My favorite nursery rhyme was not about spiders or stars. Wordless, its melody still arrested my ear. As a small child I sat underneath the piano in our living room, listening—the record’s faded jacket propped on my lap, the wood floor cool under my legs, the air shadowed by the curve of the instrument over my head. If music has color then this song was iridescent, a flash of spangled scales. The high notes of its piccolos rang out like the dazzle of sun on water or the trackless luster of gleaming ice.
“L’oiseau de feu,” Stravinsky called his Firebird Suite, in the language spoken by the Russian intelligentsia before their own 1919 funeral pyre burned away all traces of the grand manner. While it played, I stared at the phoenix reproduced on the album cover. The illustration was too muted to match the music’s vibrancy, but as its tones flitted in the corners of the room, the firebird seemed to hover before me. An incandescent creature, it was too brilliant to look at directly. Its wings scattered light across the wall, each feather a prism. Its heat stirred up turbulences in the surrounding air. Imagining its call rushing through Kashchei the Immortal’s garden, I could almost see the flowers tousled by the waves its song created nodding gently in the great bird’s wake.
Grown, I still listen to this music. When I hear it, I am transported to the suburban Boston home of my childhood: the circle of rose-colored light cast by my bedside lamp, the lisp of tree branches against the house in the windy dark, the umber piano resting in silent majesty down the hall. Then I travel beyond those sheltering walls to the gilded halls of the Paris Opera, where the 1910 première of Stravinsky’s avant-garde composition turned him into a celebrity overnight. Fourteen years later, having been struck as a teenager by Stravinsky’s novel rhythms, a young Brooklyn-born musician adapted their syncopations and suspensions in the first of his own classical compositions.
Hearing Rhapsody in Blue today, it takes many people only a first measure to recognize the rushed and jubilant pace George Gershwin announces from the start. The music’s premiere performance in 1924 instantly transformed Gershwin from a Tin Pan Alley upstart into a serious composer whose drawing power superseded the Russian’s own. Nonetheless, the twenty-six-year-old American was quick to claim Stravinsky as rhythmic model. In “Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul,” an essay he contributed to Theater Magazine in 1927, Gershwin linked the complex meter of the Rhapsody to the “ever accelerando” tempo of American life. Yet this indigenous music was created by a young man whose parents had left St. Petersburg only five years before his birth. No surprise that the man born as Jacob Gershovitz in New York would look to Stravinsky as mentor: the familial conversation circulating around him as a boy was conducted in an accented English punctuated by Russian phrasings and rhetorical questions shrugged off in untranslatable Yiddish. In the brash elegance of Rhapsody in Blue I hear the mixture of pragmatism and poetry that must have characterized that domestic speech, and as the music plays in my ears, I wonder whether in creating it Gershwin was not momentarily returned to the sound-world of St. Petersburg, city of pogrom and pleasure his parents had forsaken with eagerness and regret.
The Firebird Suite composed by Gershwin’s foreign-born colleague claims its mixed Asian and European ancestry with more insistence. Stravinsky learned his tone color from Debussy, though France’s nicer luxury could not rival his angular, edgy brilliance. Modern and Slavic, his music’s chromatic tones and pentatonic structure clash with the comme il faut polish of Parisian etiquette. The Russian-trained dancers who first performed the Firebird Suite possessed that sprightliness of movement as common in the huts of peasants as in the tsar’s opulent theater.
When I first listened to this music at the age of five, I knew nothing of Russia, the nation my father’s people had fled a few years before Stravinsky composed his score in Rimksy-Korsakov’s St. Petersburg dacha. But even as a young child I could hear in the Firebird something of this country’s splendor and harshness. Now, as this music fills my Berkeley living room, the contraries of Russia’s small-minded restrictions and vastness of scale are brought home to me. I see its barbarities to Jews, its exquisite Fabergé ornaments, and an entire spectrum of reds it is famous for: the maroon of sweat-stained babushkas, the rouge of chapped winter skin, the gouts of claret sprayed across the snow after Cossack lootings—and later, after my relatives began to master the sibilant sound of English fricatives, dropping “dis” and “dat” for “this” and “that”— the crimson wind-whipped flags waving high above Leningrad’s newly christened square.
I am by temperament distrustful of nostalgia’s extravagance, but I have only to remember Stravinsky’s music to call its bittersweet pleasures to mind. Its cadences stir the dimly puzzled recognition dreams leave in their wake, intimations of thwarted attachment—as though, yearning to cross over a threshold to another life, I remain standing in the doorway. The gold of a quaking aspen burns on the tree, then glows like stained glass under the wax paper I iron in my family’s Wayland kitchen. A ferry thrums quietly in the darkness of a foreign sea while my brothers and sister sleep undisturbed. A low voice speaks an untranslatable word and the brightness of red hair trembles at the edge of vision. For just a moment my brother David bends in concentration over an object I cannot make out.
