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George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist.
Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known.
Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928), as well as the opera Porgy and Bess (1935).Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell.
He began his career as a song plugger, but soon started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva.
He moved to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris.
After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and the author DuBose Heyward.
Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the twentieth century.
Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a brain tumor.Gershwin's compositions have been adapted for use in many films and for television, and several became jazz standards recorded in many variations.
Countless celebrated singers and musicians have covered his songs.His Rhapsody in Blue welcomes passengers onto United Airlines flights.Early lifeGershwin came from Russian Jewish heritage.
His grandfather, Jakov Gershowitz, had served for 25 years as a mechanic for the Imperial Russian Army to earn the right of free travel and residence as a Jew.
He retired near Saint Petersburg.
His teenage son, Moishe Gershowitz, worked as a leather cutter for women's shoes; Moishe fell in love with Roza Bruskina, the teenage daughter of a Saint Petersburg furrier.
Bruskina moved with her family to New York because of increasing antisemitism in Russia; she Americanized her first name to Rose.
Moishe, faced with compulsory military service in Russia, followed Rose as soon as he was able.
Upon arrival in New York, Moishe Gershowitz gave his first name as Morris.
He settled at first with his mother's brother in Brooklyn, a tailor named Greenstein, and earned money as a foreman in a women's shoe workshop.
When Morris and Rose married on July 21, 1895, she was 19 and he was 23.
Gershowitz changed his family name to Gershwin some time between 1893 and 1898, perhaps at his marriage.The first child of the family was Ira Gershwin, born with the name Israel, on December 6, 1896.
Morris moved his family to Brooklyn, a second-floor dwelling at 242 Snediker Avenue.
George Gershwin was born there on September 26, 1898; his birth certificate bears the name Jacob Gershwine, which would have been pronounced 'Gershvin' in the ex-pat Russian neighborhood.
The boy was named for his late grandfather, the army mechanic.
However, he was not called anything but 'George'.
(Years later, George changed the spelling of his surname to 'Gershwin' after he became a professional musician; other members of his family followed suit.)George and Ira lived in many different residences as their father changed dwellings with each new enterprise he became involved with.
Mostly, the boys grew up around the Yiddish Theater District.
They frequented the local Yiddish theaters, with George running errands for members and appearing onstage as an extra.After Ira and George, two more children were born to the family: Arthur (1900–1981) and Frances (1906–1999).
George ran around with his boyhood friends, roller skating and misbehaving in the streets.
He cared nothing for music until the age of ten, when he was intrigued by what he heard at his friend Maxie Rosenzweig's violin recital.
The sound and the way his friend played captured him.
His parents had bought a piano for lessons for his older brother Ira, but to his parents' surprise and Ira's relief, it was George who played it.
Although his younger sister Frances Gershwin was the first in the family to make money from her musical talents, she married young and devoted herself to being a mother and housewife.
She gave up her performing career, but settled into painting as a creative outlet; painting was also a hobby of George Gershwin.
Brother Arthur Gershwin also became a composer of songs, musicals, and short piano works.Gershwin tried various piano teachers for two years, before being introduced to Charles Hambitzer by Jack Miller, the pianist in the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra.
Until Hambitzer's death in 1918, he acted as Gershwin's mentor.
Hambitzer taught Gershwin conventional piano technique, introduced him to music of the European classical tradition, and encouraged him to attend orchestra concerts.
At home, following such concerts, young Gershwin would try to play at the piano the music that he had heard.
He later studied with the classical composer Rubin Goldmark and avant-garde composer-theorist Henry Cowell.Tin Pan AlleyOn leaving school at the age of 15, Gershwin found his first job as a "song plugger" for Jerome H.
Remick and Company, a publishing firm on New York City's Tin Pan Alley, where he earned $15 a week.
His first published song was "When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em".
It was published in 1916 when Gershwin was only 17 years old and earned him $5.
His 1917 novelty rag, "Rialto Ripples", was a commercial success, and in 1919 he scored his first big national hit with his song, "Swanee", with words by Irving Caesar.
Al Jolson, a famous Broadway singer of the day, heard Gershwin perform "Swanee" at a party and decided to sing it in one of his shows.In 1916, Gershwin started working for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls in New York, recording and arranging.
He produced dozens, if not hundreds, of rolls under his own and assumed names.
(Pseudonyms attributed to Gershwin include Fred Murtha and Bert Wynn.) He also recorded rolls of his own compositions for the Duo-Art and Welte-Mignon reproducing pianos.
As well as recording piano rolls, Gershwin made a brief foray into vaudeville, accompanying both Nora Bayes and Louise Dresser on the piano.In the late 1910s, Gershwin met songwriter and music director William Daly.
