AND THE SECOND RHAPSODY (1930–31)
ON NOVEMBER 2, 1930, FRANCES GERSHWIN married Leopold Godowsky in George’s Riverside penthouse. The next day, Gershwin conducted a performance of Girl Crazy at the Alvin Theatre, and two days after that, George, Ira, and Leonore, along with librettist Guy Bolton, left New York bound by train for Hollywood.
Arriving on November 9, they stayed at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel while the house the Gershwins had rented, at 1027 Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills—formerly occupied by Greta Garbo—was being readied for them. Some days later, George described the scene in a letter to Ethel Merman:
Well, here we are old Hollywoodites although we’ve been here about a week. It gets you. We’re booked for dinner at a different house every night this week. And always the same routine. First cocktails, then picture [movie] talk. Dinner is served starting with soup which is immediately followed by picture talk. Then fried fish or lobster . . . with picture talk and onions. That continues until after dessert and then demitasse is served in the living room and then the butler leans over a little and says, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with those musical talkies.”
For Gershwin, the environment seemed “a fine contrast to the way we wrote Girl Crazy that big New York hit with Ethel Merman and lyrics by Gershwin and music by Gershwin. . . . Is the show holding up? I mean the performance. How is Merman behaving?”1
The contracts George and Ira signed with Fox studios for a picture titled Delicious covered six weeks of work before the Christmas holiday and eight weeks after. When it turned out that the screenplay by Bolton and Sonya Levien called for only half a dozen vocal numbers, and that three of them could be fashioned from songs already in existence, the Hollywood engagement became something that—for Ira, if not for George—must have felt like a paid vacation. For George, it brought a chance to exercise his ingenuity as a showman, and the way he responded is a story in itself.
Once the three Gershwins were settled in their Beverly Hills house—George slept in Greta Garbo’s bed, which “hasn’t helped my sleep any,” as he wrote to Isaac Goldberg—news on the work front proved to be good. Before Christmas he and Ira had read and played through the songs they had written for the film’s producer, Winfield Sheehan, and its director, David Butler, and both men seemed pleased. In his letter to Goldberg Gershwin also slipped in the news that the score would include music that had gone unmentioned in the original plan: “a Manhattan Rhapsody—or Fantasy—which I am going to write for it.” He then added a musical request: “Please write me about any new music the Boston Symphony Orchestra is giving these days.”2 In the fall of 1929, Serge Koussevitzky had invited him to compose a new work for the orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, planned for 1931; Gershwin had declined then, pleading other obligations, but his query to Goldberg suggests he was thinking about possible uses for the “Rhapsody” or “Fantasy” he had decided to compose for Delicious.3
The plot of Delicious, which Bolton apparently originated, centers on a romance between a Scottish immigrant girl, played by Janet Gaynor, and a wealthy American, played by Charles Farrell. Gaynor’s character, Heather Gordon, is a lone traveler who expects to be met in New York Harbor by a relative, and Larry Beaumont, Farrell’s character, is a socially prominent Long Islander returning from an overseas trip with his girlfriend and her mother. The movie’s opening scene takes place on an ocean liner steaming westward across the Atlantic. From first class, affluent passengers look down on the steerage deck below, teeming with immigrants who are entertaining themselves with dancing and singing.4 Larry enjoys what he sees, unlike his condescending girlfriend Diana. Among the passengers in steerage is a family of Russian-born musicians on their way to an engagement at the “Russian Café” in New York City. Sascha, played by Raul Roulien, is a composer and pianist who has taken a fancy to Heather and has written a song about her. Eager to hear it, she leads him up a stairway to the first-class deck in search of a piano, but they are spotted by a steward and flee in different directions. Heather finds herself in the ship’s horse stalls, where she meets Larry, a polo star, who is tending his favorite pony.
