BY 1927 THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING musical world was coming to see Gershwin as a force whose outlook and talent challenged artistic boundaries. Early in January, when London critic Francis Toye wrote a column advocating for critical treatment of music of many kinds, he cited Gershwin’s piano recordings of “numbers from Tip-Toes”: “I have attended many social functions, where he was present. So were other musicians, some of them with the most famous names in the world of music. When Gershwin played his tunes on the piano (he was always asked to do so) all of them, violinists, pianists, composers, crowded around and listened with evident delight.”1 When Gershwin and several friends traveled that same January to cross the border to Montreal for a winter vacation that included tobogganing, ice skating, and skiing, critics from local newspapers visited his hotel and interviewed him as a composer who seemed to be remapping the musical scene. Their questions centered on the composer’s view of jazz music. “There is jazz and jazz; good and bad, as in everything else,” he told them, granting that he probably saw “this thing from a different angle to other jazz writers, because I have studied music, whereas many of them just whistle their tunes or beat them out on a piano.”2
Back home, a concert staged later in the month in New York’s Steinway Hall for the benefit of the MacDowell Colony found Gershwin in a new role: critic. The performers were three prominent amateurs: music critic Olin Downes, author and college professor John Erskine, and the Steinway firm’s Otto Urchs. The New York press had chosen two renowned pianists to sit alongside Gershwin as he reviewed the concert, Ernest Hutcheson and Josef Hofmann. The column Gershwin wrote, published in the January 22 issue of the New York World, assumes the confident, sometimes jocular voice of a commentator writing from a crossover perspective, before such a thing was common.
Erskine and Downes opened the concert with the two-piano version of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, leading Gershwin to imagine his own pleasure if “a darn nice chap” of Brahms’s caliber were to compose variations on melodies he himself had composed. Erskine then played Mozart’s Coronation Piano Concerto accompanied by his daughter, a performance Gershwin found to be “an agreeable surprise,” noting that to develop a technique with such finesse, “a college professor must have a lot of spare time.” When Urchs joined the others for Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for three keyboard instruments, the way the performers relayed the themes, “from Erskine to Downes to Urchs,” made Gershwin think of baseball, specifically the Chicago Cubs’ famous double-play combination, immortalized in the poem “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”3
On the day that Gershwin’s review appeared, the Saturday Evening Post published a lengthy article by Gilbert Seldes tracing the history of jazz music as he had experienced it in New York City. Seldes believed that Gershwin’s unique place in American music rested on two cornerstones: the early public success of his musical theater songs, and the later public success of the Rhapsody in Blue, ratified by the critics’ response. “Gershwin has definitely broken with Tin Pan Alley and cast at least half of his future with the serious symphonists,” he wrote. Moreover, “in almost every discussion of jazz opera his name occurs as the probable winner of the great distinction of creating a native opera, in the jazz style, for the Metropolitan.” In such ways had jazz offered “one new composer to America.”4
Less than two weeks after this article appeared, the Outlook magazine carried a substantial piece titled “Gershwin and Musical Snobbery.” Critic Charles L. Buchanan, having panned the Concerto in F in December of 1925, now awarded it “an increasingly clear title to be ranked the one composition of indubitable vitality, and authentic progressiveness, that this country has produced.” That Gershwin be encouraged “to grow largely and finely” seemed to Buchanan no small matter for the future of American music. His article ended with a plea that the Concerto in F be performed more widely. And as it happened, Fritz Reiner, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, agreed, for he invited Gershwin to play both the Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F in two concerts in Ohio on March 11 and 12. This was Gershwin’s first engagement with an orchestra from outside the orbit of New York, and it would prove a model for similar engagements in the years to come.
On March 9, Gershwin arrived in town for a Wednesday morning rehearsal with the orchestra, followed by lunch at the Cincinnati Club. Reporter Charles Ludwig described the rehearsal in the next day’s newspaper:
For the first time in the more than thirty years of its honored classical history the orchestra played JAZZ! And they like it—like it immensely. Indeed, they came mighty close to “going wild” over it. They yelled “Bravo!”. . . They clapped their hands when Gershwin finished his brilliant performance of his Concerto and his Rhapsody in Blue, the world’s most famous jazz works. They stamped with their feet and made a noisy cacophony, with their instruments to voice their approval. “Great!” “Wonderful!” “A marvelous player!” “Remarkable music!”—the musicians raised on Beethoven and Bach, commented to each other.