The two collaborated on the Broadway musicals Piccadilly to Broadway (1920) and For Goodness' Sake (1922), and jointly composed the score for Our Nell (1923).
This was the beginning of a long friendship; Daly was a frequent arranger, orchestrator and conductor of Gershwin's music, and Gershwin periodically turned to him for musical advice.In the early 1920s, Gershwin frequently worked with the lyricist Buddy DeSylva.
Together they created the experimental one-act jazz opera Blue Monday, set in Harlem.
It is widely regarded as a forerunner to the groundbreaking Porgy and Bess.In 1924, George and Ira Gershwin collaborated on a stage musical comedy Lady Be Good, which included such future standards as "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Oh, Lady Be Good!".They followed this with Oh, Kay! (1926); Funny Face (1927); Strike Up the Band (1927 and 1930).
Gershwin gave the song, with a modified title, to UCLA to be used as a football fight song, "Strike Up The Band for UCLA".The Gershwin brothers created Show Girl (1929); Girl Crazy (1930), which introduced the standard "I Got Rhythm"; and Of Thee I Sing (1931), Of Thee I Sing was the first musical comedy to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; more precisely, the winners were George S.
Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin.Europe and classical musicIn 1924, Gershwin composed his first major classical work, Rhapsody in Blue, for orchestra and piano.
It was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé and premiered by Paul Whiteman's concert band in New York.
It proved to be his most popular work.In the mid-1920s, Gershwin stayed in Paris for a short period of time, during which he applied to study composition with the noted Nadia Boulanger who, along with several other prospective tutors such as Maurice Ravel, rejected him.
She was afraid that rigorous classical study would ruin his jazz-influenced style.
While there, Gershwin wrote An American in Paris.
This work received mixed reviews upon its first performance at Carnegie Hall on December 13, 1928, but it quickly became part of the standard repertoire in Europe and the United States.
Growing tired of the Parisian musical scene, Gershwin returned to the United States.In 1929, Gershwin was contracted by Fox Film Corporation to compose the score for the movie Delicious.
Only two pieces were used in the final film, the five-minute "Dream Sequence" and the six-minute "Manhattan Rhapsody", which in expanded form was later published as the Second Rhapsody.
Gershwin became infuriated when the rest of the score was rejected by Fox Film Corporation, and it would be seven years before he worked in Hollywood again.OperaGershwin's first opera, Blue Monday, is a short one-act opera which was not a financial success and has only received limited performances.
Gershwin's most ambitious composition was Porgy and Bess (1935).
Gershwin called it a "folk opera", and it is now widely regarded as one of the most important American operas of the twentieth century.
"From the very beginning, it was considered another American classic by the composer of 'Rhapsody in Blue'—even if critics couldn't quite figure out how to evaluate it.
Was it opera, or was it simply an ambitious Broadway musical? 'It crossed the barriers,' says theater historian Robert Kimball.
'It wasn't a musical work per se, and it wasn't a drama per se – it elicited response from both music and drama critics.
But the work has sort of always been outside category."Based on the novel Porgy by DuBose Heyward, the action takes place in the fictional all-black neighborhood of Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina.
With the exception of several minor speaking roles, all of the characters are black.
The music combines elements of popular music of the day, with a strong influence of Black music, with techniques typical of opera, such as recitative, through-composition and an extensive system of leitmotifs.
Porgy and Bess contains some of Gershwin's most sophisticated music, including a fugue, a passacaglia, the use of atonality, polytonality and polyrhythm, and a tone row.
Even the "set numbers" (of which "Summertime", "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" and "It Ain't Necessarily So" are well known examples) are some of the most refined and ingenious of Gershwin's output.
For the performances, Gershwin collaborated with Eva Jessye, whom he picked as the musical director.
One of the outstanding musical alumnae of Western University in Kansas, she had created her own choir in New York and performed widely with them.
The work was first performed in 1935; it was a box office failure.Last yearsAfter the commercial failure of Porgy and Bess, Gershwin moved to Hollywood, California.
He was commissioned by RKO Pictures in 1936 to write the music for the film Shall We Dance, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Gershwin's extended score, which would marry ballet with jazz in a new way, runs over an hour in length.
It took Gershwin several months to write and orchestrate it.Gershwin had a ten-year affair with composer Kay Swift, whom he frequently consulted about his music.
The two never married, although she eventually divorced her husband James Warburg in order to make it possible.
Swift's granddaughter, Katharine Weber, has suggested that the pair were not married because George's mother Rose was "unhappy that Kay Swift wasn't Jewish".
Oh, Kay was named for her.