Their conversation is interrupted when Sascha calls out to Heather, who leaves to join him. The two immigrants resume their search for a piano, which they locate in the ship’s saloon. Sascha can now sing the first Gershwin number in the show, to an audience of four: Heather, Larry, Diana, and her mother, Mrs. Van De Berghe. He explains that the song’s origins lie in the charm of a mispronunciation by Heather: “You’re so de-lic-i-ous,” followed by “cap-ri-ci-ous,” “am-bish-i-ous,” and “re-pe-tish-i-ous.”5 As Sascha sings and plays, Larry is transfixed by the young woman he has just met. He has already proposed marriage to Diana, but, though inclined to accept him, she has asked for time to think it over. Mrs. Van De Berghe cautions her daughter that Larry may be “thinking it over” too. In a performance lasting a bit more than three minutes, “Delishious” reveals the artistry of Sascha, affirms the magnetism of Heather, and casts her in a light appealing to Larry. “As the song ends,” reads a cue in the shooting script, “Heather and Larry have forgotten that it is Sascha’s song.”
The scene that follows takes place below deck, where Heather confesses her attraction to Larry to Sascha’s sister, Olga. Falling asleep, Heather dreams of being welcomed to New York with a lavish ceremony, in which “Mr. Ellis,” proprietor of Ellis Island, presents her with a giant key to the city.6 But when she actually disembarks the next morning, she finds herself a fugitive from justice, sought by U.S. immigration officials for deportation back to Scotland. She escapes from her pursuers in a truck transporting a polo pony to its owner’s estate on Long Island—coincidentally, the estate of Larry Beaumont. Larry’s valet Jansen, who knows Heather from the ocean voyage, hides her in an upstairs guest room.
Heather has rejected a marriage proposal from Sascha, whom she admires but does not love. And now she sings a reflective song, “Somebody from Somewhere,” affirming her faith that someday she will find the real thing.7 The song owes much to her Scottish identity,8 with a verse that quotes Robert Burns’s classic song “Comin’ through the rye.”9 Although the refrain melody is spare, the harmonies show enough richness—especially in their use of secondary dominants—to reflect Gershwin’s compositional touch. When Larry learns that Heather has found her way to his estate, and that a friendly note he wrote her before leaving the ship was never delivered, he greets her warmly, offering her a place of refuge until her immigration trouble is resolved. But she slips away during the night, not wanting to live on his charity, and assuming that his kindness to her stems from pity.
Now the scene shifts to Lower Manhattan and the Varick Street flat where Sascha and his extended family live in a state of artistic penury. Heather has found her way there, and she is offered a pantomimed role in the act the family is preparing for the nearby Russian Café. On the evening of her debut, Larry is sitting at a table with Diana and her mother. Sascha and his musician colleague Toscha announce a new comic number: “Katinkitschka,” a slapstick folk song about a Russian peasant couple who are having trouble with their daughter Katinka, played by a mute Heather. Here, Ira invokes the broad comedy of a suffix run wild to mock parents whose spirited daughter has flaunted their house rules by falling for a soldier boy instead of marrying a banker’s son. But in the end, the sight of Katinka’s “wedding ringitchka” inspires her “Popitschka” and “Momitschka” to “laugh and singitchka.”
To Larry’s astonishment, after the show Diana’s mother announces an engagement party for him and her daughter, to be held during the coming week. In light of that news, a subdued Heather accepts Sascha’s second proposal of marriage. Back in the Varick Street flat, Jansen joins a family effort to compose a wedding song, mostly on vocables like the title—“Blah, blah, blah”—with an occasional word of endearment appearing when a rhyme is required. Everyone but the bride-to-be is caught up in the tide of good spirits that the new song fosters.10
On Sascha and Heather’s wedding day, after the family troupe has left for the Russian Café, Heather turns on the radio only to learn that Larry Beaumont has suffered a nasty fall in a polo match. She rushes out to Long Island to be by his side, offering her services as a nurse and obviously raising his spirits. But when the local police learn of her whereabouts, they show up to arrest her, and she barely manages to escape. Returning to Sascha’s flat, she finds wedding decorations still hanging on the walls and the cake standing untouched on the sideboard. Sascha, sitting at the piano, is playing the soaring slow theme from the “New York Rhapsody” he has just completed, a theme that Gershwin referred to as “Brahms-like.”
