UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

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includes the deathless lullaby, Summertime.
Much can be said about Porgy and
Bess, whose music will be reused in
a symphonic suite orchestrated by
Gershwin, and in the instrumental suite
Catfi sh Row. For a long time the opera
will be performed more frequently in
Western Europe and in Russia than in
the United States. It will be the fi rst
American opera to be staged in La Scala
in Milan. It will be made into a fi lm,
whose music will win an Oscar. It will
take 50 years for Porgy and Bess to be
staged by the Metropolitan Opera.
Hollywood calls
The Talkies have swept Hollywood.
Music is now an integral part of a fi lm,
to the detriment of the pianists who used
to play while silent pictures rolled, but
offering new opportunities for composers.
Gershwin anticipates the riches that
will surely fl ow for himself and for Ira
from a second trip to Hollywood.
RKO Pictures is growing rapidly, and
offers the Gershwin brothers $55,000 to
work on the fi lm Watch Your Step, which
will be rebaptized with the name of a
Gershwin song, Shall We Dance. George
and Ira move into a Beverley Hills mansion
complete with tennis court, pool
and billiard room. George writes music
worthy of Ira’s lyrics: Let’s Call the Whole
Thing Off, and They Can’t Take That Away
From Me, which gets an Oscar nomination.
Yet George is not happy. He misses
the contact with his audience, and in late
1936 he undertakes a concert tour. For
some time he has not been at his best.
He suffers from frequent headaches,
and seems to be running out of energy.
During his fi nal concert with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, in the midst of
playing the Concerto in F he is surprised
to smell what seems to be burning
rubber, before passing out.
His doctor can fi nd nothing wrong.
Still with Ira at his side, he returns
to his writing, composing music for A
Damsel in Distress, a vehicle for his old
friend Fred Astaire, dancing this time
with Joan Fontaine. Then there is a new
fi lm which promises to be a blockbuster
hit, the Goldwyn Follies. Gershwin calls
on the talents of the famed Russian
62 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
choreographer George Balanchine.
But the headaches are getting worse,
accompanied by dizziness and perception
of strange odors. Consultations
with top specialists bring no defi nite
diagnosis. In June he undergoes a complete
checkup: blood and urine tests,
electrocardiogram, and a neurological
exam. They turn up nothing. George
is impatient as his condition worsens.
Increasingly weak, he naps often and
can no longer stand bright light. He
cannot walk without aid. Worried but
powerless, Ira and his wife place George
at the home of a friend with a nurse to
care for him.
On July 9, 1937, he falls into a coma.
Rushed to hospital, he is examined by a
neurosurgeon. It is only the next day that
doctors discover what they had suspected
for some time: a brain tumor.
He goes into the operating room at
the Cedars Lebanon Hospital in Los
Angeles on July 11 th , but he does not
survive the operation. He dies without
regaining consciousness.
The man behind the artist
Gershwin’s rise was not without
detours. It was because he was well ahead
of his time in his attempt to create a
fusion of jazz and the classics, because
he was a school dropout in a country
where diplomas had replaced titles,
because it seemed impossible to reach
the top echelons as a composer without
a solid classical background — and
Gershwin had studied at no university,
and with no European master. He was
also hampered by his very fame, for he
was more popular than many a composer
supposedly better schooled in harmony
and composition.
On top of it all, he was Jewish. Certain
articles in contemporary musical
journals by supposedly broadminded
critics have an anti-Semitic tone whose
virulence is downright disconcerting.
There was, around George Gershwin,
an impressive cohort of women, admirers
or potential lovers of whom we know
little. A few names are mentioned here
and there: Kay Swift, Paulette Goddard,
Julie Adams. But what good would it do
us to know the intimate details of the
great? I can say only that Gershwin was
courted by the great of this world, who
hoped to have him at their table, as well
as by women who hoped to receive him
in their beds.
“Why should I limit myself to one
woman,” he is purported to have said,
“when I can have as many women as I
want?”
In praise of Gershwin
George Gershwin was a phenomenal
melodist and a composer of genius, the
most illustrious of the New World,
and — one can affi rm without fear of
contradiction — the creator of a distinctively
American music. He leaves a
priceless heritage of fusion, classic jazz,
and eternal melodies that have entered
the American soul, with works such as
the Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue.
As for opera, his arias are recognizable
even to those who don’t know who wrote
them. We have all been exposed to these
sublime melodies, immortalized by their
spontaneity, their enthusiasm, their
freshness, their passion, and their deeply
human qualities.
As a pianist he was prodigious. It
was at the keyboard he was happiest,
spinning melodies or variations on those
melodies. Ira, his brother and collaborator,
wrote that he had been especially
astonished by his brother’s left hand. We
might regret that he left us only three
works for piano, but such works! They
are the Three Preludes of 1926.
Very much influenced by Afro-
American music, he was also an admirer
of Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg, Poulenc
and others. They in turn much admired
him and sometimes quoted his music.
Ravel became close to Gershwin, and
the two exercised a mutual infl uence.
Gershwin’s orchestrations became more
refi ned, while Ravel became infl uenced
by the Gershwin manner. Traces of
Gershwin can be heard in his Sonata for
Violin, his Concerto in G for Extroverted
Piano, and the Concerto for the Left Hand,
composed for a friend who had lost an
arm in the war.
Darius Milhaud, for his part, was the
fi rst composer to sign a major classical
work in the jazz idiom. It was La creation
du monde of 1923.
But why ma ke compa r isons?
Gershwin was Gershwin. There will
never be another.