This Day in Classical Music History (Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in Triumphant Premiere)

Feb. 12, 1924—The audience that heard Rhapsody in Blue on this cold, snowy night greeted the ground-breaking “jazz concerto” with rapture at its premiere at New York City's Aeolian Hall—a distinct relief for George Gershwin, who composed it in haste, with the utmost reluctance, without formal music training, and performed it at the end of a long, otherwise boring concert.

A good thing that listeners that night (including John Philip Sousa, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Rachmaninov) embraced what the 25-year-old composer called his “musical kaleidoscope of America—our vast melting pot,” because many critics and even some fellow composters were nowhere near as enthusiastic.

Critic-composer Virgil Thomson, for instance, sniffed that Rhapsody, though “quite a satisfactory piece,” didn’t amount to much, because “Rhapsodies…are not very difficult to write, if one can think up enough tunes.” And, despite conducting the piece and performing its piano portion, Leonard Bernstein followed Thomson’s lead in dismissing it as “not a composition at all [but] a string of … terrific tunes … stuck together with a thin paste of flour and water.”

Even this year, The New York Times, in a piece of blatant contrarian clickbait, ran pianist, composer and writer Ethan Iverson’s essay calling it “The Worst Masterpiece,” using adjectives like “naïve,” “corny,” and “Caucasian,” and the comment that, because the composition didn’t achieve a true fusion of jazz and classical genres, it “clogged the arteries of American music.”

Oh, please! Gershwin can’t be held responsible for either the lack of daring of fellow composers or the racist musical tastes of American audiences that couldn’t accept the innovation of Louis Armstrong and other jazz creators.

He simply wanted to resolve a miscommunication with popular bandleader Paul Whiteman, who, after hearing the composer’s vague desire to write a piece blending jazz and classical elements, publicly announced that Gershwin would contribute to “An Experiment in Modern Music" only a month away.

Whiteman overcame Gershwin’s protest that he was on the way to Boston for a pre-Broadway tryout of his latest musical project (it turned out to be Lady, Be Good). Fortunately for the composer, it was on the ensuing train ride, “with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer that I suddenly heard — and even saw on paper — the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end.”

A few more facts about the creation of this standard in the American classical music repertoire:

*Lyricist brother Ira contributed the title;

*Gershwin also sought to incorporate the sounds of New York: hurdy-gurdies, player pianos of Harlem, the chugging of trains, the construction of midtown skyscrapers;

*Clarinetist Ross Gorman, in rehearsals, played a joke on the composer by playing the opening—17 distinct notes—as a long smeared glissando. Gershwin loved the effect and kept it in the piece;

*Gershwin had scored the piece for two pianos, but confessed that he knew nothing about arrangements—leading Whiteman to put it in the hands of his associate Ferdi Grofe;

*Gershwin himself was the pianist at the premiere; he didn’t have time to write out the solo passages for the instrument, so he played them from memory (and probably improvised some of it);

*Rhapsody in Blue not only announced the arrival of a unique talent to the concert gall, but also the cultural start of the American Century.

The composition propelled Gershwin into any serious discussion of homegrown practitioners of classical music. In the short 13 years remaining to him, even though he continued to crank out popular songs for Broadway and Hollywood with his lyricist brother Ira, he also created ever more ambitious works for the concert hall and opera stage, including Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess.

As Phillip D. Atteberry wrote in an article for The Mississippi Rag, “Like the land in which he grew up, Gershwin did not understand boundaries or limits. Anything that could be imagined, could be attempted.” 

Flashback, June 1963: Brian Wilson Takes Studio Helm for Beach Boys

As the eldest of the musical Wilson brothers and co-songwriter of their first original hits, Brian Wilson was already the center of attention for The Beach Boys. 

But in June 1963, the 21-year-old took on even greater importance as he assumed the role of producer, moving the band into some of the most innovative territory in 1960s pop music even as the additional pressure from it all endangered his fragile psyche.

I became interested in this topic because of the brief scenes devoted to Brian’s studio sessions for Pet Sounds and the single “Good Vibrations” in the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy.  

