Flashback, December 1925: Gershwin’s “Concerto” Debuts at Carnegie

Appearing for the first time on a symphony program as either performer or composer, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway great George Gershwin overcame jitters about lack of formal classical music training by soloing at the piano for his own work, Concerto in F, before a capacity audience at Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1925.

The 27-year-old composer received his commission for the work (originally titled “New York Symphony”) from Walter Damrosch of the New York Philharmonic, who sought him out the day after Paul Whiteman’s orchestra played Gershwin’s incorporation of jazz into classical music, Rhapsody in Blue.

Rhapsody in Blue…for me, and for thousands of other cinemaniacs, that music--as dazzling as a Fourth of July display--is heavily associated with its use in Woody Allen’s 1979 film, Manhattan. My passion for his music continued through the years, whetted by watching six years ago a compelling one-man show on his life and work in Chicago, George Gershwin Alone, featuring Hershey Felder.

Then two years ago, at one of my favorite vacation spots--the Chautauqua Institution--I stayed at the Carey Cottage Inn, where Gershwin came in mid-summer 1925 to work on the composition for Damrosch, then found, at the edge of this grounds, the shack where the composer--feeling that he really needed privacy, lest his instincts to play the piano upon friends' request at any time take over--came to compose in earnest.

In addition to attracting visitors interested in self-improvement and culture, Chautauqua, then as now, was a center for religious education and spiritual seeking. In a letter to Pauline Heifetz, sister of the famed violinist Jascha, that was included in Joan Peyser’s 1993 biography of Gershwin, The Memory of All That, the composer set down, in tones of affection barely winning out over irony, his fish-out-of-water feelings as a member of the Jewish faith in a place heavily imbued with Christianity:

“I’ve been in this place 9 days and I must say I made a happy choice in coming here. The atmosphere is quite different from any other I’ve been in. There are, for example, 40,000 people here, pious people with one foot in the grave, whose greatest pleasure is to go to lectures and sermons on Christ and His return or Evolution versus the Bible. You know the type….However they are very quiet, homely Americans who, aside from their narrowness, are very nice people."

(You can read a prior post of mine about Gershwin’s time at Chautauqua here.)


Gershwin is an American musical progenitor, just as surely as another George--Washington--was this nation’s great political progenitor. Over the last half century, any time a pop composer ventured into a more serious, classical vein—The Pajama Game’s Richard Adler (Wilderness Suite), Paul McCartney (Liverpool Oratorio), Elvis Costello (The Juliet Letters, Il Sogno) and Billy Joel (Fantasies and Delusions, Op. 1-10 )—it’s Gershwin’s lead they were following. But, with the exception of Kurt Weill (Street Scene) and Stephen Sondheim (Sweeney Todd), few of these experiments have been memorable, let alone entered the classical music repertoire, the way Gershwin’s has.

Also like the Father of His Country, Gershwin created something indelibly American by working from Old World models. In a prior post, I mentioned how Washington designed Mount Vernon himself with the help of architectural “copy books.” Similarly, Gershwin got to work on his commission from Damrosch by setting forth for London, he puckishly noted, with “four or five books on musical structure to find out what the concerto form really was!”

The composer was serious about studying this, but of course he wasn’t about not knowing what the concerto was. Yet many critics and composers of the time, to Gershwin’s horror, treated the quote far more seriously than he intended, and till the end of his tragically truncated career (dying of a brain tumor at age 38) they derided him as a musical interloper.

One of these individuals annoyed by this incursion into “serious” musical territory was a violist for the New York Symphony Orchestra, Allan Lincoln Langley. Not content with asking Damrosch point-blank if Gershwin had been given the commission because it would represent good box office, Langley then spread a rumor that the composer’s close friend, William Daly, was largely responsible for the piece’s orchestration.

There was an element of self-interest on the part of the naysayers in all of this—and, not to put too fine a point on it, an element of anti-Semitism, too. In a 1990 Boston College Magazine essay, “Serious George,” William H. Youngren pointed to Ivy League music professors such as Edward Burlingham Hill and Daniel Gregory Mason, who believed “America would find its authentic voice in the work of composers like themselves, men who came of Anglo-Saxon stock, had attended Ivy League colleges and had gone on to conservatory training under European masters. To them Gershwin’s successful bid for recognition as a composer of extended concert works was a serious affront.”

In his history of the Great American Songbook, The House That George Built, Wilfred Sheed sums up pretty succinctly how these carpers treated Gershwin from here on out: “The serious New York critics began seriously to give up on George, like philanthropists who’ve tried everything for some child of the streets and found the kid just hopeless.” Adding to their fury: Gershwin’s popularity, which put fannies in the seats of the concert halls—something that the music they championed had trouble doing.

It would be another three years before Gershwin felt emboldened enough to re-enter the classical realm, this time with An American in Paris. When he did so, there was a definite comfort level involved, since the American premiere was conducted by Damrosch again. But he'd also taken the advice of others, such as Maurice Ravel, and trained with the best classical composers in Europe he could find. In the case of Gershwin,

I couldn’t end this post about Gershwin without another point of comparison with Washington: allegations that each man fathered an illegitimate son. In the case of Gershwin, that supposed offspring may have been conceived at the time he was laboring over Concerto in F.

In his analysis of Washington as slaveowner, An Imperfect God, Henry Wiencek examined the documentary evidence concerning the possibility that a slave named West Ford was the product of a relationship between the President and a woman named Venus. Wiencek’s verdict: impossible to disprove, barring DNA tests (and even this would only demonstrate whether Ford was a member of Washington’s family, not whether the master of Mount Vernon was indeed the father of the slave.)

(My own feeling is that it is highly unlikely that Ford was the product of such a union. Tellingly, before marrying George in 1759, Martha Washington had given birth to four children in a prior marriage; yet, though the widow, in her late twenties at the time of her remarriage, was still well within childbearing years, she never had a child with the Father of His Country. Very likely, Washington was sterile because of his medical history of smallpox and genito-urinary tuberculosis.)

The case involving the musical George is more complex and harder to dismiss. A man calling himself Alan Gershwin (born Albert Schneider) claimed, in a 1959 article in the notorious entertainment scandal rag Confidential, that he had been fathered by the composer during an affair with a married chorus girl in the mid-1920s. His date of birth was May 18, 1926, in Brooklyn--meaning that he would have been conceived in the fall of 1925.

This claim troubled the retirement years of George Gershwin's devoted surviving brother (and lyricist brother) Ira. Peyser, who gave the claim the greatest prominence, has had her credibility assailed by reviewers and other Gershwin biographers. But the evidence of her subject's circumstances and character cannot be rejected out of hand.

Unlike Washington, George Gershwin (who never married) carried on relationships with many women, included married ones. It’s altogether possible that a child resulted from such a liaison. On the other hand, Alan Gershwin never submitted to DNA testing, and biographers of the composer do not have hard evidence to prove his claims.