What is it about music that allows the untutored alongside the professional to become receptive to such things, part memory and part want? How can waves of air create such nuanced shades of feeling? Painting offers a similar understanding, but the eye must travel from corner to center to corner before it grasps the play of color, line, and shape that composes a canvas. Reading a paragraph of prose calls for similar effort: time elapses before words can align themselves as idea in our heads. Even watching dance—an art that elides past and present as music does, each figure superimposing itself upon a prior arrangement—requires a translation of spatial designs into the language of feeling before we create meaning from movement.
Music is different. How strange to hear a piano concerto and know its beauty is simply the wake in air left by hammers striking taut strings. Still, opening the heart to the resonating atmosphere is effortless. Music speaks what is most intimate only to gesture toward ideas whose abstractness hovers beyond the limits of individual experience. This is not possession, but something nearer: the body’s physiology made audible to the listening self, its ceaseless rhythms beating soft and immovable in the ear. An art of distillation, patterned sound retains a purity distinct from the clutter of words, whose freight of association dazzles and intrigues. Well played, music conforms perfectly to the beauty you hear in your head. When this concordance arrives, the rightness is so complete it transcends the blunt shape of feeling altogether.
Grown and well traveled, I hold in memory the salmon-colored limestone of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall at sunset and the glittering blue-and-gold tile of its Dome of the Rock at noon. I remember the seal-shaped glass I bought on the island of Murano resting cool and heavy in my hands and the way the vaporetti skated light as water striders over the liquid skin of the Grand Canal. I have seen gargoyles grin atop the doors of Winchester Cathedral and peered at outlandish beasts half-concealed behind the trellised borders of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum. But nothing compares with the enchantment of that inner world I envisioned with Stravinsky’s help during those long-ago afternoons.
Though George Gershwin was American born, I cannot help but imagine him stepping out of Call It Sleep (1934), the story of immigrant life Henry Roth set in turn-of-the-century New York. Like Roth’s David Schearl, Gershwin grew up in a world that was loud, accented, cacophonous. The boats that had carried his Russian parents to the New York Harbor rose and fell on the swells like the bows of cello players drawing out the slowly vibrating low notes of their instruments, the legato motion of wrist and arm liquid as water. The chestnut polish of wood, the rounded cavernous opening smelling faintly of spruce and the ambergris of wax: the cello was perfectly framed to sound notes sonorous as ocean depths.
Arrival dashed this romantic daydream of the golden land. The squat rise of the New York coast halted the forward motion of the waves, which spluttered into dirty foam along its beaches. The Gershovitzes had left behind the elegant vistas of the Winter Palace that lent St. Petersburg its French facade, but even they, Jewish outsiders, knew the pulse of the city’s Russian heartbeat sure and ceaseless as winter. New York was different, its tempo quick-stepped as a child, its mood fickle as light in a March sky.
Though a fiction, Call It Sleep chronicles the painful adjustment of the newcomer more profoundly than any early twentieth-century photograph or film reel managed to document. Its language permits readers to hear as well as see the faltering forward movement of the new arrivals. Rendering their broken English with pitch-perfect ear, Roth acknowledges the inevitability of assimilation without ignoring its indignities. The book opens with disembarkation only to twist salutation into a shipwreck of iron and gall. Backlit by a waning sun, a dreary Statue of Liberty looms over the boat: “To those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane.” Expectancy has turned to grimness with the realization that “opportunity” is just a con man’s pitch. Stumbling onto the New York soil, their legs accustomed to the rise and fall of the waves, the majority of Russian Jews met only what Roth called a “canceled momentum.”
Like other émigrés, George and Ira Gershwin’s father, Morris, wandered during the family’s first years in New York. Between 1896 and 1916, as Howard Pollack notes in his comprehensive biography George Gershwin: His Life and Work, the family lived at more than two dozen addresses as Morris took up and discarded an equal miscellany of occupations. In the end his efforts paid off. Though he began as the archetypal itinerant peddler, he was able to provide his children a record player and a piano, privileges their neighbors did not possess. The immigrant memoirs published during Gershwin’s youth offered American readers mostly Cinderella stories, but his own transformation from hyperactive street kid to Carnegie Hall impresario was more celebrated still. George quit school at fifteen, but he and his brother Ira would eventually claim possession of the city. The pianist’s ragged fingernails were filed into the virtuoso’s well-insured hands and the skates and hockey stick were abandoned for tails and a tux. Not long after, the family left its Brooklyn apartment for a penthouse suite on Riverside Drive George filled with three pianos and thirty European masterworks in heavily gilded frames.
Loaned in 1933 to the Art Club of Chicago, Gershwin’s painting collection sported Picasso’s Absinthe Drinker. But Pollack tells us that it included the work of distinguished Jewish painters too: Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait of a Doctor, Max Weber’s Religious Festival, André Derain’s Road through the Forest, and Marc Chagall’s Rabbi among them. Many immigrant Jews shut the door in the face of the past, marrying Protestants and insisting their Russian childhoods had died with their Hebrew names. But Gershwin inclined his head in a gentlemanly bow toward history. Even as his parents became secular, the canvases he purchased gestured toward tradition and the sacred.
