![]() Jazz historians barely mention the composer of "I Got Rhythm," whose harmonic progression supports nearly as much jazz improvisation as the blues and most accounts of twentieth-century classical music treat Gershwin as a speck compared with giants like Stravinsky, Ravel, and, more recently, Ives. But this achievement is either pushed aside as a kind of embarrassment or described in terms of mindless self-congratulation, with George - the self-made millionaire, the Jewish mother's prize, the sex symbol, the man of the people - playing out every cliché of the American Dream. Even though he is the one twentieth-century American composer whose music is played all the time and everywhere, Gershwin is an isolated and inimitable figure - the only popular composer of this century whose works have made a lasting dent in the granitic façade of the classical canon. We Americans, however, have yet to make up our minds about Gershwin. In the papers the next day Viennese critics hauled out their usual clichés about American orchestras (too loud, too slick, too impersonal) and saved their praise for the Gershwin - the only kind of music we Americans, apparently, can really play well. ![]() The audience sat on its hands after the first three works, bursting into an ovation only after the Gershwin. Two years ago in Vienna I heard the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, which many American critics have hailed as the finest orchestra in this country, perform Wagner's Rienzi Overture, Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin, Strauss's Don Quixote, and, almost as an encore, Gershwin's An American in Paris - a difficult program, chosen to show off the orchestra's technical prowess and stylistic range. Even today Gershwin's music exposes the gaps between European and American musical sensibilities and the ambivalence in our musical culture. To say, however elegantly, that Gershwin's identity might not survive such study was to assume that Gershwin was a freak of nature rather than a true artist. ![]() Almost all the great European modernists, Ravel and Stravinsky included, had received rigorous musical training, which did not prevent them from writing highly personal and innovative music. Stravinsky's alleged response made clear who was the master and who the Lower East Side parvenu. Although Gershwin may have thought he was being polite, an unsympathetic ear might have heard him saying that he could buy any composer, no matter how famous. Gershwin's request for lessons, usually made at some fancy party where he had dazzled everyone at the piano, may have seemed charming in an unpolished, American way, or annoyingly naive, or just insulting. ![]() A hundred years after Gershwin's birth and sixty-one years after his death, it is difficult to say just who was patronizing whom in these little dances of fake humility and silk-glove rejection. One Gershwin biographer, Charles Schwartz, tracked down the sources of these stories after finding that they all led back to the Gershwin family, he speculated that the composer had floated them himself. The dapper Frenchman declined, saying, "Why should you be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?" The Russian, notorious for his one-liners, supposedly asked Gershwin how much money he made when Gershwin told him, Stravinsky said, "Then I should take lessons with you." Stravinsky later insisted that the exchange never took place, and claimed that before he had even met Gershwin, he had heard the money story from Ravel. He is said to have requested them from Varèse, Schoenberg, Bloch, and Toch, among others, but the two legendary responses are attributed to Ravel and Stravinsky. WHENEVER George Gershwin met a famous composer, so the stories go, he would ask for lessons. ![]()
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