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George Gershwin's Music
- Abstract
Much has been written about George Gershwin; but almost nothing about his music. Version after version of his life appears, and in each he is seen merely as a prototype of the American success story. In the recently released Warner Brothers’ motion picture, “Rhapsody in Blue,” Gershwin’s glittering rise to fame and fortune found its destined apotheosis in a million-and-a-half-dollar Hollywood production. Yet such was the character of the composer’s life that, with the addition of two fictitious love affairs, it emerges on the screen relatively true to its actual course. The only surprise is that it took Hollywood eight years to bring to the screen a biography which had existed as a living script for almost two decades.
When George Gershwin became a legendary character in the favorite American folk-drama of success, alongside politicians, explorers, and captains of industry, music could be said to have become an integral part of the national culture. After him, other American composers with similar goals have reinterpreted their lives in the “rags to riches” tradition. Aaron Copland, with one eye on the reading public, begins his autobiographical sketch with the words: “I was born on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab.” Yet no matter how hard Gershwin’s colleagues tried post factum to fit themselves into the Horatio Alger pattern, it was Gershwin alone who found wide public favor, perhaps because he had no need to adapt himself to the public. He was the public—one of the mass of eager young people who drew their inspiration from the lives and careers of Henry Ford and Greta Garbo.
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