The Yiddish-speaking parents of Henry Roth’s David struggle to approximate the elongated vowels of New York’s place names. Rose and Morris Gershwin sounded Anglo-Saxon syllables with verve. “Ya’acov” became “Jacob” and “Jacob” turned into “George” before his father made this New World name foreign again, Pollack reports, by pronouncing it as “Judge.” Once grown, however, the Gershwin children riffed on their parental inheritance with such confident, ironical élan that this accent became the city’s own patronymic. The brothers’ Broadway tunes were easy and elegant, the swingy, staccato rhythms unmistakably American, the blue-toned notes carrying in their modern chromaticism faint traces of temple prayers.
The nostalgic “Swanee” made the twenty-one-year-old George recognizable, but forgetfulness cemented his fame. Contemporaries listened to his music for evidence of forward motion—the faster, the better. For the most part Gershwin obliged, tuning his ears to the Brooklyn streets and their dissonant fugue of voices, an exciting urban score for the ballet of streetcars and walkers he must have watched as a child from the windows of fifth-floor walk-ups. In Hollywood, Goldwyn and Mayer transmuted this raucous life into the aerial synchronicity of film’s early show tunes, directing cameramen perched high on platforms to shoot kaleidoscopic patterns of song and dance. Gershwin translated this motion into symphonic sound that created New World shine. His melodies glint like silvery cocktail dresses, their phrases shifting with casual grace from major to minor, their harmonies effortless in sound as the footwork of Fred Astaire, their voices blithe with the promise of Ira’s titles: “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” “Strike Up the Band,” “Lady Be Good,” “Beginner’s Luck,” “’S Wonderful.” Too charming for melancholy, too quizzical for artlessness, Gershwin’s music asks the social butterfly and the person who favors solitude to meet in the middle. Even his quieter melodies distinguish themselves by their conspiratorial invitation to the listener, one urbane enough to craft mood rather than moodiness.
Gershwin’s physicality worked in concert with his sound. From the pages of Merle Armitage’s 1938 homage, George Gershwin, the composer’s friends and colleagues insistently call attention to his vitality. Gershwin quickened the tempo at art openings, enlivened the chatter at cocktail parties, picked up the pace on golf green and tennis court. Reading these recollections, I see his lean frame thrum like New York’s electrified rails—poise on its own refusing the slackness of melancholy. If he carried himself with an uprightness a shade too vigorous to be jaunty, his smile was just serene enough to suggest it was not relish but an openness to appreciation he invited.
Arrogant? Maybe, but even at twenty-six Gershwin knew he was creating musical structures to rival New York’s inimitable energy. In hindsight he would provide the city a high watermark of achievement before its tempo stumbled at midcentury. And during his lifetime, by and large, the country accepted his self-confidence. Despite his dark Jewish looks and lovely charcoal eyes, Gershwin became America’s golden boy, spinning off million-dollar hits with the same ease Mozart turned out minuets and trios. It was true that Gershwin assumed a polish the eighteenth-century prodigy disdained. (“My son! You are hot-tempered and impulsive in all your ways!” Mozart’s father chides in a letter translated by musicologist Alfred Einstein in his 1945 study.) Still, juxtapose the portrait of Mozart you obtain from Mozart: His Character, His Work with the glimpses of Gershwin Armitage’s book offer, and you’re likely to conclude that the two composers shared a childlike delight, an irrepressible drive, and uncannily similar silhouettes.
Gershwin aside, I can count on the fingers of one hand the composers who have made American music history. When it comes to quick recognition, even these others—Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, Virgil Thomson—must take a back seat to Gershwin and Aaron Copland, the two immigrant sons who formed our most well-known twentieth-century sound. After Gershwin’s early death, Copland (a fellow New Yorker) came to greater prominence. Both musicians had grown up on streets where children tripped over the curling linoleum of cold-water flats and slammed screen doors in tempo with the sounds of scuffles outside. Copland created a quiet oasis in counterpoint to the din. In the serenity of his compositions, I also hear detachment: as a young man, he would recall in the calm, clear prose of Music and Imagination, he did not want art and life to “touch.” Music should be “a great building that shut out the street noises.”
Gershwin called this noise inside. Democratic as the downtown streets, the Rhapsody is breezy, affable, inviting. Scored for clarinet by Ferde Grofé, its opening slide up the scale recalls the anticipatory “A” orchestras play as they tune up onstage. When I hear its exuberant upward climb, I find myself recalling the mix of sound that rose around me as a girl from the stages where I played in youth orchestras. In memory I draw the bow of my viola across the strings while my left hand turns the pegs at its neck as I listen for the place that sounds a perfect fifth. From the solitary “A,” a city of musical phrases springs up; violas calling to the other strings, winds answering brass, each instrument adding its singular notes to a world resonating with timbres too sympathetic to call dissonant.
