarked on a more ambitious project. He composed an opera by the title of Blue Monday which caught the eye of Paul Whiteman, the leader of one of the most important bands in the New York panorama of the era.
Whiteman was keen to explore the possibilities which lay in the grey area between “classical music” and the new genres which were quickly sprouting and blossoming in the effervescent musical scene of the Roaring Twenties. A first experiment, with singer Éva Gauthier, had been successful, but Whiteman was eager to strike while the iron was hot, also because he was not the only one who had perceived the potential of such an undertaking.
He approached young Gershwin and asked him to write a jazz (or jazz-like) piece in the genre of a piano concerto; Whiteman had a concert scheduled for the celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, on February 12th, 1924, to be held at Aeolian Hall. But the non-negligible detail was that this was happening in the last weeks of 1923, i.e. less than a couple of months before the scheduled premiere. Gershwin was flattered but understandably frightened, and he politely declined.
However, on January 3rd, 1924, during an evening of leisure, Gershwin was shocked to read on a newspaper that he was supposed to be writing the piece he had refused to write! Whiteman had made the announcement in the hope of burning the chances of his archenemy and rival Vincent Lopez, who was planning a concert with the same concept, at the crossroads between classical music and jazz. Gershwin had no chance but to accept, and started feverishly working on the piece. He was fortunate, though, that inspiration came to him suddenly, and that he somehow “saw” the finished piece at a single glance: “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer…. I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance”.
The first draft was written as a two-piano version, and had the provisional title of American Rhapsody: “American”, for the above-mentioned idea that it encompassed all things American in music, and embodied the very spirit of American society; “Rhapsody” because it is… “rhapsodic”, i.e., without a clearly defined musical structure and consisting of seemingly unrelated musical episodes – although all of the piece’s main musical ideas are exposed in the first few bars, thus giving the feeling of a progressive unpacking of an already present musical substance. The idea for the definitive title is credited to George’s brother, Ira, who had visited an exposition of Whistler’s paintings where the pictures’ principal nuances ended up in the artworks’ titles. Therefore, playing on the double meaning of blue, the title was found.
The piece’s premiere, in a version for piano and wind band orchestrated by Ferde Grofé (and with the initially planned chromatic scale of the solo clarinet turned into the iconic glissando by the performer in the premiere) was a success; it was witnessed by some of the main protagonists of the musical world of the time, including Stravinsky, Kreisler, Stokowski, and Rachmaninov. From then on, both the Rhapsody and its composer were on their way for immortal success, and Rhapsody in Blue would become one of the best known “classical” pieces written in the twentieth century.
A similar perspective animates the Three Preludes. They are the sole survivors of a much more ambitious plane, echoing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or, at least, Chopin’s 24 Preludes. Gershwin wished in fact to write his own set of 24 Preludes, but managed to compose just seven, of which a mere three were published as piano pieces. They are both extremely innovative and, at the same time, very palatable. The first explores the relationship between classical music, blues and Brazilian dances; the second is more expressive, and was defined by his composer as “a sort of blues lullaby”. The third, in spite of Gershwin’s alleged “Spanish” inspiration, is still very much American, with its iconic syncopations and its dialectical atmosphere.
The ten songs recorded here are among the finest written by George Gershwin; all of them were the joint ventures of George and Ira. Different from what happens most of the time, the composer wished to create unconstrainedly. Only after the musical profile had been determined, he passed the music to the lyrics’ author, who had to find words to fit the music. Though unconventional, this method worked very well.
For Porgy and Bess, the masterpiece opera on the touching relationship between two Black lovers, George and Ira Gershwin worked on poems by DuBose Heyward. Gershwin immersed himself in the religious and artistic mood of the discriminated Blacks, and wrote music in the style and spirituality of the Black Americans. Summertime is an exquisite lullaby which is also a leitmotiv of the entire opera, and its melodic roots may have come to Gershwin from… Ukraine, as has been argued by some! I Loves You Porgy is the moving love song with which Bess addresses her crippled lover. It is a profound and intense piece, which requires much in terms of both technique and personality from its interpreters.
Embraceable You was first conceived for an unpublished operetta, East Is West, and then re-employed by the Gershwin brothers in Girl Crazy, a musical featuring the iconic couple of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, whence also But Not For Me comes. In that musical another extremely successful song found its place, i.e. I Got Rhythm. Here, Ira found it difficult to pay homage to unusual rhythms employed by his brother, and therefore he unusually opted for unrhymed lines. The Man I Love comes from a musical comedy, titled Lady Be Good, and it is coeval with Rhapsody in Blue, while Fascinating Rhythm was another success of the Astaire/Rogers couple – just as was Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, an ironic song comparing British and American English. If the two lovers of the famous skate scene are thinking of parting on linguistic divergences, a much more touching parting is that depicted in They Can’t Take That Away From Me, from the same movie (Shall We Dance). And, as a final Astaire song, A Foggy Day is another encounter of Britishness and Americanness: it was originally written for a musical (later turned into a movie) based on a novel and on a play by the quintessentially English author P.G. Wodehouse, who, however, had been conquered by America.