After greeting Heather, Sascha guides her through his new composition, citing different aspects of New York City: its towers, noise, riveters, nighttime silence. As the other musicians return to the apartment, they join in immediately with Sascha to play music from his new rhapsody. An immigration officer has been spotted in the neighborhood, and Sascha hopes the music will distract him as Heather finds a place to hide. But by now discouraged, exhausted, and not wanting to get her friends into trouble, Heather leaves the premises through a window onto the fire escape. And at this point, the musicians’ on-screen music-making yields to the sound of a symphony orchestra.
Unrelated to any of the film’s other songs, Gershwin’s symphonic music represents the metropolis, its people, and the urban landscape through which Heather walks, deep into the night, with no comfort or haven to be had. Much of this scene’s drama lies in the interaction between cinematic images of Heather and the surroundings she encounters, with the expressive, often forceful orchestral music that underlies them. Gershwin’s contemplated “Manhattan Rhapsody—or Fantasy,” now realized, provides a dramatic complement to a remarkable episode.11 Heather’s nocturnal wanderings finally bring her to a police station, and the music, through a final reprise of the solemn and heroic Brahmsian theme, comes to a climactic cadence as she approaches the front desk and gives herself up.12
The end of the picture is brief and frenetic. Larry Beaumont, his head still wrapped in bandages, learns that Heather will be deported on the Majestic later that evening. Having learned, too, that Diana had been the one who summoned police, he speeds through the night, sprints up the ship’s ramp, and claims his true bride just in time, to the strains of “De-li-ci-ous.”
After an advance screening of Delicious in December 1931, several reviewers pointed to the “New York Rhapsody” scene as an original and noteworthy aspect of the new film. A critic for the Motion Picture Herald called it “one of the finest, if not the finest, musical composition originally conceived for motion pictures.”13 Where the idea for such a blend of action and music originated is not known—from Gershwin himself, or from conversations involving him and others in the brain trust of Delicious: Bolton, Butler, or Sheehan. Once sound film had been introduced in the late 1920s, the idea of this kind of coordination—editing a film to fit the structure and style of preexisting music—had been in the air, though more among European and Soviet filmmakers than those in the United States. Delicious marks the first such attempt in Hollywood, followed only a decade later by Walt Disney’s Fantasia.14
One witness on the scene as Gershwin was composing music for the young refugee’s nocturnal adventure was Hugo Friedhofer, later in life an award-winning film composer and arranger. In 1931 he was a staff musician at the Fox studio and, as it turned out, eager to help Gershwin realize his plan for another orchestral work that could stand alongside the Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. He recalled:
We became quite close, because George loved to have somebody around when he was writing. . . . I used to take his original—what were really piano parts, or two-line sketches, and blow them up. In the case of the Second Rhapsody, originally called Rhapsody in Rivets, I laid out the first orchestral sketch on it, from sitting alongside him and discussing orchestration as we went along.15
After returning to New York early in March, well before Delicious was filmed, Gershwin spent several months completing and orchestrating his Second Rhapsody, drawing on music he had composed in Hollywood. A read-through of the score took place on June 26, an occasion he described to his close Hollywood friend Aileen Pringle:
I hired fifty-five men last Friday to play my orchestration of the new Rhapsody, and the result was most gratifying. In many respects, such as orchestration and form, it is the best thing I’ve written. It was a bit longer than I expected, lasting about fifteen and one-half minutes. The National Broadcasting Company, whose studio I used, are connected by wire with the Victor Recording Laboratories so the studio, as a great favor to me, had a record made of the rehearsal. I shall get it tomorrow. Good idea, eh?16