Over lunch Gershwin explained that jazz was simply one idiom that he drew on when he composed. “When I write music I do not set myself deliberately to write jazz. I just try to write good music and make use of whatever appeals to me in jazz rhythm and idiom.”5 He also, for the first time in a public forum, linked the phenomenon of blue notes, and blues music, to race: “The ‘blues’ suggest the sad or ‘blue’ feeling hidden under the gayety of the negro.”6
In the wake of the concerts, in which Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks flanked the two Gershwin compositions, a pair of local reviews offered radically different responses to the challenge Gershwin posed for classical music lovers. One was by Nina Pugh Smith of the Times-Star, who declared that “probably no concert ever played in this city will elicit as widely differing opinions as this juxtaposition of jazz and Beethoven.” Trying to give Gershwin his due, though personally put off by his music, she described him as “a musician born, a composer born, an original thinker born, and an artistic personality needing to be freed from the artificiality of an environment”—meaning New York City. “If Mr. Gershwin could come out of New York into these broad United States,” she ventured, he “could acquire a national, and not a provincial, musical speech.” 7
The lengthy review written by William Smith Goldenburg of the Enquirer, on the other hand, recognized that jazz music had now “invaded the symphony concert hall and . . . been received with open arms,” which he believed could make it a new force to be reckoned with. Yet, he admitted, “we do not know whether to congratulate ‘Jazz’ upon its elevation in society or condole with the Symphony for changing the complexion of its associates.” Goldenburg wondered: “Who is this George Gershwin and what are his accomplishments that he should be able to . . . cause the musical and non-musical citizens to respond to the phase of art—yes, it’s that—which he represents?” The question was one that, decades after he posed it, historians and biographers were still pondering. Goldenburg’s conclusion: “He must be headed somewhere.”8
The early months of 1927 also saw the publication of another article by Gershwin in Theatre magazine, this one in the March issue. Each of his earlier written statements had been linked to a particular event or a composition occupying him at the moment. In contrast, “Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul” reveals the ideas and principles of a composer who hopes to be better understood as an artist. The article’s carefully posed photos show Gershwin as a stylish, pensive presence, his hands elegantly displayed.9 With years of composing behind him, Gershwin allowed that he was not surprised when the likes of Rachmaninoff, Heifetz, and Hofmann “paid me compliments upon my efforts as a composer.” What did surprise him, though, was that all these paragons “complimented me upon my piano execution,” even though his formal piano study had consisted of
but four years . . . and those not with teachers of celebrity. . . . My facility had come not from tuition but from a habit I had consciously cultivated since I was in my early teens. I mean my habit of intensive listening. . . . Strains from the latest concert, the cracked tones of a hurdy gurdy, the wail of a street singer to the obligato of a broken violin, past or present music, I was hearing within me. Old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, rag-time ditties, combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear. And through and over it all I heard, faint at first, loud at last, the soul of this great America of ours.
Having in his 1925 article dismissed as a superstition the notion that “jazz is essentially Negro,” he was now perceiving jazz music as “a combination that includes the wail, the whine, and the exultant note of the old ‘mammy’ songs of the South.” Jazz could be described as “black and white,” indeed “all colors and all souls unified in the great melting pot of the world,” with “vibrant syncopation” as its dominant note.10
THERE IS ample evidence that, after writing scores for Aarons and Freedley’s three hit musicals, the Gershwins felt ready for shows of a different sort, although several more along earlier lines would continue to appear: 1927’s Funny Face, starring the Astaires; 1928’s Treasure Girl, with Gertrude Lawrence; 1929’s Show Girl, with Ruby Keeler; and 1930’s Girl Crazy, with Willie Howard, Ginger Rogers, and Ethel Merman. What changed in 1927, though, was that the Gershwins began working for other producers, including Edgar Selwyn, a writer and director as well as producer, and Florenz Ziegfeld—men of an older generation whose subject matter ranged more widely. Indeed, the next Gershwin musical comedy, produced by Selwyn, was based on a libretto by George S. Kaufman, with a tone and subject matter that could hardly have been farther removed from that of the romantic comedies of Aarons and Freedley’s productions.
