Books: Up Tunes GERSHWIN

What if George Gershwin had lived longer? He saw his first hit song, Swanee, sell more than a million copies, wrote for Broadway and symphony orchestras and performed Rhapsody in Blue to the applause of Rachmaninoff and Stokowski, all before his 30th birthday. He was planning further classical compositions when he died of a brain tumor at the age of 38 in 1937. Would Gershwin’s later music have made its way into the standard American repertory along with the works of Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber? Or would he have been considered an overreacher whose notes never quite shook off the reverberations of Tin Pan Alley?

In this amiable study of a man and his epoch, Musicologist Edward Jablonski shows why the queries persist on the 50th anniversary of Gershwin’s death. George’s father, Leatherworker Morris Gershovitz, thought Ira, the oldest of his four children, was the most talented — until George, nearly two years younger, appropriated the keyboard with an amalgam of brashness and genius. The boy abandoned school at 15 and quickly rose from Manhattan streets to the clamorous offices of song publishers. Sometimes his talent outstripped his ambition. When he auditioned for a job with Irving Berlin, the composer turned him down with some free advice: “Stick to writing your own songs, kid.”

The kid took it to heart. Gershwin’s music reflected an emotional ebullience, but he rarely gave all of himself in private life. He was exceptionally close to his brother; they shared a house even after Ira’s marriage. But George remained a bachelor whose most valued female friend was the married composer Kay Swift.

Gershwin tended to be facile in his attitude toward classical music: “I’d like to write a quartet some day,” he mused. “But it will be something simple, like Mozart.” Even today, when the rich harmonies of A Foggy Day and The Man I Love have become pop classics and jazz standards, the High Gershwin of Porgy and Bess and Concerto in F finds detractors. They began sounding sour notes as early as 1925, when the New York Times critic found the concerto’s “instrumentation . . . neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring.” Composer Virgil Thomson wrote, “Gershwin does not even know what an opera is.”

The target paid little attention to these professional attacks. Jablonski is particularly illuminating when he shows Gershwin distancing himself from his oeuvre, finding new ways of playing his tunes at parties as if they had been written by someone else. After a rehearsal he exclaimed, “I think the music is so marvelous — I really don’t believe I wrote it!” Gershwin’s appetite for popularity, says his biographer, took him even further from the critics; he could never quite forsake the Hollywood sound stage for Carnegie Hall. When a producer accused him of aiming too high, Gershwin sent a reassuring message: “Rumors about highbrow music ridiculous . . . am out to write hits.”

On that score he seldom failed. With Ira as lyricist, George composed the up tunes that seemed the antidote to depression, financial or psychological. Composer Alec Wilder remarked, “Since Gershwin was rarely given to sad songs, what could have been a more welcome palliative for the natural gloom of the times than the insistently cheery sound of his music?” The sound never fades. This year there have been TV specials, new recordings and productions like the Glyndebourne Opera Festival’s sellout Porgy. Next season a musical will be fashioned from the old melodies, with a new book by Neil Simon.

Jablonski bolsters the romantic tale of the young composer brilliantly burning out before his time. But in this case the story is true, and the question of what Gershwin might have accomplished remains. As Kay Swift conjectures, “We’ll never know, will we? But it would have been important.”