George Gershwin

George Gershwin (1898–1937) was the great reconciler of America’s musical worlds, a composer who moved between Broadway, the jazz-inflected popular song, and the concert hall with a fluency no one before him had achieved. Born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and raised on New York’s Lower East Side, he left school at fifteen to work as a ‘song plugger’ in Tin Pan Alley, absorbing the harmonic vocabulary of popular music while teaching himself the craft of composition. His early fame came from songs and stage shows written with his brother Ira as lyricist, a body of work that gave the American songbook some of its most enduring standards. But Gershwin longed to be taken seriously as a concert composer, and in 1924 the bandleader Paul Whiteman gave him his chance with the commission that became Rhapsody in Blue, a sensational fusion of jazz idiom and symphonic ambition. There followed the Concerto in F, the tone poem An American in Paris, the Cuban Overture, and finally the folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935), his most ambitious work. He died in 1937 of a brain tumour at only thirty-eight, at the height of his powers, leaving a body of music that, more than that of any other composer, sounds like America itself.