Kaufman, a Pittsburgh native, had been hired by the New York Tribune in 1913 as its drama critic. While filling that post—and, from 1917 to 1930, a similar one at the Times—he also took classes in acting and playwriting, and in 1918 saw a play of his staged on Broadway for the first time. Two years later, Kaufman and a group of journalistic and show business friends began meeting informally for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, near the theater district. This congenial crew—their company included Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, Franklin Pierce Adams, Heywood Broun, and Marc Connelly, among others—came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table, admired in sophisticated circles for clever pronouncements and the cultural influence they were said to wield in New York and beyond. Kaufman’s own brand of humor tended toward the mordant; to advertise a struggling new comedy of his that opened during a flu epidemic, he suggested a campaign built around the slogan “Avoid Crowds. See Someone in the House.”11 The success of the 1920 comedy Dulcy, written with Connelly as a feature for actress Lynn Fontanne, won for Kaufman a niche among comic playwrights that he sustained in the years to come.
Although claiming little relish for music, Kaufman contributed a sketch to Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue of 1923, and later that year, with Connelly, wrote the book for a musical comedy, Helen of Troy, New York, starring Queenie Smith and with a score by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby; this show logged 191 performances at the Selwyn Theatre. In 1924, Kaufman and Connelly supplied the book and some lyrics for Be Yourself, to which Ira Gershwin also contributed. The next year, with Berlin writing words and music, Kaufman provided the script for The Cocoanuts, starring the Marx Brothers, which had a run of 276 New York performances.
So when Selwyn commissioned Kaufman and the Gershwin brothers to write Strike Up the Band for the 1927–28 season, he had assembled a team with an excellent record of success.
The theme of the United States at war was far from a typical subject for humor less than a decade after World War I’s armistice. But the war Kaufman invented for Strike Up the Band was an absurdly comic conflict with Switzerland, ignited by a chilly Swiss response to a new U.S. tariff on cheese imports. Sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Horace J. Fletcher, proprietor of Fletcher’s American Cheese Company of Hurray, Connecticut, talks an advisor of the president into war as a profit-sharing enterprise, with proceeds to come from selling tickets to battles fought in the Swiss Alps.
On a morning during National Cheese Week, the curtain rises on Fletcher’s factory, where the workers declare themselves “Fletcher’s American Cheese Choral Society” in solemn four-part harmony, then sing an oath of fealty to the firm, led by their boss. Fletcher’s next song affirms his self-infatuation. “Typical Self-Made American,” sung to Jim Townsend, himself a farm boy turned reporter for the local newspaper—and the show’s hero—is an anthem of self-congratulation, all Fletcher’s claims of self-denial and strength of character being seconded by a chorus of workers.
Plant manager C. Edgar Sloane, the show’s villain, hopes to marry Fletcher’s daughter Joan, though she shows no interest in him. In a conversation between Sloane and Fletcher, the manager threatens blackmail if the boss fails to pressure Joan to be his wife: “I’m sure you wouldn’t want anyone—especially the government—to know about that little income tax matter.” When a telegram brings news of Switzerland’s objection to the cheese tariff, Fletcher reaches for an encyclopedia. “ ‘Switzerland. A small country in the middle of Europe.’ A small country. Well!” A military plot starts to take shape.
A coconspirator with access to the levers of power in Washington happens to be visiting Hurray that day to dedicate a mailbox (whatever that ritual might mean): Colonel Holmes, perhaps modeled on a real-life figure, Col. Edward M. House, an influential advisor to former President Woodrow Wilson. His arrival precipitates the show’s fifth number, “The Unofficial Spokesman,” in which Fletcher dubs Holmes “the unofficial wizard of the age.” Holmes, we learn, has always found that he drew attention by remaining silent, and the chorus versifies his philosophy: “He never said a thing that was absurd, / Because, you see, he never said a word.” Fletcher offers to pay the war’s costs and give the government a quarter of the profits, as long as the war bears his name. And Holmes agrees. A few weeks later, a crowd gathers outside Fletcher’s residence. “Fletcher’s American Cheese Choral Society” has become “Fletcher’s Get-Ready-for-War Choral Society.” Their upbeat song, “Patriotic Rally,” carries no fear of wartime mayhem, as if a friendly tussle fought with beanbags or pillows were just around the corner.
Jim Townsend and Joan Fletcher cross paths at the rally, and Joan is caught up in the excitement of the moment. But “I’m a peace-loving citizen,” Jim tells her. “And I’m supposed to go over there and fight? . . . To make the world safe for Fletcher’s Cheese?” Joan replies, “The man I love will want to go—he’ll be proud to go.” And now the pair joins forces to sing “The Man I Love,” the luminous ballad cut from Lady, Be Good! Joan, played by Vivian Hart, sings Ira’s original words, while Jim, played by Roger Pryor, answers with a second refrain imagining the girl he loves. The recycled song works its magic, and the two fall into each other’s arms.