As Rhapsody continues to play, the sound metropolis of the orchestra shapes itself into a different image—the tumult and tension of New York, whose crowded midtown streets open abruptly onto the wide plaza of Lincoln Center. As a teenager in 1976, I once climbed the stairs of the New York State Theater in this complex to take part in a performance of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. A U.S. senator introduced to us as Edward Kennedy orated its speaking part in a nasal baritone while we high schoolers suppressed giggles onstage. A half century earlier, Gershwin’s own ears—barely out of adolescence—were tuned to this city celebrated for its Fifth Avenue fashions and censured in the photographs Jacob Riis took of tenements crowded as Calcutta alleys. As his colleagues looked soberly toward Europe and mimicked the prestigious romanticism of Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner, Gershwin listened for the live-wire vibrations of New York’s downtown flair and uptown swank. In the twenties as now, the city hummed with the brute power of the transformer and what Henry Adams calls in “The Dynamo and the Virgin” an infinite “vertiginous” energy. This Protestant blue-blood saw in the new force only a frightening waste of spirit; leave it to the child of Russian Jews to recognize beauty in the fervent drive for innovation.
Nothing in the American classical repertoire comes close to the Rhapsody’s bravura. The clarinet’s chromatic rush up the scale is American as a slide into home plate and Jewish as a village wedding dance, a Fifth Avenue strut with a swashbuckling nudge and wink, a street whistle that deepens into expressiveness as the music climbs upward: the melancholy brightness of klezmer stretched around the swagger of jazz. The work’s boisterous slide parades its Yiddish-accented demonstrativeness, and then the piano’s bass chords mime the rude life of the city, that keep-up quickstep of walkers, the jostle of feet and off-balance weaving of people hurrying along the pavement in a crowd.
Refusing a singing cantabile, Gershwin distinguishes each note. His clarity of expression lets the listener take over the bodies of different pedestrians in turn, the sounds of flute, trumpet, and piano distinct as a stiletto heel is from an oxford. As the Rhapsody rushes headlong toward its finish, it is almost possible to hear what Isaac Goldberg calls in George Gershwin: A Study in American Music a kind of “metropolitan madness.” As if on cue, Gershwin stays the hurried motion, replacing the music’s staccato texture in a series of stately legato phrases. Long withheld, full of yearning, their slow cadences climb upward. Hearing them, it is not difficult to imagine the thronged streets from on high. The ascending phrases seem to carry you over the Brooklyn Bridge, to circle past the New York Harbor, to dive toward coffee shops where people sit round-shouldered on top of bar stools. Soundtrack for reverie, the rising phrases speak the dreams that spiral upward with the smoke from workers’ cigarettes.
Its hunger to be in and of the world advertises the Rhapsody’s American provenance. Indeed, Gershwin linked his composition to the life of the streets with unapologetic enthusiasm. The Rhapsody is “full of vulgarisms,” he explained in an article for the New York Sun on May 7, 1930, six years after the premiere. “That’s what gives it weight. I never tried to prettify it as most composers do.” In the context of his sound, to be vulgar was to participate in the vigorous life of the ordinary. Ira’s lyrics evoked the high life for Broadway audiences, but his brother’s classical repertoire dignified the masses, the people heard pounding the pavements in the Rhapsody, the descendants of slaves who sang the minor-keyed gospel and blues that sustain Porgy and Bess. Music is the purest art, its beauty abstract as the numerical ratios that govern the intervals between notes. The Jazz Age rhythms that Gershwin’s classical repertoire codified are no different, though they speak of dreams in the same breath with disappointment. Like the folk songs Copland wove a decade later into Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring to honor cowboys working the range as well as the Smoky Mountain poor, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue spoke with impassioned fervor for America’s anonymous—its taxi drivers and railroad workers, shopgirls and sweatshop tailors.
Goldberg and Pollack both indicate that Gershwin completed the piece in his family’s small West 110th Street home some three weeks after finding his name in an advertisement for the upcoming concert at the Aeolian Hall. In this piece I hear the clatter and companionship of my own house. I watch my sister, a small diva, dance in and out of the picture; I listen to my twin brothers play trumpet and trombone, their brass choir all the more vigorous for its occasional discord; I recall my mother absently call, call, call from upstairs, her voice a single violin weaving in and out of the tumult. Remembering this noisy scene I have no trouble picturing Gershwin amid his own family, writing quickly and with concentration as the sounds of pots clanging and people talking rise percussively from the floor below.
In his hurry to complete the piece he left a few piano figurations out of the score to be improvised—but that was fine, he decided, since he would be its soloist. This composure only contributed to what some called an overweening pride and what Gershwin himself labeled, in an anecdote Jerome Kern retells in Armitage’s 1938 collection, “plenty of chutzpah.” But eighty years and scores of illustrious performances later, his first classical concert stands out for high praise. “He didn’t moon around, and he didn’t get brutal,” Virgil Thompson remembers of Gershwin’s own performance in a November 2, 1942, review of the piece played by the NBC Symphony. Instead, he “played it straight.” The twentieth-century virtuoso spoke with no less confidence in his talent than had Mozart; seeing, like that eighteenth-century artist, no reason to pretend otherwise. “I don’t set myself up as a pianist, although I’ll bet I can play that piece better than anybody you can name,” Gershwin told the Sun in his 1930 interview with unassuming pride.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby touted ascots and name-dropped Oxford to camouflage his penniless beginnings. A living embodiment of Fitzgerald’s “elegant young roughneck,” Gershwin remained Jimmy Gatz. At twenty-two, the composer told Edison Musical Magazine in October 1920 that he aimed to appeal “to the great majority of our people.” Fifteen years and $5 million dollars later, this goal had not changed. Others were quick to forget the Russian songs and Hebrew melodies that had sung them to sleep and swifter still to mock the greenhorns who disembarked on Ellis Island a few years after their ships had docked. Not Gershwin. In Hollywood, he hosted parties where film celebrities shared tables with refugee artists arriving in increasing numbers from Europe. He dallied with starlets and attended a concert hosted by Edward G. Robinson to hear Stravinsky play. But it was his Yiddish-speaking mother he greeted first after each of his concerts.