A possible return trip west for the film’s shooting remained on Gershwin’s mind through the summer, even though by July he and Ira were already at work on a George S. Kaufman musical comedy named Of Thee I Sing. “If there was any possible chance,” Gershwin wrote George Pallay in California on July 30, “I would love to come as I am more than anxious to have a hand in the making of DELICIOUS. I hope to Heaven that the picture will be made right and will prove a big hit. There is nothing that would please me more than to come out to California next year to do another musical picture.”17
Delicious opened at New York’s Roxy Theatre on Christmas Day 1931, to mixed reviews.18 Of Thee I Sing, on the other hand, opened on Broadway the very next day and was an instant hit. But for the Gershwin brothers, the release of Delicious was a letdown; by then the experience of creating the picture’s score—in California, and the better part of a year in the past—had surely faded. And George was less than pleased with the result, as he admitted in a New Year’s greeting to Pringle: “I was very disappointed in the picture we wrote. . . . It could have been so swell but imagination in producing it & cutting it was lacking.” But there was no time to wallow in regret: in spite of his disappointment, Delicious would “come near breaking the all time record at Roxy’s. They expect to do $130,000 this week,” he told Pringle. Moreover, he added, the “Boston Symphony will finally play the new Rhapsody on Jan 29 & 30th in Boston & Feb. 5 in New York.”19
GERSHWIN’S Second Rhapsody for Orchestra with Piano was premiered on January 29, 1932, by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After the Boston premiere, several critics described the work as an expansion of a sequence of music written originally for Delicious, and their claim remained part of the composition’s lore into the twenty-first century.20 But in Gershwin’s mind, the Rhapsody, more than the movie score, was the primary artistic takeaway from his first Hollywood stay. “Nearly everybody comes back from California with a western tan and a pocketful of moving-picture money,” he claimed airily to Goldberg. “I decided to come back with both those things, and a serious composition—if the climate would let me.”21 In an interview in the Boston Evening Transcript, he contrasted the new piece’s genesis with that of the Rhapsody in Blue:
When I started on the earlier work, I had exactly five weeks to the time of performance. So I wrote it in three. I turned over page after page, knowing it was not as good as I would have liked it to be. But I knew also that it had to be finished and that I could waste no time on revisions. I kept saying to myself, “Never mind, I’ll fix that after the concert.” But the Rhapsody in Blue was a success and its weak spots have never been fixed.
For the Second Rhapsody, he had had seven weeks:
The parties and the night-life of Hollywood did not interest me in the least. They bored me in fact. Here was my chance to do some serious work. Seven weeks of almost uninterrupted opportunity to write the best music I could possibly think of. What a chance! The main theme came out of the picture, of course. . . . The picture was not to be released until Christmas, and I was requested not to bring out the Rhapsody until after the picture had been launched. All the while I have been revising and polishing. I have even made minor changes since coming to Boston. In this piece I have had the opportunity of doing pretty nearly what I wanted.
And the result had offered its own reward, for Koussevitzky “brings out things, and makes them sound like a million dollars,” he added, “that I hardly knew were there!”22
The sounds of the Rhapsody’s first section—industrial riveting, jazz-oriented dancing, and discordant harmony—reflect an urban landscape. Gershwin’s inventiveness shines in the metamorphosis of the percussive “rivet theme” from a succession of repeated eighth notes to a tidy, propulsive eight-bar tune that helps to unify the first section. A middle section, arriving about halfway through with a dignified mien, invites the listener into a more contemplative space, where melodic emphasis comes to the fore. Its “Brahms theme,” introduced by the orchestra, was cited years later by Robert Russell Bennett as “the best tune Gershwin ever wrote.” This soaring melody unfolds over an archlike bass line, with strategically placed blue notes lending a modern aura to the sound.23 “Middle” implies a three-part form along the familiar lines of ABA, but in fact the third section proves shorter and quicker than the first, with a pianistic display that brings the piece to an end with a flourish.
