George Gershwin

George Gershwin was born on 26 September 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Moishe and Rose Gershowitz. His father often changed jobs and the family moved constantly around New York. George was a boisterous child who preferred street games and roller skating to school. But one day, aged ten, he heard a classmate play the violin and was overwhelmed. In 1910 his parents bought a piano for his elder brother Ira: George immediately sat down at it and played with astonishing ease.

He took lessons with Charles Hambitzer, a teacher who introduced him to Chopin, Liszt and Debussy and predicted he would become a great composer. At fifteen, in 1914, he left school to become a “song plugger”, a demonstration pianist for a song publisher on Tin Pan Alley, New York’s street of popular-music publishers: all day long he played the new songs for singers and customers. There he discovered ragtime, blues and jazz and began writing his own songs.

In 1919 his song Swanee, recorded by the famous singer Al Jolson, became a huge hit: it sold more than a million copies of sheet music and two million records. Gershwin became famous and rich at twenty-one. He composed for Broadway revues and dreamed of uniting American popular music and classical music.

In January 1924 the bandleader Paul Whiteman announced in the press that he would perform a work by Gershwin at a big concert devoted to “modern American music”. Gershwin, who had forgotten, composed in a few weeks Rhapsody in Blue for piano and jazz band, whose opening clarinet glissando, invented during rehearsals, has become legendary. On 12 February 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York he played it himself before Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Heifetz: it was a triumph. That same year he wrote with his brother Ira, a lyricist, his first musical, Lady, Be Good!

For a decade the Gershwin brothers created Broadway hits such as Oh, Kay!, Funny Face, Girl Crazy, with I Got Rhythm, and Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize. His songs, such as The Man I Love, Embraceable You and ’S Wonderful, became jazz standards. George also composed the Concerto in F (1925), commissioned by the conductor Walter Damrosch, and the Three Preludes for piano (1926).

In 1928 he stayed in Paris, where he met Ravel, Prokofiev and Nadia Boulanger. He asked Ravel for lessons, who reportedly replied: “Why become a second-rate Ravel when you are a first-rate Gershwin?” He composed An American in Paris, a tone poem evoking a tourist’s stroll through the streets of Paris, with real taxi horns he had brought back. In 1935 he premiered Porgy and Bess, a “folk opera” whose characters are all African American, with the famous lullaby Summertime.

In 1936 he moved to Hollywood with Ira to write music for film musicals, notably with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. But in early 1937 he suffered from headaches, memory lapses and dizzy spells: it was discovered too late that he had a brain tumour. He died in Los Angeles on 11 July 1937, aged thirty-eight. Gershwin brought jazz into the concert hall and remains one of the best-loved American composers.