AUGUST 16, 1932
The Lewisohn Stadium stretched from 136th Street to 138th Street and from Amsterdam Avenue to Convent Avenue. Seventeen thousand tickets had been sold, a record-breaking audience. Thousands of spectators were turned away.
The day before the performance, George had been so ill that he thought he might have to call it off. He lay in bed unable to talk or even turn his head on the pillow without nausea and pain. Kay called his doctor, who knocked at the door, took George’s pulse, and prescribed rest and aspirin. None of which seemed to help.
She spent that afternoon and night with him feeling helpless. George was unable even to swallow a spoonful of chicken soup. All Kay could do was to lie beside him.
The morning of the show, the pain lifted. “You know something? All that pain was worth it,” said George. “It made me appreciate being alive.” He sipped his orange juice. “I feel reborn.”
In the afternoon, Paul Mueller drove Kay, George, Ira, and Oscar Levant to the stage entrance through a cordoned-off back alley. Kay had never seen such a crowd, brilliantly lit with arc lamps, chattering and laughing. Other composers, of the serious ilk, might have shied away from such a blatantly commercial venue, which drew not only the wealthy and sophisticated but also the common men and women who swarmed the standing-room-only area. But Gershwin reveled in the adulation.
Accompanied by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Oscar Levant delivered a sensitive and robust New York Concerto. “He plays the damn thing better than I do,” George marveled.
“Far better,” agreed Kay. While George played the Concerto and everything else with a free, improvisatory flair, shifting tempos and adding or subtracting flourishes at will, Oscar attacked it with bravura and rigor, as he would a piece by Brahms.
The orchestra followed with An American in Paris and then, as the audience cheered and whistled, George sauntered out to the stage, looking as graceful and dashing as ever despite his receding hairline. He bowed perfunctorily, sat at the piano, and released an energized Rhapsody in Blue as if letting a wild animal out of its cage. He followed with his Second Rhapsody, adapted from the long montage sequence he had composed for the movie Delicious and revised for Serge Koussevitzky. The spectators whistled, hollered, and stamped, demanding more and yet more. Looking at the crowd from the side of the stage, Kay pondered the phenomenon of mass hysteria, all this psychic energy focused on her beloved.
Of course there were the melodies. The razzmatazz playing. But none of that explained the giddy emotion she was witnessing. What they heard in his music was a resounding statement about America, E pluribus unum. From the blues and spirituals and cantorial chant and hayseed fiddle playing and south-of-the-border rhythms, as well as the residue of European high culture, America could forge a sound all its own, accessible, addictive, and modern. What these people saw in George Gershwin was the personification of their dream: an immigrant’s son who had achieved wealth, American prosperity hammered in the factories of Tin Pan Alley, riveted with Pittsburgh steel. The child of an alien ethnicity who had not only mastered the techniques and fashions of European High Culture, but who had helped reinterpret that culture, chipping away its pretentions for a rugged New World. Because he dared to be uniquely and truly American, without apology, he had earned the esteem of European composers and playgoers in London and Paris.
What Kay observed in that multitude of faces and heard in those cheers was not merely pride, but hope. Hope for a shared culture built on mutual respect. Richard Wagner had insisted that was the main purpose of art: to create and nurture the myths that fused a culture together. But Wagner had suffered from the European sickness. His vision of unified culture required the crushing dominance of one group to the exclusion of others.
For days afterward, it seemed everyone in New York City was talking about the Lewisohn Stadium concert. Several music critics and composers, rising stars like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, now openly grumbled about the injustice of Gershwin’s fame. Their journalist-critic devotees echoed and amplified their gripes, without specific attribution. The New York Times noted that “critical opinion in many quarters expresses reservations as to Gershwin’s lack of technical resources” and called attention to “the generally self-conscious manner in which the young composer utilizes the popular rhythms of the day in the development of his themes.” The New York World offered a more nuanced, ambivalent appraisal: “Mister Gershwin makes the most gorgeous mistakes in orchestration.”
Kay read this comment to George the morning after the show. He beamed. “That is the best compliment I ever received.”