Joan loves her father and believes ardently in Fletcher’s American Cheese, to the point of thinking war a fair price for protecting its reputation, and Jim’s feelings for Joan are strong enough to coax him into the military. But as the martial drumbeat intensifies and patriotic toasts are being proposed, Jim samples the ingredients used in Fletcher’s factory and realizes the cheese is the product of Grade B milk. He decides that only one course is open to him: to proclaim the coming war as a fake, an advertisement for cheese manufactured from milk that he, as a dairyman, knows to be substandard. The forum for his stand is the “Finaletto,” a public confrontation with Jim on one side and Fletcher, Sloane, and Holmes on the other. Between them stands the chorus, responding to the argument being waged in the arena.
Jim first makes his case in a confident, square-cut melody, and the chorus listens respectfully. The war’s proponents answer with driving, agitated-sounding music of uncertain tonality, making a counterclaim with a plausible edge of menace. When Joan weighs in with music radiating trust in her father’s integrity, the townspeople’s allegiance shifts in her direction, and when Fletcher weighs his own standing against that of the young journalist, the chorus supports his self-endorsement. Jim’s lone voice cannot prevail against that groundswell of public opinion. Having begun on a note of controversy, the Finaletto ends with the bumptious unanimity of “Patriotic Rally” music. That this chain of events has unfolded, operalike, among characters who sing rather than speak their words invests the Finaletto with an emotional weight more nuanced and potent than the usual musical comedy temperament.
Jim is dragged off in chains, leaving the stage to Fletcher, Sloane, and Holmes, plus Mrs. Draper, an unattached dowager who shares their goals. (“If there’s one thing I like,” she assures them, “it’s a nice war.”) The cabal addresses ideological matters in a meeting of the newly formed “Very Patriotic League,” convened as the four of them don Ku Klux Klan–like hoods. Purity of allegiance is deemed essential. Questions are raised about why, for example, The Swiss Family Robinson is still available in American libraries. The cabal discusses how upcoming battles may be staged to best dramatic effect and priced for maximum profit. Fletcher invites his colleagues to “imagine a beautiful moonlight night in the Alps—a good battle—music—maybe Paul Whiteman himself.”
Brought in to face interrogation by the League, Jim is conscripted into the military, and the show’s title song, which serves as the Act I finale, begins. Ira Gershwin remembered vividly the origins of “Strike Up the Band”:
Late one weekend night in the spring of 1927, I got to my hotel room with the Sunday papers. . . . I hadn’t finished the paper’s first section when the lights went up in the next room; its door opened and my pajamaed brother appeared. “I thought you were asleep,” I said. “No, I’ve been lying in bed thinking, and I think I’ve got it.” “Got what?” I asked. “Why, the march, of course. I think I’ve finally got it. Come on in.” . . . He played the refrain of the march practically as it is known today. Did I like it? Certainly I liked it, but— “But what?” “Are you sure you won’t change your mind again?” “Yes, I’m pretty sure this time.” . . . The reason I wanted assurance was that over the weeks he had written four different marches and on each occasion I had responded with “That’s fine. Just right. O.K., I’ll write it up.” And each time I had received the same answer: “Not bad, but not yet. Don’t worry. I’ll remember it; but it’s for an important spot, and maybe I’ll get something better.” This fifth try turned out to be it. Interestingly enough, the earlier four had been written at the piano; the fifth and final came to him while lying in bed.12
Gershwin’s genial military march was just the right fight song for a comic war in which nobody gets hurt. Kaufman would later call it “the best song in any show of mine.”13
Act II begins in the Swiss Alps. The weather is fine and the crowd is eager to watch a battle, but the Americans’ adversaries are nowhere to be found. Jim, relegated to kitchen duty, figures out that when a Swiss general wants his troops to assemble, he summons them with a yodel. Jim proposes that the Americans hide in a particular mountain region while one of their own officers yodels, and then surround the enemy when they answer the call. His plan works like a charm. The Swiss are captured without bloodshed, the war is won, and Jim—Horace Fletcher anoints him “Major James Tecumseh Townsend”—is honored as its hero.
In the show’s last scene, back in Connecticut, Jim claims Joan for his bride-to-be, with her father’s blessing. He also discovers the culprit who degraded Fletcher’s American Cheese from Grade A to B: Sloane, who turns out to be Col. Herman Edelweiss, head of the Swiss Secret Service. Horace Fletcher, who has agreed to marry Mrs. Draper, is vindicated as an innocent party. The way is now clear for the tariff to be repealed, and for him and his company to join an international League of Cheeses, where all cheeses are considered equal.
