I’m unsure once I first listened to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered 100 years in the past this week, from begin to end.
Snippets had performed all through the soundtrack of my life as a toddler and teenage — the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics on the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, random cartoons, commercials for United Airways, cameos in Disney productions. It’s a kind of classical items, like Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies and Bach’s spooky Toccata and Fugue in D minor, that way back left orchestra halls to entrench themselves within the American psyche.
After I lastly received by “Rhapsody in Blue” in its entirety, it was the aural equal of the Huge Bang.
The wailing, breathless clarinet solo that kicks issues off. The wry tubas and trombones that intensify the opening part. The thunderous drums and cymbals that announce the start and finish of actions. Elegant violins. Piano chords that jaunt alongside throughout solos and rise above the swirling, clashing chaos, demanding to be acknowledged.
George Gershwin, composer and pianist, at residence in New York. The picture is dated Sept. 1, 1934.
(CBS Photograph Archive )
The composition was a revelation. It swaggered and stomped and skipped. It was unpretentious and rollicking — nothing that I had identified classical music to be — and sparked an admiration for Gershwin’s creation that grows the extra I study him and his occasions.
As orchestras across the nation rejoice “Rhapsody in Blue” all through 2024, it’s essential to consider the piece as extra than simply music. In a yr when People are fretting about our democracy in methods we haven’t for many years, it tells the saga of this nation — and affords a approach ahead.
As Gershwin typically recounted, he wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” in a rush after studying a newspaper article reminding him of his promise to debut a brand new concerto mixing classical music with the jazz that was riveting the nation’s cool set on the time. Searching for a muse, the 26-year-old discovered one within the clangs, hisses and whistles of a practice journey to Boston. That base allowed Gershwin to assemble “a kind of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our huge melting pot, of our unduplicated nationwide pep, of our metropolitan insanity,” he informed a music critic in 1931.
His remaining product nailed it, each musically and thematically. Hints of Cuban clave rhythms, Tin Pan Alley harmonies, Jewish melodies and piano licks swim by its overarching Romantic theme. The messy tempo — alternately defiant, maudlin, weepy and bombastic — seems like a rustic that was working issues out inside itself however nonetheless remained optimistic and assured about its future.
There was no higher individual to examine this sonic tribute to the US than Gershwin. He by no means attributed any specific political significance to “Rhapsody in Blue,” as a result of he didn’t must. He was the kid of working-class Jewish immigrants who fled the tyranny of the Russian Empire for an opportunity at a greater life in New York. His work wrestled with the questions that each second-generation American faces. Do you preserve the customs of the outdated nation, reject them utterly to completely assimilate into mainstream society, or do you seize the perfect of the 2 and blend it with what you decide up from different cultures?
Like many second-generation children, he selected the latter state of affairs and lived it with gusto.
Gershwin made his resolution in a metropolis teeming with folks from world wide, in a nation that noticed the inflow of foreigners as alien and threatening. Three months after the debut of “Rhapsody in Blue,” President Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act. It severely curtailed immigration from Southern and Jap Europe and created the Border Patrol to maintain out Asians and Mexicans — the antithesis of all the pieces that Gershwin’s ode to America celebrated.
“Rhapsody in Blue” is most recognized with New York, correctly — Gershwin was a Gothamite, he debuted it in Manhattan, and the perfect recording of it stays Leonard Bernstein conducting the Columbia Symphony in 1959 whereas taking part in the piano (too dangerous Bradley Cooper didn’t re-create the scene in his latest Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”). But we in Los Angeles must also declare part of Gershwin and his genius. He decamped to Southern California along with his brother Ira to plug away in Hollywood, seeing higher occasions in Los Angeles as an alternative of the East Coast. However George’s profession was minimize tragically quick when he died in 1937, at simply 38, after surgical procedure to take away a mind tumor.
Dancers and piano gamers carry out throughout the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer season Olympics on the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on July 28, 1984. Eighty-four grand pianos performed George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
(Georges Bendrihem / AFP by way of Getty Photographs)
One may solely think about what Southern California, gateway to Latin America and Asia, might need taught Gershwin had he lived.
His tour de drive is aspirational, inspirational and affords classes for all of us. But there’s at all times been pushback in opposition to the brilliance of “Rhapsody in Blue.” Bernstein as soon as informed the Atlantic that it was “a string of separate paragraphs caught along with a skinny paste of flour and water” and never “an actual composition,” at the same time as he described Gershwin as “my idol.” In latest many years, students have accused Gershwin of cultural appropriation for daring to be a Jewish man who fused his love of Black music with classical music — a fusion that reached its apogee with the opera “Porgy and Bess.”
Lately, composer Ethan Iverson wrote within the New York Instances that “Rhapsody in Blue” was “the worst masterpiece” within the classical canon, describing it as “Caucasian,” regardless of the hell which means. To think about it as corny and antiquated and “white” misses its revolutionary potential. Thank God the general public has understood its reality all alongside.
There’s a purpose why it’s a regular that symphonies trot out at any time when they want a sellout (the Los Angeles Philharmonic will play it on the Hollywood Bowl this summer season, website of many iconic performances that includes Gershwin’s oeuvre). Why eyes glisten as folks rise from their seats when the orchestra reaches the rousing conclusion.
It’s unabashedly hopeful and pleased with this nation’s mess. It dares you to really feel the identical. It’s America at its greatest.
