A Life in Music
Gershwin.
by Edward Jablonski.
Doubleday. 436 pp. $21.95.
It is probably fair to say that George Gershwin (1898-1937) was the most famous American musical figure of his brief time. He died before reaching his thirty-ninth birthday, and did not achieve celebrity until 1924, wth the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue—though the date could perhaps be pushed back to 1922, when Paul Whiteman recorded “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” or even to 1920, when Al Jolson recorded “Swanee.” In any case, it was only for about fifteen years (give or take a couple) that Gershwin was before the public. Yet at the time of his death, probably fifty to a hundred of his songs, his handful of concert works, and portions of his opera Porgy and Bess were known throughout the world, and he was widely regarded as this country’s most important and representative 20th-century composer.
But until now there has been no biography that did him justice. Isaac Goldberg’s 1931 George Gershwin is valuable because Goldberg had Gershwin’s cooperation, but is wildly idolatrous. David Ewen’s 1970 George Gershwin—His Journey to Greatness is fanciful and riddled with errors. The first really serious biography, Charles Schwartz’s Gershwin: His Life and Music, did not appear until 1973. Though it contains much valuable new research and some insightful analysis, it is a compulsively mean-spirited book. Despite his obvious admiration for Gershwin’s music, Schwartz seems determined to show that the man (and the composer) was not all he seemed (or was cracked up) to be. Again and again he portrays Gershwin as naive, ignorant, anti-intellectual, boorish, egotistical, manipulative, and pushy. (This last accusation, I might add, is especially hard for a reader to swallow, coming as it does from a biographer who saw fit to introduce into his book two utterly irrelevant photographs of himself, one with Nadia Boulanger and the other with Duke Ellington, neither of whom was a figure of any importance in Gershwin’s life.) As Schwartz tells it, Gershwin was an unholy mix of roué and prig, and the energy, vitality, and warmth that so impressed those who actually knew him were merely an “outer shell” that concealed a seething mass of insecurities and some rather nasty obsessions.
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It is a great pleasure to be able to report that in Edward Jablonski, Gershwin has at last found the biographer he has so long needed and deserved. To anyone who knows The Gershwin Years, which Jablonski wrote in collaboration with Lawrence D. Stewart, for many years Ira Gershwin’s secretary, this will come as no surprise. Though too loose and informal to be counted as a full-dress biography, The Gershwin Years, which was first published in 1958 and then republished in a revised edition in 1973, is a thoroughly delightful book that gives a fascinating and comprehensive picture of the era suggested by its title. This new book is both narrower in scope and far denser in its factual coverage of Gershwin’s life. Unless some startling new information comes to light, it is hard to see why Gershwin will ever need another biography.
Though Jablonski’s book has been generally well received, some reviewers have expressed disappointment that he did not attempt to delve more deeply into Gershwin’s psyche, to ferret out the causes of the tremendous drive that produced all that wonderful music in those few years. It seems to me, however, that Jablonski’s steadfast refusal to put his subject—dead now half a century—on the couch, and to speculate about sources, motives, and causes beyond what the written and spoken record warrants, is one of the great strengths of his book. We have recently been treated to biographies of Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein that dwell tediously and fruitlessly on their subjects’ alleged respective searches for father-figures; it is a great relief to have this book on Gershwin that simply—though it was of course no simple task—weaves together the external facts of his extraordinary career with the testimony of so many people who knew and worked with him.
It is, however, worth pointing out that Schwartz’s distastefully skewed depiction of Gershwin has other sources (or at least precedents) besides the common biographer’s itch to make himself appear more wholesome than his subject. For despite Gershwin’s enormous popular success—or, rather, because of the peculiar nature of that success—his career and reputation were under something of a cloud during most of his creative life, and even after his death. We Americans love to think of ourselves as free and adventurous, experimental, not bound by the rigid categories of the Old World. And nowhere is this more true than in the arts. Yet it was precisely the apparent ease with which Gershwin moved back and forth between the musical theater and the concert stage, from popular songs to extended concert works and finally into opera, that troubled and annoyed his contemporaries—and especially his American, as opposed to his European, contemporaries.
