The S.F. Symphony is taking on “Rhapsody in Blue.” Pictured: Composer George Gerswhin.
Beloved Gershwin work was born of a bandleader’s unlovable scheme
It would be hard to think of a masterpiece of the musical canon whose birth was as transparently steeped in bad faith as George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” To appreciate this work as it deserves — to love it as deeply and unreservedly as its rhythmic vigor, harmonic insouciance and profusion of melody beseech us to — means negotiating an array of dubious assumptions that were baked in from the start.
They concern the relationship between jazz and classical music, the distinction between “high” and “low” cultural traditions, and the racial component inherent in all of it. That’s a lot to disentangle in a piece of barely 20 minutes’ duration that may not want much more than to delight and enthrall its listeners.
But as “Rhapsody” returns to Davies Symphony Hall this week, as the centerpiece of the San Francisco Symphony’s program led by guest conductor Edward Gardner with pianist Simon Trpceski as soloist, it’s worth our effort to try. If not, we risk losing sight of what Gershwin did accomplish with this score.
The remarkable thing about the roots of the “Rhapsody” is that it began life, at least in part, as a marketing gimmick. It was part of an extended concert given in 1924 by the jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman in New York City’s Aeolian Hall that set out to prove a point — or at least, claimed that as its goal.
That point was that jazz could (and indeed should) be repackaged and reconceived in a way that could make it more acceptable to white classical music lovers. If Whiteman and his manager, Hugh C. Ernst, didn’t say so entirely explicitly, they came awfully close.
They titled the concert “An Experiment in Modern Music,” and Ernst penned a note for the program that remains striking for its disingenuousness and casual racism.
“The experiment is purely educational,” he wrote. “Mr. Whiteman intends to point out, with the assistance of the orchestra and associates, the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today which — for no good reason — is still being called jazz.”
The implications could hardly have been clearer. The African American artists who had given birth to this vibrant tradition were transformed into non-persons, their musical language depicted as a “discordant” problem in need of some kind of redemption.
The solution was not only to will these artists away, but to absorb their innovations into the structures of the classical tradition, which by this account represented a more sophisticated conception of form. The overstuffed program — Gershwin’s was just one of a wearying 23 works in the lineup — included rhapsodies, symphonies and tone poems ostensibly in the key of jazz.
And the false dichotomies didn’t end there. Whiteman added a nationalist strain to the occasion by enlisting a panel of expert judges to pronounce one of these works the most
authentically “American.” In a nice twist of irony (or brazenness), none of the judges — the pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, the violinists Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist, and the soprano Alma Gluck — was American by birth.
Yet it’s not at all clear that Gershwin himself was complicit in either the sketchy premises or the Barnumesque gimmickry of Whiteman’s concert. In fact, he knew nothing about it until a few weeks before the event, when he saw Whiteman quoted in a newspaper article with the claim that Gershwin was at work on a “jazz concerto.”
That was not true — it was evidently Whiteman’s attempt to get the jump on one of his competitors — but the empty boast did speak to certain artistic ambitions that had been stirring in Gershwin’s mind for a while. His musical interests, after all, were broad, encompassing not only classical and African American traditions but the Jewish popular and theatrical traditions that he and his brother Ira had been immersed in during their upbringing in New York.
The idea of combining these strains intrigued him, and so he undertook to knock out, in the short time available, something suitable for the occasion. The source of the title itself is unclear — one traditional explanation, possibly apocryphal, is that Gershwin was inspired by the color-infused titles of the painter James Whistler, such as “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” (better known as “Whistler’s Mother”).
The concert was a triumph, and “Rhapsody” made Gershwin an artistic celebrity in a way that not even his successful musicals such as “Lady, Be Good!” had done. From that day forward, until his tragically early death at 38 just 13 years later, he was never out of the spotlight, and “Rhapsody” remained one of his most popular and bestknown creations.
Still, one of the most exhilarating aspects of the piece is how poorly it comports with Whiteman’s regrettable framing narrative, in which classical music imparts a veneer of sophistication to jazz. “Rhapsody” is connected in certain ways to both the jazz and the classical traditions — both of which Gershwin understood reasonably well — and those strains coexist in a productive and uneasy tension.
But the connections can be tenuous. Certainly “sophisticated” does not accurately describe the blocky and impulsive formal plan that undergirds the “Rhapsody,” nor the relatively blunt thematic treatment of its material. Gershwin subsequently made more ambitious attempts to employ classical forms in the Concerto in F and “An American in Paris” — but not, I think, more successful ones.
Gershwin may have set out, at Whiteman’s bidding, to create a jazz-classical mashup that would combine the most salient elements of both. But in missing the mark, he wound up with something far more valuable — a work whose distinctive melodic profile and ingratiating theatrical vitality have continued to delight listeners for generations.