After Gershwin's death, Swift arranged some of his music, transcribed several of his recordings, and collaborated with his brother Ira on several projects.Early in 1937, Gershwin began to complain of blinding headaches and a recurring impression that he smelled burning rubber.
On February 11, 1937, Gershwin performed his Piano Concerto in F in a special concert of his music with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the direction of French maestro Pierre Monteux.
Gershwin, normally a superb pianist in his own compositions, suffered coordination problems and blackouts during the performance.
He was at the time living with his brother Ira and Ira's wife Leonore in a rented house in Beverly Hills while they worked on other Hollywood film projects.
Leonore Gershwin began to be disturbed by George's mood swings and seeming inability to eat without spilling food at the dinner table.
She suspected the onset of mental illness and she insisted he be moved out of their house to lyricist Yip Harburg's empty quarters nearby where he was placed in the care of his valet, Paul Mueller.
The headaches and olfactory hallucinations continued and on June 23, after an incident in which Gershwin tried to push Mueller out of the car in which they were riding, Gershwin was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles for observation.
Tests showed no physical cause and he was released on the 26th with a diagnosis of "likely hysteria".
His troubles with coordination and mental acuity worsened, and on the night of July 9, Gershwin collapsed in Harburg's house where he had been working on the score of The Goldwyn Follies.
He was rushed back to Cedars of Lebanon where he fell into a coma.
Only at that point did it become obvious to his doctors that he was suffering from a brain tumor.
An immediate call was made to pioneering neurosurgeon Dr.
Harvey Cushing in Boston who, retired for several years by then, recommended Dr.
Walter Dandy, who was on a boat fishing in Chesapeake Bay with the Governor of Maryland.
Dandy was quickly brought to shore by the Coast Guard and sent on to Newark Airport to catch a plane to Los Angeles; however, by that time Gershwin's condition was judged to be critical and the need for surgery immediate.
An attempt by doctors at Cedars to excise the tumor was made in the early hours of the 11th, but it proved unsuccessful, and Gershwin died on the morning of July 11, 1937 at the age of 38.Gershwin's many friends and fans were shocked and devastated.
John O'Hara remarked: "George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to." He was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
A memorial concert was held at the Hollywood Bowl on September 8, 1937 at which Otto Klemperer conducted his own orchestration of the second of Gershwin's Three Piano Preludes.Gershwin received his sole Academy Award nomination, for Best Original Song at the 1937 Oscars, for "They Can't Take That Away from Me", written with his brother Ira for the 1937 film Shall We Dance.
The nomination was posthumous; Gershwin died two months after the film's release.EstateGershwin died intestate, and his estate passed to his mother.
The estate continues to collect significant royalties from licensing the copyrights on his work.
The estate supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act because its 1923 cutoff date was shortly before Gershwin had begun to create his most popular works.
The copyrights on all Gershwin's solo works expired at the end of 2007 in the European Union, based on its life-plus-70-years rule.In 2005, The Guardian determined using "estimates of earnings accrued in a composer's lifetime" that George Gershwin was the wealthiest composer of all time.In September 2013, a partnership between the estates of Ira and George Gershwin and the University of Michigan was created and will provide the university's School of Music, Theatre, and Dance access to Gershwin's entire body of work, which include all of Gershwin's papers, compositional drafts, and scores.
This direct access to all of his works will provide opportunities to musicians, composers, and scholars to analyze and reinterpret his work with the goal of accurately reflecting the composers' vision in order to preserve his legacy.Awards and honorsThe Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to George and Ira Gershwin in 1985.
Only three other songwriters, George M.
Cohan, Harry Chapin and Irving Berlin, have had the honor of receiving this award.A special Pulitzer Prize was posthumously awarded to Gershwin in 1998 "commemorating the centennial year of his birth, for his distinguished and enduring contributions to American music."The George and Ira Gershwin Lifetime Musical Achievement Award was established by UCLA to honor the brothers for their contribution to music and for their gift to UCLA of the fight song "Strike Up the Band for UCLA".
Past winners have included Angela Lansbury (1988), Ray Charles (1991), Mel Torme (1994), Bernadette Peters (1995), Frank Sinatra (2000), Stevie Wonder (2002), k.d.
lang (2003), James Taylor (2004), Babyface (2005), Burt Bacharach (2006), Quincy Jones (2007), Lionel Richie (2008) and Julie Andrews (2009).George Gershwin was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame in 2006.NamesakesThe Gershwin Theatre on Broadway is named after George and Ira.The Gershwin Hotel in the Flatiron District of Manhattan in New York City was named after George and Ira.In Brooklyn, George Gershwin Junior High School 166 is named after him.BiopicsThe 1945 biographical film Rhapsody in Blue starred Robert Alda as George Gershwin.