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The trouble began with the famous Aeolian Hall concert of February 12, 1924, at which Whiteman premiered Rhapsody in Blue, with Gershwin at the piano. Accustomed as he was to the ways of the musical theater, and being relatively inexperienced at orchestration, Gershwin left the job of scoring the Rhapsody to Ferde Grofé, who was then Whiteman’s chief arranger. This now seems a small matter, hardly worth mentioning, but then it seemed very important indeed.
So long as Gershwin confined himself to writing songs and the scores for musical shows, he could be safely ignored by the American musical establishment. But the instantly and immensely successful Rhapsody was something else again. For the leaders of that establishment, men like Daniel Gregory Mason and Edward Burlingame Hill, who headed the music departments at Columbia and Harvard respectively, had it all planned out that America would find its authentic musical voice in the works of composers like themselves, composers 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 serious composer was not only an affront but also a threat. Mason wrote of the “insidiousness of the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity,” and deplored the fact that “our whole contemporary attitude toward instrumental music, especially in New York, is dominated by Jewish tastes and standards, with their Oriental extravagance, their sensuous brilliancy and intellectual facility and superficiality, their general tendency to exaggeration and disproportion.” There had to be some way of proving that a Jewish song-plugger from the Lower East Side who had come up through the Tin Pan Alley ranks with little or no formal training was a fraud. Thus the fact that the musically more respectable Grofé had orchestrated Rhapsody in Blue was eagerly seized upon as evidence that he had probably had a hand in its composition as well.
Gershwin, who had a sizable ego, was understandably stung by these rumors. He therefore resolved that from then on he would orchestrate all his concert works himself—though still leaving the scoring of his shows to others. But shortly after the premiere of his Concerto in F, which took place at Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1925, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony and Gershwin again at the piano, the rumors came out into the open.
In the September 1926 issue of the magazine Singing, the composer A. Walter Kramer, who had served as editor of Musical America and had studied abroad with the Italian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero, contrasted the world of classical music, in which “composers do their writing for themselves,” with the jazz world, in which “the composer isn’t even asked to write his own scores,” and added: “It is openly stated that the scoring of Rhapsody in Blue is Ferdie’s; that the Gershwin Piano Concerto was written by him [i.e., Gershwin], but the orchestration done by someone else.”
The composer Allan Lincoln Langley, who had been a student of Mason’s, published a similar piece, entitled “The Gershwin Myth” in the December 1932 issue of George Jean Nathan’s new magazine the American Spectator. In November of the same year Langley had played viola in a performance of the 1928 An American in Paris that Gershwin had conducted at the old Metropolitan Opera House, and he had noted what he took to be Gershwin’s excessive dependence, at rehearsals, on his friend, the conductor Bill Daly. “The genial Daly,” wrote Langley, “was constantly in rehearsal attendance, both as répétiteur and adviser, and any member of the orchestra could testify that he knew far more about the score than Gershwin.” “No previous claimant of honors in symphonic composition,” Langley concluded, “has ever presented so much argument and so much controversy as to whether his work was his own or not.”
Finally, it became known after the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess that since 1932 Gershwin had been studying with the theorist Joseph Schillinger. And so this time it was Schillinger—rather than Grofé or Damrosch or Daly—who got the credit for having done for Gershwin what he obviously, being who he was, could not have done for himself.
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Throughout most of his career, then, Gershwin was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Either he was a musical illiterate who had blundered alone into the world of serious music or—more likely, considering his success and his ethnic background—he had craftily got others to do his work for him. That it was perfectly possible for so gifted a man to cross the line from Broadway to Carnegie Hall was, to many of his most influential contemporaries, simply inconceivable. Even Schwartz, in his biography, gives some credence to the rumors.
But of course the plain truth, as Jablonski clearly shows, is that Gershwin did it on his own. Not only is there the testimony of his friends and of his sketches and manuscript scores, now in the Library of Congress; there is also the fact that no other explanation makes any psychological sense. Gershwin was not only a fiercely ambitious man but a very proud one as well, sure from an early age of the magnitude of his gift. One day in 1919, when he was confiding some of his future plans to his fellow pianist Abram Chasins, Chasins suggested that he take some lessons from Rubin Gold-mark, who was later to teach at Juilliard. Gershwin glared at him and angrily replied: “You’re just the kind of person who’s keeping me from my great work!” The more successful he became, the more his reputation as a serious composer mattered to him. Surely he would no more have compromised his sense of himself by depending unduly upon others than he would have run the risk of having the dependency somehow come to light.