And if he had lived to be seventy-two, eighty-one—or even ninety, like Copland? What themes would we be humming in traffic and crooning as we coax our children toward sleep? Like Mozart’s gift, Gershwin’s own talent was theatrical. The Magic Flute offers high camp while Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess is a salt-of-the-earth saga. Yet both composers offer range amid restriction and a lightness of touch with which to communicate depths of yearning. The elegant irony their music offers listeners appealed to innovators like Einstein, Bellow, and Rothko, intellectuals and artists who were all too familiar at mid-century with the curbs experience sets upon expectation. In “At the Thought of Mozart,” a 1956 essay published in High Fidelity magazine, Copland praises this prodigy for the “happy balance” he achieved “between flight and control.” Copland’s serene Appalachian Spring recalls Mozart’s poise, if not his mercurial range of moods. But it is the febrile Gershwin, not his tranquil contemporary, whose music recalls the eighteenth-century composer’s expressive sensibility. In Porgy and Bess, Gershwin checked cockiness with humility and sang of desire with an eye on the close horizon, creating a modern musical idiom simultaneously bright and bitter. Copland’s tranquility offered a measured defiance of the frantic times, but I am convinced that Gershwin’s temperament would never have turned moderato. He would not have relinquished the staccato rhythms of the city to take solace in the pastoral sonorities of Billy the Kid and Rodeo Copland offered listeners on the eve of World War II. Neither, I believe, would Gershwin have lost his unmitigated delight in the world—his openness to joy and sorrow that speaks to ordinary people whose limited possibilities cannot curtail the range of their interior lives.
Such is Gershwin’s legacy, that it is almost impossible to imagine the rhythms of twentieth-century metropolitan life without his soundtrack. His imprint on the collective American imagination remains as permanent as Yosemite’s Half Dome in an Ansel Adams photograph, as strongly etched as the face of Lincoln on the penny, as iconic as the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty herself. His melodies remain the jazz standards of our day: sit in a nightclub in Copenhagen or Cancún on any given evening and you are likely to hear a Gershwin number. Fusing the rhythmic hesitations he learned from Stravinsky with the syncopations of African American jazz, Gershwin created a forward-thinking music that inspired proprietary affection in the generation of Americans who claimed him as a household name. “He alone actually expresses us,” Samuel Chotzinoff wrote for the New York World after the first performance of the 1925 Concerto in F at Carnegie Hall. Almost a century later Gershwin is still the present. More than eighty years after his death, “Summertime” is as familiar as “Amazing Grace”—and, as any internet search confirms, more often quoted in film and television scores than the “Star Spangled Banner.” In the present moment no less than during the year it was first sung, the hard-won sweetness of “Summertime’s” minor-keyed melody offers us the consummate American song of myself.
A great many intellectuals responded to the misery induced by World War I by abjuring faith in feeling. Gershwin refused to echo a world-weary modernism, that dark flower inclined toward gloom. Born a twenty-year remove from the Russian Pale, he saw no need to cultivate the lassitude and cynicism other Americans pretended. He possessed no less confidence than Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, Einstein’s indestructible curiosity, and the tireless energy that drives the reflections of Saul Bellow’s characters. “Whatever I know about music, I’ve wrenched out for myself,” Gershwin insisted to Life magazine in 1929, seven years after he premiered Rhapsody in Blue. A modern romantic, he understood innovation as a tool in the service of communication. In his work the pain of dislocation mutates into the pleasure of translation: this, he felt in keeping with other Jewish innovators, was what art and science could offer that a more literal piety could not.
For the most part music is an art of evolution, not revolution. Its most radical innovators quote established tradition without qualm. Twelve-tone composer Arnold Schoenberg threw out tonality, then named Mozart and Bach his closest precursors. Gershwin epitomized American audacity, but his music glances back toward the Russia his parents fled a few years before his Brooklyn birth. At the heart of a spiritual like “Summertime” lies a rueful “yes” that recalls the hard lives of his grandparents. His music’s spirit, a lullaby to the wealth and beauty of a culture still in its youth, bespeaks a quintessentially Old World acceptance of transience and insecurity.