If music employs elements of mathematics, then the story of how Brian solved so many harmonic equations simultaneously—all within the tight space of a 2 1/2-minute pop single—makes him seem like Einstein discovering the formula for relativity while everyone else is merely adding 2 and 2.

Paul Dano’s Brian in Love and Mercy is, initially, remarkably self-assured for someone so young, coaxing skilled studio musicians towards the sounds he hears in his head. He’s not dictatorial or arrogant in his perfectionism, just hyper-focused—until he finally hears what he has in mind, producing the most beatific of smiles.

Brian had only formed the Beach Boys two years earlier, but his mastery of songwriting and recording techniques was advancing rapidly. And he now had learned enough to know what hadn’t been working, and to try to do something about it.

He and the other Beach Boys had been quietly fuming about how hurriedly and cavalierly their initial producer at Capitol Records, Nick Venet, had arranged their first two LPs, Surfin’ Safari and Surfin’ USA. As a bass player himself, Brian especially hated the poor bass sound coming out of Capitol’s studio.

Brian’s father, Murry Wilson, pressed Capitol to let Brian be in sole charge of the band’s production from now on. The record company reluctantly agreed.

On June 12, Brian took his engineer and studio right-hand man, Chuck Britz, into Western Recorders studio, where the Beach Boys worked on two of their seminal early hits, “Little Deuce Coupe” and “Surfer Girl.”

Two days later—still a handful of days short of turning 21—Brian turned to L.A.'s Gold Star studio, used by one of his musical heroes, Phil Spector—and, over the next four years, until a devastating nervous breakdown diminished his influence in the band, evolved into one of the most influential forces in pop music.

But more interesting to me ultimately was how Brian came by his musical acumen, what his innovations were, and why—along with Phil Spector, George Martin, and Berry Gordy—he ranks among the most influential musical producers of the Sixties.

To answer the first question: however Brian developed as a musician—the bassist and keyboard player in a rock ‘n’ roll band—was as basic as learning one’s ABCs. Even obvious early influences like Chuck Berry, The Lettermen, the Four Freshmen, and Jan and Dean could only take him so far.

He needed people who could fire his imagination. From the age of four, Brian was taken with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, bowled over by “everything” about it, he told NPR in an interview 13 years ago: “The chords, the melodic movement, the arranging, the impetus, the excitement, the beauty. It was just an absolute work of art."

Among slightly older contemporaries, Brian found a couple of others who provoked him into thinking how he could expand his musical palette.

As a composer and producer, Burt Bacharach was blending the complex chromatic shifts in jazz into three-minute pop melodramas of aching and loss.

The “Wall of Sound” created by Spector particularly affected Brian. He played one of the hits of the super-producer labeled the “first tycoon of teen” by Tom Wolfe, “Be My Baby,” “a hundred times every single day,” according to the lead singer on the single, Ronnie Bennett (who later married Spector). 

In fact, Brian wrote in the following year “Don’t Worry, Baby,” hoping vainly that it would be used by the man he regarded as the greatest producer in the world.

As Brian increasingly used the group of ace studio musicians known as “The Wrecking Crew,” other members of the Beach Boys—notably, Mike Love—began to chafe about where they would fit in with all of this. 

With so little to do instrumentally themselves, how long would they have to wait around in the studio till he got what he wanted? Where would deviating from their surf rock sound take them on the marketplace? How would they perform this in concert? And where would their own harmonies fit in?

On this last score, certainly, their fears proved groundless.  Brian adopted Spector’s method of doubling up on instruments, including ones that were quite unusual in pop music. (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”, on Pet Sounds, featured two pianos, three guitars, three basses, four horns, two accordions, drums, and percussion.)

But, as noted in Scott McCormick's September 2017 post from the blog “Disc Makers,” the Beach Boy leader also exercised restraint and allowed for more aural space, enabling more intimate harmonies—exactly his group’s forte.

A year and a half later, Brian’s crippling workload and frenetic songwriting-arranging-touring schedule led him to have a nervous breakdown while on tour, leading him to stop performing live so he could concentrate on the studio. It was the first indication of the mental health issues that would plague him from then on. 

But, even as he worried about how the Beach Boys would compete musically against a foreign invader on the U.S. charts—the Beatles—Brian would be creating work that would be imitated by fellow musicians and loved by millions of fans for the next 60 years and counting. 