One of the many virtues of Jablonski’s book is that it shows just how much time Gershwin managed to find, throughout his incredibly busy creative life, to devote to the serious study of music. In his midteens he began taking piano lessons from one Charles Hambitzer, who introduced him to Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, and, as Gershwin later put it, “made me harmony conscious.” When he expressed an interest in studying theory, Hambitzer recommended Edward Kilenyi, who had studied with Pietro Mascagni in Rome and with Mason at Columbia, where he had earned a Ph.D.—something of a rarity in those days. Gershwin’s studies with Kilenyi seem to have lasted from 1919 to 1921. In the summer of 1921 he took a course in orchestration at Columbia, and in 1923 he did indeed try studying with Gold-mark, but the two men did not get on.
In the meantime Gershwin had served his Tin Pan Alley apprenticeship as a song-plugger at Remick’s (1914-17) and, in 1918, had graduated to the post of songwriter at Harms, who then became his regular publisher. Jolson had made his famous record of “Swanee,” and George White had asked Gershwin to provide music for his annual George White’s Scandals, an arrangement that lasted from 1920 through 1924. The collaboration with his lyricist brother Ira (1896-1983) had got under way, and by the mid-1920’s the two Gershwins were turning out show scores at the rate of one or two a year for the likes of Fred and Adele Astaire (Lady Be Good!, Funny Face), Gertrude Lawrence (Oh, Kay!, Treasure Girl), and Marilyn Miller (Rosalie). Obviously, there was little time for directed study. In the same month that the Concerto in F was premiered, December 1925, two Gershwin shows, Tip-Toes and Song of the Flame, opened on Broadway.
But Gershwin kept reading and studying on his own, and attending concerts and recitals. Moreover, as Jablonski shows, once Gershwin had made his name as a theatrical composer, he again felt free to attempt serious directed study. In 1926 he composed only one show score, for Oh, Kay!, and spent “several months searching for a suitable teacher.” During 1927 he met, at first weekly and then monthly, with the composer Henry Cowell, and probably also with the composer Wallingford Riegger and the conductor Artur Bodanzky. Early in 1928, when he was beginning work on An American in Paris, he had something of a breathing space: Funny Face and Rosalie were running on Broadway, and Oh, Kay! had moved on to London. Gershwin therefore approached Maurice Ravel, who was on a tour of this country and had asked to meet him, and later, in Paris, Nadia Boulanger. Both of them turned him down, for reasons that are not now clear.
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Of course there was much more to George Gershwin’s life than work, and there is much more in Jablonski’s book than an account of his studies and achievements. The constant parties, at which he often played the piano until well past dawn, are vividly remembered, and his relations with the various glamorous women whom he courted are for once put in perspective. There were not only the famous affairs with movie actresses Paulette Goddard and Simone Simon, but the far more important and long-lasting relation with his great friend Kay Swift, also a gifted songwriter. In 1934 she divorced her husband, the financier James Paul Warburg, perhaps with the thought (or hope) that she and Gershwin would marry. When he left for Hollywood in 1936, they agreed not to communicate with each other, but his letters to his friend Mabel Schirmer are filled with inquiries about Kay and with bits of news—“Have not yet found a steady girl out here”—that seem clearly intended to be passed on to her. Jablonski also uncovers a fairly serious relation with a girl named Rosamond Walling, who was twelve years Gershwin’s junior.
Why did he never marry? Perhaps because his parents’ marriage had not been a happy one, but more likely because, just as with his studies, he had trouble finding the time. It is revealing, and touching, that he seems to have talked of marriage most seriously only near the end, when his energy for work had been drained by the brain tumor that would kill him.