I am three generations removed from my great-grandmother’s passage out of Russia, but the story of her first day in New York is as clear to me as if I had disembarked alongside her. Sun glistened on the wet docks as she walked down the swaying plank that bridged ship and shore. The warm air carried the salt-smell of fish and the sweeter one of rot. On the land close by the listing ferryboat, men and women cried out words she did not know, but their wooden carts—piled high with fruit and bread and round candies wrapped in the soft pink color of her best dress—made their unknown jargon beckon. Tugging the hand that held her own, she called out for one of the pastel circles in politest Yiddish. Her mother just shook her head; the small coin her daughter asked for, the family could not afford.
A century later, my language still includes a few of this child’s Yiddish phrases. As a girl, I found the drawn-out vowels and thick consonants pleasurable to pronounce and as satisfying to hear as the sounds my feet made when I walked through the field behind our house after spring rains had turned the earth to a rusty, sulfurous muck. My father denied recollection to look constantly forward, but a similar Yiddish undercurrent sustained the rise and fall of his speech. The Jewish drama, the playfulness, the half shrug that accepts the world’s darkness as it mocks our position within it—all lay underneath the affectionate remonstrance he meted out on good-humored days when, wagging a finger close to my nose in mock severity, he intoned what sounded like “ich-er-de-bott-geven” (it is forbidden), the stopped gutturals and implosive consonants familiar and foreign to my ear.
Growing up in a city whose Jewish character did not preclude condescension toward greenhorns and nouveau riche alike, Gershwin and Copland must have found sound-memories like these embarrassingly close for comfort. Unlike the taunts that greeted them as boys, adult anti-Semitism was sidelong and sophisticated. Regardless of their personal distinction, each must have felt the occasional spite as a cold current in warm water. No surprise they continued to widen the distance between their music and the Russian intonations of their immigrant parents. Like Langston Hughes, Gershwin sang America, but from his childhood until his death he composed within a milieu inhabited largely by Jews. The “flashing beauty” of Maxie Rosenzweig’s violin first pulled him off the streets, Isaac Goldberg recounts, and Schoenberg’s tennis game kept him playing during his last year in Hollywood—or so Oscar Levant remembers in “Variations on a Gershwin Theme,” his 1939 Town and Country tribute to the composer. In between, Gershwin attended the Yiddish musical theater that helped shape his sense of drama and traded ideas with Irving Berlin and Rubin Goldmark. Others—saxophone player Stan Getz, for one, master interpreter of Gershwin’s Broadway tunes—chose to pass, marrying out of their faith and moving to more affluent localities whose covenants excluded their own families. Still, the slow vibrato of Getz’s instrument recalled the reedy tenor of the cantor. Despite the shots of whiskey he slugged back to burn away memories of the Lower East Side, the Old World inflections Getz knew from boyhood and recognized in Gershwin’s melodies crept back into his own musical speech.
Gershwin invited his mother, Rose, to every one of his dinner parties, where her accented English posed a good-natured satirical question mark amid the general laughter. It was this irony Gershwin scored in his music, this bemusement that forestalled smugness in his most sentimental melodies. Humor, melancholy, and playfulness were the composer’s trademark inflections—all borrowed from the comedies of the Yiddish musical theater and the smiling resignation he heard in his parents’ speech. A certain quizzicality, the capacity to see clearly the limitations of his own perspective, gave to Gershwin’s music something that was not quite sorrow but that resonated underneath the brightness of the melodies and deepened their surface luster.
That was what immigrant parents could do for you, their rough-edged English abrading your ears till you understood the faltering gait of most peoples’ hardworking lives without conscious reflection, a wisdom those born into a more settled history take years to acquire. To listen to your native tongue spoken by someone who has grown up with a different language is to be reminded that your speech offers a discrete vantage on the world. The exotic emphasis in the familiar word offers the same picture as the reverse image in the photograph: another way to see yourself. You can hear the inflections of Vitebsk and Dvinsk in Gershwin’s vigorously American syntax, the way you might fleetingly register your mother’s blush in your child’s mobile face or your father’s stubbornness in the angry set of her jaw. Like familial memory, the musical recognition is as incontrovertible as it is momentary, giving a connecting richness to the silence between notes, adding expectancy to the pitch the ear anticipates. Looking forward? Looking backward? Music is rather a state of suspension, an art in time that stops time in its tracks.
At the turn of the century, as Gershwin transformed himself from a boy who scrapped in the streets to the young man who took bows in the concert hall, the old quartet of earth, air, fire, and water was ceding to newer and less melodious-sounding players: the strong force, electromagnetism, the weak force, and gravity. Almost a century later, it is air, the invisible immensity surrounding and containing us, that remains most difficult to grasp. Music is a palliative for this incomprehensibility, the tool that quickens atmosphere into the shape of sound, the miracle by which a formless substance is made to sing. Music yokes feeling with faith and the desires of our hearts with the disregarding universe. In harmonies that resonate with feelings too subtle to name, Gershwin found a synthesis that expressed the self while it taught him to hear the “not you” that is all the world allows. I listen to Rhapsody in Blue, to “The Man I Love,” to “But Not for Me” and wonder which is lovelier: the resonating notes, or the quiet that returns in their wake.
