GERSHWIN
GEORGE GERSHWIN
(1898–1937)
London Philharmonic Orchestra – An American in Paris
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1997
George Gershwin is one of the few composers of any century to make the crossover successfully from ‘popular’ to ‘serious’ music. Born in Brooklyn in 1898, he was already an acclaimed composer by his early twenties. Al Jolson’s recording of ‘Swanee’ became his first big success, and he went on to write twenty-two musical comedies, mostly in collaboration with his lyricist brother Ira, including Of Thee I Sing in 1931, the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize. Later in Hollywood the partnership also wrote such hits as ‘A Foggy Day’, ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ and ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’.
An American in Paris premiered on 13 December 1928 at the Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Damrosch. It is probably the most accomplished of Gershwin’s large-scale orchestral works, and perhaps significantly the first to be fully orchestrated by himself. Essentially a jazz-based tone poem, its style is unselfconscious, brash and humorous, encapsulating all the sights, sounds and bustle that go to make up the fabled city all good Americans go to when they die.
The work had been sketched out in a score for two pianos before Gershwin made his fifth and final trip to Europe in the spring of 1928. In search of the distinctive sound of a Paris taxi to flavour the piece, he and a French-speaking friend, Mabel Schirmer, scoured the auto parts shops on the Avenue de la Grande Armée for a collection of motor horns, which subsequently caused much bemused comment back in his room at the Majestic Hotel where he was working on the orchestration.
The finished work comprises three continuous movements or episodes rounded off with a coda. Atmospheric as it is, the music does not set out to tell any specific story. Gershwin remarked, “As in my other orchestral compositions, I’ve not endeavoured to present any definite scenes in this music. The rhapsody is programmatic only in a general impressionistic way, so that the individual listener can read into the music such episodes as his imagination pictures for him.” However, to help him through the composition he did have a certain structure in mind.
The opening, he wrote, portrays the impressions of an American visitor strolling about the city, taking in the sights and soaking up the atmosphere. The gay tone is then overtaken by a strongly rhythmical blues section, as if the tourist had wandered into a bar and, after a few drinks, succumbed to a bout of homesickness. (In fact, Gershwin had scribbled the word ‘drunk’ over this section in the two-piano arrangement, but omitted it again in the final orchestrated score.) The blues rise to a climax, to be immediately followed by a return to the bubbling exuberance of the hiving streets. At the conclusion of the piece, “the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant”.
But the dangers of being too specific about the ‘meaning’ of such programme music are interestingly highlighted by the fact that the composer actually disagreed with some of the programme notes musicologist Deems Taylor prepared for the premiere. One example is the quiet Delius-like moment introduced by the celesta: Gershwin stated that at this point he imagined his American hero passing a cathedral. Taylor thought otherwise, and described the ensuing dialogue between solo violin and orchestra as a meeting between a charming Parisienne and a slightly drunken foreigner who can only repeat her sallies in unintelligible English.
Reviews after the premiere were, as usual with Gershwin’s more serious music, mixed. Praise and condemnation came in equal parts, but the composer as usual took it all in his stride and moved on to the next thing. Sadly, he had less than a decade of creativity ahead of him. Barely two years after the controversial opening of his ‘folk opera’ Porgy and Bess in 1935, Gershwin died of a brain tumour. He was not yet 39 years old.