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Throughout, Jablonski’s attitude toward his subject, both as man and as artist, is just as a biographer’s should be: sympathetic yet alertly critical. On balance, Gershwin was pretty much what he appeared to be: an enormously gifted, energetic, fun-loving, attractive man. His constant bouts with the disease he wryly dubbed “composer’s stomach” were due not to some dark and deep-seated neurosis but simply to the pressure of the deadlines that he kept setting for himself in order to see how far his talents would carry him. As Jablonski’s extensive and valuable coverage of the musical shows makes clear, Gershwin was an efficient and accommodating collaborator who was always willing to submit to cuts and other changes in order to get the show on the road, even when it came to cutting about a quarter of his “labor of love,” Porgy and Bess, for its first production—a tactical error that may well have been responsible for the work’s initial critical and box-office failure. Perhaps the best summary of his character cited by Jablonski comes from DuBose Heyward, author of the novel Porgy and coauthor (with Ira) of the libretto for Porgy and Bess: “A young man of enormous physical and emotional vitality, who possessed the faculty of seeing himself quite impersonally and realistically, and who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going. This characteristic put him beyond both modesty and conceit.”
Ira Gershwin too is tellingly portrayed by Jablonski. His activities form a quiet running counterpoint to those of his more flamboyant brother, and there is an affectionate “Epilogue” that chronicles his achievements after George’s death—mainly in order to dispel what Jablonski terms “the popular misconception” that “Ira’s talent was almost totally dependent on his brother’s genius.” I must say that I find it hard to see how anyone could ever have thought this of the collaborator of Kurt Weill, Harold Arlen, and Vernon Duke, the man who wrote the lyrics to such songs as “Jenny,” “The Man That Got Away,” and “I Can’t Get Started.”
The one, quite minor, complaint I have to make against Jablonski’s book is that it is inadequately documented. He tells us, for example, that Langley’s suspicions were touched off not by anything that happened during rehearsals of An American in Paris but rather by Daly’s rhetorically asking “Did I write that?” while he was rehearsing a suite of Gershwin tunes that he had prepared for the concert at the Met. What is the source of this information? Jablonski also tells us that Will Vodery’s original, long-lost orchestration of Blue Monday, the mini-opera that Gershwin wrote for George White’s Scandals of 1922 (and that Whiteman later revived, in a new orchestration by Grofé and with the new title 135th Street), has now “surfaced.” Where is it? Since Jablonski was aiming at a popular audience, it is understandable that he should not have wanted to pepper his pages with superscript numbers. But he could and should have given us far more extensive documentation than is contained in his bare four pages of “Notes on Sources.”
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If justice has at last been done to George Gershwin’s life, the same, alas, cannot be said of his works. The score of Rhapsody in Blue that is almost invariably performed is a dreadful, inflated “symphonic” version credited to Grofé. But the late Frank Campbell-Watson, Gershwin’s music editor at Harms, told me that it had actually been cobbled together out of the various additions that conductors had marked in their rental scores over the years, as the work came to be played by ever larger ensembles. The rumors about Gershwin’s deficiencies as an orchestrator also prompted Campbell-Watson to tamper with the scores of the Concerto in F and An American in Paris, and to assign others to tamper with those of Second Rhapsody and the Variations on “I Got Rhythm.”
But the far superior score of Rhapsody in Blue that Grofé prepared for the Aeolian Hall concert, though still unpublished, has recently been recorded, by Michael Tilson Thomas (LP: CBS IM 39699; CD: CBS MK 39699) and also by Maurice Peress, in a very interesting recreation of the complete Aeolian Hall concert (LP: Musicmasters MMD 20113X/14T; CD: Musicmasters MMD 60113T). And the spurious score of Second Rhapsody has now been pulled out of circulation by Warner Brothers, the successors to Harms, in favor of Gershwin’s original score, which Tilson Thomas also recorded for his CBS set. But, incredibly, the orchestral score of Gershwin’s masterpiece, Porgy and Bess, has never been published in any form!
All this needs to be set right, and we need to have idiomatic, properly scaled performances of Gershwin’s works—rather than the pretentious, overblown ones we have been getting ever since he was elevated to the dubious distinction of being America’s great folk composer, a sort of musical equivalent of Norman Rockwell. Then, and only then, will we really get to know the man with whom Jablonski has worked so hard to acquaint us.
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