Gershwin had about two weeks—the same amount of time as did Mozart—in which to cope with the fact that he was gravely ill. At the beginning of 1937 he was tired. Some diagnosed a nervous breakdown, Hollywood’s new disease. Others attributed Gershwin’s abrupt loss of energy to fatigue after the completion of three films in twelve months, though he habitually worked at this crippling speed. A few intimates felt he was simply despondent at the conclusion of an unrequited infatuation for Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin’s companion. But in the past Gershwin had drawn knowingly upon his attachment to unattainable women, and his ebullient music was the richer for its darker undertones of feeling.
In June, excruciating headaches sent him to Los Angeles’s Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, but his exam results proved inconclusive. Anxious to get back to work, he declined a spinal tap (the very procedure that, administered in his final hours, confirmed evidence of a brain tumor). After his initial release he tried to settle back into routine, but astonishingly, playing the piano had become a task rather than a given: his motor coordination was off. Within the week he had engaged a nurse and moved to the quiet home of a friend. Five days later—just weeks shy of his thirty-ninth birthday—he lapsed into a coma. By the morning of July 11 he was dead.
In the end, despite its X-rays, psychotherapy, and drug regimens, modern medicine offered Gershwin less clarity about his outcome than did the eighteenth-century physic that readied Mozart for his passing. For both composers, a mere three hundred hours spanned the interval between relatively good health and absolute cessation. Vigorous, ambitious, cheerful, and absorbed, they found their respective worlds contracting with unimaginable rapidity until length and breadth spanned only the gap between bed and night-stand. The eighteenth century was habituated to sudden acts of God and the lightning strike of misfortune: Mozart could move from the brilliant stage of The Magic Flute to his darkened bedroom overnight, accepting the fact that the fifteen days he possessed before rheumatic fever felled him a month short of his thirty-sixth birthday were all he would obtain.
But for the modern composer peremptorily torn away from his round of composing, piano playing, and parties, confinement in the stillness of the sickroom must have been unfathomable. Mozart spent his remaining hours dictating instructions for the Requiem that would become his own eulogy. Did Gershwin entertain for a moment the idea he would not live to celebrate his fortieth birthday? His astonishing joie de vivre camouflaged his body’s fatigue, so it is no surprise he failed to register mortality until it hovered over his bedside. Here was a man so perpetually curious about the world a bouquet of flowers sent him rushing out for a text on horticulture; so absorbed in art he mastered painting, took up photography, amassed a library and traded dance steps with Fred Astaire; so unceasingly active he golfed, skied, fished, wrestled, boxed, lifted weights, and played tennis—all with the same competitive zeal and unswerving concentration. Irrepressibly energetic (he often punctuated his speech with a percussive beat of the left hand) and entirely joyful (he tap-danced in elevators), Gershwin was the most intensely vital individual those who crossed paths with his own would ever meet.
Friends mourned him for years, certain that behind the open door of every party they attended they would find him seated at the living room piano playing one of his own melodies. For Lillian Hellman, who left Hollywood immediately after he died, the Kodachrome city resolved instantly into black and white. A decade after his death, Vernon Duke, whose lovely “April in Paris” sounds unleavened juxtaposed to the lissome charm of Gershwin’s tunes, admitted he had not accepted the idea that the composer would not write another song. Even the writer John O’Hara, who confessed to disliking Gershwin, wrote for Newsweek in 1940: “George died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
I get up from my desk to put a midcentury recording of Getz playing Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay” on my old CD player. In a former decade, the scratchy sound of the record’s revolutions would have echoed the smoky timbre of the sax. Now I listen using another dying musical technology clean of sonic background as a phrase of the musician pulls against the quicker pulse of the rhythm. In the high held note that follows there is the shock of memory, and for a moment I see David again, my brother who died at thirty-one almost three decades ago, his bright orange hair vivid against the green of the armchair he is lounging in, his head cocked assertively at the angle he first affected as a shy nine-year-old. I hear his soft voice drawl out one of the interminable stories he smilingly refuses to abridge. Gershwin’s brightness is my brother’s sweetness. In his confirming energy I hear my refusal to mourn. Getz’s luminous interpretation is a lullaby to this composer’s early death, as it is an elegy for my brother’s own. In the vibrato of his low notes you can detect the musician’s exhalations of breath. The blurry croon of his playing tempers intensity of feeling the way a ring around the moon diffuses its bone-white beauty, the way cold air makes sharp words diffuse into soft mist around a speaker.
The shock of Gershwin’s passing was only the beginning for the composer’s family. Just so, divorce and distance caused alterations in my tightly bonded circle. But David’s death from lung cancer created its largest devastation. For Gershwin’s intimates, the emptiness of his absence must have seemed like this; a dark star, the malignant event that tore into their balanced chemistry, compounding the sharp pain of the young man’s loss with the more lasting ache of familial estrangement. Surviving into their eighties, his long-lived siblings had less and less to do with one another as small spats that would have resolved at once in earlier days developed into lengthy grievances. For Ira, who functioned practically as his twin, Gershwin’s death must have felt odd as an amputation, a severance more internal than external that not only divided brother from brother but the soul from itself. Ira completed the lyrics of “Love Is Here to Stay” after his brother’s death. In retrospect, this song’s gravely tender beauty seems to me less to honor romantic attachment than fraternal love.