Those distinctive final measures apparently came about thanks to Edward Kilenyi, one of the musicians Gershwin had invited to his orchestral runthrough in June 1931. One evening not long after that session, Gershwin invited his former teacher to dinner and showed him the finished orchestration of his new work, written on extra-large score paper to accommodate all the lines he needed. “When he expressed anxiety about the form of the work,” Kilenyi recalled,
I suggested that he play and explain it to me while I followed the orchestral sketches. I could not find anything to suggest except a change in the closing passage. This was an orchestral tutti with the piano soloist not playing at all! I lightly remarked that perhaps audiences might expect the soloist to continue to play after the orchestra stopped. He agreed with my comment and asked help in creating an effective ending. I suggested that he use the main motif for brass and piano, giving it fortissimo. He sat down and changed the ending accordingly. When . . . Bill Daly arrived, he warmly announced to him: “Look, Bill, what new ending Edward suggested!”24
The new work’s premiere, six weeks after the successful Boston debut of Of Thee I Sing, sparked much local excitement. Moses Smith in the Evening Traveler deemed the Rhapsody a triumph, and Gershwin’s compositional skill remarkable—especially for a composer who claimed to shun musical “traditions.”25 “Throughout, there is a conciseness of formal development, a neat way of saying something and then going on with other matter. Now and then the expression becomes unduly sentimental or bombastic. But this is the exception: for the most part Gershwin displays the taste, the intellectual command of the artist.”26 For Warren Storey Smith of the Post, no fan of Gershwin, the piece was “much better made, from the technical standpoint, than its famous predecessor.” Beyond that, however, “his musical speech is still predominantly that of Tin Pan Alley. . . . Most of the new rhapsody calls out for a musical comedy setting. At a symphony concert it is as out of place as a one-piece bathing suit.”27 Henry Taylor Parker recalled that to hear Gershwin play his Rhapsody in Blue was to feel as if the music was “springing anew from the mind and temperament that created it.” But he perceived a different approach at its successor’s unveiling. “Mr. Gershwin . . . proceeded cautiously; took thought, as it seemed, of every measure and every tone; was sedulous with each accent, each shading.” The idea that inhibition could be “inherent in the music itself” troubled this seasoned critic.28
A week after the Boston premiere performances, Koussevitzky led his orchestra in a pair of Carnegie Hall concerts that introduced the new Rhapsody to listeners in Gershwin’s home city. Times critic Olin Downes felt that “with all its immaturities, the Rhapsody in Blue is more individual and originative than the piece heard last night. . . . We have had better things from Mr. Gershwin, and we expect better in time to come.”29 W. J. Henderson of the Sun also thought the new Rhapsody suffered in comparison with its predecessor:
It is likely that most music lovers will believe that the first rhapsody expressed America and its musical inclinations even better than this one. Mr. Gershwin possesses a unique talent and his endeavors to put jazz in the artistic category are interesting and commendable. He was heartily applauded last evening after he and the great orchestra had performed his work with extraordinary brilliancy.30
After its second New York performance, more than six months went by before the new piece was heard again—as part of an unprecedented all-Gershwin concert in Lewisohn Stadium on August 16, 1932. Moreover, only two more performances of the work have been documented during Gershwin’s lifetime, neither of which involved him: on November 4, 1932, as part of Paul Whiteman’s fourth “Experiment in Modern Music” concert in Carnegie Hall—Ferde Grofé’s arrangement, with Roy Bargy at the piano;31 and on March 20, 1933, performed by Hamilton Harty and the London Symphony Orchestra, with Solomon Cuttner as soloist.32
Gershwin came away from the first performances with a positive impression of his new composition. Talking with Boston’s music critics during rehearsals, he had spoken approvingly about the “revising and polishing” that seems to have continued almost until the eve of the premiere. He apparently came to cede his artistic judgments more than usual to the process of rethinking that circumstances had offered him. Perhaps some of the confidence in his first inspirations through years of composing to a deadline had eroded as he continued to polish details in the Second Rhapsody.
Of his five performances under Koussevitzky, two seem to have involved moments of uncharacteristic nervousness. Boston critic Moses Smith’s review cited an unspecified pianistic glitch early in the first performance, attributing it to “a slight attack of nerves at the opening of the rhapsody.” And a week later, Gershwin’s piano-playing friend Oscar Levant, sitting with him backstage in Carnegie Hall before the first New York performance, urged him to relax by playing through a few of his own songs, only to incur Gershwin’s ire when the onstage call was unexpectedly delivered. Gershwin blamed Levant for distracting him from his systematic warmup.33 These mishaps contradict Gershwin’s usual public persona, known for offering performance as a way to share with others the delight he took in his artistry and music-making. “It may be that this new Rhapsody,” H. T. Parker suspected, “was written subduing himself to reflection, bending too long and considerately over music-paper before he set down the just and final note,” a process “at odds with the natural, the essential play of his creative instinct.”