Always musically adventurous, he was evolving the group from its Berry-based guitar foundation and surf-and-hot-rod teen subject matter to polyphonic pop symphonies that would take in a wider age group and world.

This Day in Cold War History (‘Porgy and Bess’ Staged in Leningrad, at Soviet and US Turning Points)

Dec. 26, 1955—In the first American theater troupe appearance in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution, the international touring company of Porgy and Bess performed in Leningrad.

The massive company, nearly 100 strong, presented the 1935 “folk opera” by George and Ira Gershwin amid simultaneous watersheds in U.S. and Soviet history. In America, the civil-rights movement was picking up momentum with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision and the onset of the Montgomery bus boycott. In the U.S.S.R., Nikita Khrushchev, having been named secretary of the Communist Party, was gauging how to expose Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian abuses.

In this atmosphere, the production by the Everyman Opera Company became a vehicle for political controversy, as this work had been since its Broadway premiere 20 years before. Then, it was a matter of domestic dispute: How accurate was its depiction of African-American life? Now, many wondered if the Soviets would use the show to highlight American racial inequality as Marxism competed against the free-enterprise system in the postwar order.

So much intrigue and suspense surrounded the event that it received unusually extensive press coverage, including by CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr and Truman Capote, stepping away from novels, musicals and film scripts to venture into creative nonfiction for The New Yorker Magazine. Capote’s chronicle of the epic trip, The Muses Are Heard, became his first significant step into the genre that he would transform with In Cold Blood.

The all-black cast (insisted on from its Broadway premiere) of the Everyman group had already been touring for four years, including a triumphant stop earlier that year before a demanding Italian audience in Milan's La Scala to perform the theater's first American opera. But the stakes were far higher when Everyman director and co-producer Robert Breen led his company into Russia.

Throughout the international tour, the group had been sponsored by the U.S. State Department. But funding was denied for the Russian leg of the long tour because the State Department felt the Soviets would use this depiction of poverty in Charleston’s Catfish Row in its propaganda war against America.

Instead, funding was handled by the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and as the Everyman group prepared for the show, they anxiously considered whether they were being watched by their hosts and how they should answer incessant questions about the civil-rights struggle going on back at home.

It is hard not to read Capote’s account without admiration for the intelligence, talent and dignity of its African-American cast, each member balancing fidelity to an imperfect country that could easily be embarrassed on the world stage with their commitment to truth and justice.

It is equally difficult to read Capote without rolling one’s eyes at State Department representatives addressing the cast in carefully calibrated terms, at other whites along for the ride (e.g., Ira Gershwin’s wife Lenore on rumors that their hotel rooms would be wired: “Where are we going to gossip? Unless we simply stand in the bathroom and keep flushing…”) and at Capote’s trip through a local department store.

Despite some jitters before and during the performance on how Soviet listeners were reacting (Bess’ adjustment of her garter upset some local prudes), the show moved audiences in Leningrad and, later, Moscow. It paved the way for later productions in Mother Russia of My Fair Lady, The Threepenny Opera, Annie Get Your Gun, Kiss Me, Kate, and Sugar.

Song Lyric of the Day (George and Ira Gershwin, on Incomprehension of the News)

“The more I read the papers
 The less I comprehend
 The world and all its capers
 And how it all will end.”— “Love Is Here To Stay,” lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin, originally written for the film The Goldwyn Follies (1938), reprinted in Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (2009)

Song Lyric of the Day (George and Ira Gershwin, on Dating and "The Economic Situation")

“I’m tired of keeping up with the economic trends

And the universal problems that perplex;

Oh, tell me where I can find a man who condescends

To show an int’rest in sex.”—"The Economic Situation," music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, in Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (2009)

For The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, George Gershwin (1998-1937) and brother Ira (1896-1983) had “Miss Gherkin” (a young Eve Arden) and a group of chorus girls lament the terrible impact of hard times on their love lives. It’s not so much that anxiety and overwork lacerate the male libido, but rather that politically active intellectuals now show no interest in them whatsoever. 