My gentle mother, for all her apparent pliancy, refused to enroll us in music lessons. Private instruction was expensive, but it was the ambition of Wayland’s elect that rankled. Confusing diligence with aptitude, the town’s elite fitted their small Mozarts with costly instruments in expectation they would bloom into prodigies. The four of us children had no such pretensions, but since the elementary school rented both strings and brass, we too were allowed to perform experiments upon its battered specimens. After school, our house vibrated with the distempered sound of an ungainly brass trio and viola, an arrhythmia that would have confused the relentless metronome of a pacemaker. But I persisted in wanting to play the piano, and at thirteen, my mother finally arranged for a teacher.
We had inherited a Steinway baby grand from my grandmother, a compact mahogany beauty whose keys my father reanimated, piano-player-like, when we coaxed him to remember a few measures of the Rachmaninoff concerto he had performed for a high school competition. Later my mother played too, her facility for sight-reading a different gift from my father’s ear. When I was very young, however, the piano sat silent. To my small child’s gaze it was an umber expanse glassy as the sea above the blond hardwood floor. A fine quartz crystal, my father’s wedding gift to my mother, was set at an angle atop its smooth surface, its face etched with the closing couplet of Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet in calligraphic script: “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” The majesty of its sentiment would have been discordant amid the pleasant clutter of our household without the piano’s elegant line and loveliness of tone. Our collie sat nearby on a worn spot in the living room rug, her head cocked quizzically to one side as occasional shrieks of rage rose from my twin brothers’ room below. A green armchair, soiled with the residue of cereal spills, was positioned at the other end of the room. This was where I sat curled up most afternoons, propping a book on its frayed right arm.
The piano’s polished surface gleamed in the cold New England light, exotic as a Russian grandmother at a Boston school board meeting. Which it was: the hard-won product of an immigrant daughter’s dream, resettled now in the suburban home of her scientist son. From the age of thirteen until I turned eighteen, when I left Wayland, I practiced at the Steinway. We did not attend church or temple, so music was the only ritual I knew. I began with scales and arpeggios, the musical equivalent of a ballet dancer’s pliés or a runner’s stretches. Something in the discipline these simple exercises demanded appealed to my quick-tempered self; when I played them well, they sounded pure as the taste of cold water.
If you have been fortunate enough to attain a minimum proficiency level upon a musical instrument, you will recognize that wordless feeling of completeness that follows upon the chance execution of a piece played as perfectly as your ability allows. I practiced the Bach inventions out of a tall music book distinguished on the music stand by its pine-green front. With their fugue-like counterpoint, they were not easy to learn: one of the two independent melodies tended always to sound clearer and more rhythmic under my fingers while the other staggered, the weaker partner in a three-legged race. When I did get a piece to sound balanced, the coordination of sound was fluid as the kinetic symmetry of paired figure skaters. I liked Chopin’s preludes, too, with their dreamy repeating bass lines, and a few of the Études, whose difficulty I associated with virtuoso performers and that made the fingers of my small hand ache when I played them for too long. Beethoven I loved—what teenager would not?—and I repeated the stormy opening of the Appassionata Sonata over and over, the fortissimo chords crashing with grandiose self-importance upon my ear. Later, when I was old enough to prefer the classicism of Mozart and Bach to the romantic composers, I practiced the second movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, a muted andante whose distilled loveliness requires little technique but some interpretive skill before its arpeggios transform themselves into the dynamic line of real musical expression.
My parents have long since divorced, and the piano rests silent in my brother Charles’s home, my one-bedroom apartment not sufficient space to contain it. David, his twin, who stood so bashful and confident in the olive suit and bright salmon-colored tie he wore to his medical school graduation, did not live to see its displacement. The living room’s grace, which I loved with a child’s unconscious faith—the smooth pine floorboards against which the polished Steinway glowed—is accessible only in memory, as are the lucent words of the sonnet I had thought more permanent than the crystal upon which they had been so carefully graven. Nonetheless, I cannot help but equate their calm grandeur with the classical repertoire of the piano. Inextricably but irrevocably, I have married love to music, connecting the nuances of feeling sounded by this instrument to Shakespeare’s language and the line of the piano’s dark wood to the clarity of the crystal set atop its front. These days I rarely obtain the chance to play. Still, I have only to place my fingers upon piano keys and the past wells up in its resonating notes. As a child, my happiest times were those I spent islanded in the calm waters of family life that proceeded brightly all around me: the afternoons I read in the jade-colored armchair while my brothers and sister played in the kitchen, the hours I sat at the piano, the sounds of Bach and Beethoven and Schubert reverberating on its ivory keys. Now in memory I hear the chords of the Moonlight as they subside into silence, and the abiding family love of my childhood comes back to me.