The ironic subject matter and biting wit of Strike Up the Band have worn relatively well into the twenty-first century. Jim Townsend and Joan Fletcher, rather than a juvenile and an ingénue, seem more like a hero and a leading lady; both show strong temperaments tied to moral sensibilities. Fletcher, Holmes, and Sloane are all powerful and flawed. The vacationlike setting in which the show’s creators turned the plot into a musical satire is also worth noting. In April 1927, George, with Ira and his wife Leonore, rented a country house near Ossining, New York. The house stood on the forty-acre Chumleigh Farm, allowing the brothers recreational opportunities not readily available on New York’s Upper West Side. Guests from the city dropped by for visits, including Kaufman, songwriter Harry Ruby—who brought his baseball glove and a ball so that he and George could play catch—and columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, who took part in a croquet match. It was here, with plenty of daylight hours available and more time than usual on their hands, that the Gershwins were first tempted to take up painting.
One invitee to Chumleigh Farm was composer Charles Martin Loeffler, born in Europe but long a Boston resident, and then living in the eastern Massachusetts town of Medfield. Loeffler had been a teacher of Gershwin’s close friend Kay Swift, who, in New York the preceding April, had given a party in Loeffler’s honor. Gershwin played the piano at that gathering, and shortly afterward the veteran composer wrote Swift that he had found it a revelation to hear Gershwin “play his Concerto, hear him sing his songs and—to know him.” He also found Gershwin a possessor of “that rare something, indefinably lovable.”14 A friendship blossomed between the two composers, and in the coming years Loeffler would attend a number of Gershwin events and Broadway shows. Gershwin invited Loeffler to visit his country retreat, which he was unable to do because of an eye ailment, but a letter he wrote in June testifies to the warmth of his feelings for a younger member of his profession:
It is needless to say that I have pinned my faith on your delightful genius and on your future. You alone seem to express charm, grace and invention amongst the composers of our time. When the Anthland and Coptheils ed tutti quanti will be forgotten, . . . you, my dear friend, will be recorded in the Anthologies of coming ages! I am looking forward with keenest expectations of consoling delight to your latest work.15
The Gershwins’ stay at Chumleigh Farm seems to have continued into the latter part of July, when they returned to their New York abode on West 103rd Street.
On August 29, Strike Up the Band had its premiere at Reade’s Broadway Theatre in the seaside community of Long Branch, New Jersey. A Variety critic praised Kaufman and the Gershwins for having constructed an American musical on the model of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Savoy operas,” but noted that “satirical musical shows have never been a success in America, though the time may now be ripe. Nor do Americans like to be laughed at on the stage—this seems to appeal only to the English.”16 On September 5, the second phase of the tryout run began, now at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia. The critics generally liked what they saw, the Philadelphia Inquirer similarly lauding the Gershwin brothers for capturing “the Savoyard mantle.”
But although many critics appreciated the artful presentation of a mock war over cheese, the general public had trouble seeing beyond a premise that seemed unpatriotic, hence unfunny. By the time the company reached Philadelphia, key members of the cast had begun to give notice, and attendance fell off quickly. On September 14, barely a week after it opened there, Variety pegged the show as a flop and held Kaufman’s book responsible. “ ‘Strike Up the Band’ won some corking notices, but the clientele did not like it at all” was the diagnosis. “The first string men, who saw it later in the week, waxed even more enthusiastic about it in their ‘second thoughts,’ but the pungent satire and absence of the usual musical comedy hokum in the George Kaufman book didn’t get [over].”17
With customers staying away and losses piling up, producer Selwyn closed the show before the “furore” forecast for New York could come to pass. A forlorn memory of Strike Up the Band’s last days in Philadelphia probed the chasm between the show’s sterling theatrical pedigree and its rejection by theatergoers. It seems that Ira Gershwin, haunted by “the ghosts of D’Oyly Carte”—a reference to Richard D’Oyle Carte, the impresario who brought Gilbert and Sullivan together—was standing with Kaufman and his brother in front of the Shubert Theatre. As they looked disconsolately down the street, a cab drew up and two elegant Edwardian-style clubmen, dressed to the nines, got out, bought tickets, and entered the theater. “That must be Gilbert and Sullivan,” Ira commented, “coming to fix the show.”18