I really had to chuckle, though, when I came across this couplet: 

“You’re looking your best, but he hasn’t noticed

For you’re up to your neck in the Taxpayers’ Protest.”

How did the Gershwins anticipate the Tea Party movement of the last decade?

Leave it to the wise, witty and brilliant brothers to make the nation chuckle even during the Great Depression.

This Day in Classical Music History (Gershwin’s ‘American in Paris’ Debuts)

December 13, 1928—Featuring what its composer termed “the most modern music I've yet attempted,” An American in Paris, the product of George Gershwin’s trips abroad to deepen his knowledge of orchestration and harmony, premiered across the Atlantic, performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Walter Damrosch. Still only 30 years old, Gershwin was displaying the ambition that would enable him to transcend the boundaries of his Tin Pan Alley apprenticeship. Many musicians playing the piece at the premiere, though, did not appreciate his moxie. They would be horrified by the thought that the composition they performed with such little appreciation that night would  become one of the most loved classical music pieces of the last century.

Twelve years after this event, and three years after Gershwin’s untimely death, his close friend, pianist-composer-humorist-raconteur Oscar Levant, described an overnight train journey they had taken in A Smattering of Ignorance: “A lengthy discussion of music occupied us for an hour or so, and I was actually in the midst of answering one of his questions when he calmly removed his clothes and eased himself into the lower berth.... I adjusted myself to the inconveniences of the upper berth…. At this moment my light must have disturbed George [Gershwin’s]’s doze, for he opened his eyes, looked up at me and said drowsily, ‘Upper berth—lower berth. That’s the difference between talent and genius.’”

The anecdote tells us what good company the puckish Gershwin could be, but if he thought genius would have been enough to get him by, he would never have been serious enough to change musical direction—nor crucially, over the long term, figure out how he would apply the musical immersion he underwent with Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. 

(Not that these men could understand his direction, either: Ravel asked, when Gershwin asked about receiving orchestra lessons from him, "Why would you want to risk being a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?" Even Schoenberg, who did eventually come around and instructed him, marveled, after he heard about the American's current income from Broadway show tunes, that perhaps Gershwin ought to give him lessons.)

Gershwin made his first trip to Paris in 1924, after his success with Rhapsody in Blue. Two years later, after yet another visit, he decided to write a piece about the city that would capture an American’s impressions of it. To lend his composition extra authenticity, he even bought French taxi horns whose sounds he would use. 

But it would still not be until the spring of 1928, when he and lyricist brother Ira went to the city for some rest and relaxation after their work for the frenzied opening of their musical Rosalie for Florenz Ziegfeld, that he got to work on the idea forming in his head. (Ira, normally no slouch, used this time, as he put it, "[seeing] the sights and [drinking] beer.")

Gershwin completed his piano sketch for An American in Paris by early August, then his orchestration for it on November 18, less than a month from the premiere by Damrosch, who had also conducted the premiere of Gershwin’s prior major classical work, Concerto in F.

The New York Philharmonic reflected the loathing that traditional classical musicians possessed for the interloper Gershwin, who, for his part, attended its rehearsals dressed in a derby hat and smoking a cigar.  One music critic of the time exhibited similar snobbery over Gershwin’s attempt to cross musical boundaries: “An American in Paris is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane, that the average movie audience would be bored by it."

Au contraire, as they say. One Gershwin phrase about the piece he was planning in the summer of 1928—that it was “really a rhapsodic ballet”—may have inspired Hollywood to think about its possibilities for dance on film. In 1951, MGM released a movie that incorporated the name of the piece into its title and a generous helping of the composer’s music, though the half-hour composition itself was reduced to last than five minutes onscreen. It was a career highlight for star Gene Kelly, director Vincente Minnelli, and even Levant, whose character imagines himself playing Concerto in F before an audience in a large concert hall, taking on the successive roles of  pianist, conductor, kettle drummer, xylophonist, violinist, concert master and, at last, an audience member who shouts "Bravo, encore!"

Whether or not you agree that the movie should have won the Best Actor Oscar that year (beating out A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun), it surely remains one of the highlights of the American musical, just as the composer it honored remains safely esconced now in the classical music canon to which he aspired.

(The accompanying Bain News Service photograph of George Gershwin is now in the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.)