CONSTANT LAMBERT (1905-1951)

 

In the early fifties as a young rebel aged 17 I found myself on defaulters in the school cadet force and refusing the punishment. This led to a bare headed court martial and my being cashiered. The head of English, Doctor Giles, a pacifist sympathiser immediately offered me the position of school librarian which was a cushy number in comparison and it was in those pleasant surrounds that I found on the shelves a book which further fuelled my recently discovered passion for classical music. It was entitled “Music Ho” and written in 1934 by Constant Lambert. It became and remains a testament from my youth, my Leviticus and Deuteronomy from which I can still quote sections by heart. Music Ho, sub-titled by Lambert as “A Study Of Music In Decline”, is a somewhat pessimistic overview of the contemporary musical scene distinguishing between pre-WW1 pioneers, still perceived as modern, Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg and post war pasticheurs, later Stravinsky and Les Six. There followed nationalism and the modern scene; the exotic; jazz and the low life; the over popularization of music; the psychological cul de sac of the Schoenberg school; and ending with Sibelius to lead the way into the future with the exception that Lambert realized by the second edition that there had been an inexplicable silence coming from that quarter. His writing style remained witty and sardonic, pillorying some who it turned out were his favourites at heart, particularly the Russian school and the neo-classical composers. He might have criticised Poulenc and Les Six but in style he himself could have been described as the seventh member of Les Six. He much admired Vaughan Williams, his teacher, yet giving him a hard time in summing up the English country bumpkin school as both unbearably precious and unbearably hearty. This was all written by a 29 year old with an obvious deep knowledge and insight into the music of others and whose appreciation of art and literature revealed him to be the great all rounder of the arts.

 

Constant Lambert has been largely known for just one work, The Rio Grande, an evergreen exciting work for choruses and audiences alike, its bluesy and jazzy intonations and rhythms owing more to Duke Ellington than to Vaughan Williams. Yet in the twenties he was seen as leading the way to recognize the jazz influence in classical music. He was said to be Britain’s answer to George Gershwin although the comparison is way off the mark. Gershwin was a songsmith who had the ability to upgrade popular song and theatre and clothe it into classical forms whilst Lambert had the foresight to imbue jazz methods into his classical creations. He was not the first. Milhaud had been there using jazz for his Ballet La Création Du Monde whilst Bohuslav Martinu was pitching in with charlestons in his ballet, La Revue de la Cuisine. From 1923 to 1930 Constant Lambert was pouring out one work after another and then the tap turned off. He did continue to write but it was only a drip here and there. His career led him to become musical director in the ballet and much of Lambert’s time was taken up with that medium including touring out in the styx and consuming volumes of alcohol that the time available for composition became a diminishing factor.

 

Constant Lambert was born in Fulham, not that far from the Chelsea Arts Club where, I am reliably informed, he was a prominent member. His father, George Washington Lambert, was born in St Petersburg but emigrated at a young age to Australia. He married in 1902 and with his wife came to Europe, first to Paris and then London. He was a none too successful artist and sculptor living a fashionable Bohemian life. Constant, their second son, was born in 1905 to a backdrop of debts and visiting bailiffs. Well known artistes frequently gathered at the house but Constant on the whole was a lonely, frequently sickly child. Still he gained entrance in 1918 to Christ’s Hospital school where he contracted a virulent combination of rubella with septic arthritis that very nearly killed him. After a number of operations, he finally emerged with one leg slightly shorter than the other, leaving him with a permanent limp, and a shattered right eardrum, leaving him permanently deaf in one ear, and a horror of doctors. At 17, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied composition under Vaughan-Williams to whom he warmed and George Dyson, composer of the Pilgrim’s Progress, whom he detested. This was 1922, the year that Walton wrote Façade. Lambert was to become the most celebrated recite of the Edith Sitwell poems alongside her. In 1923 he also set Two Songs to poems by Sacheverell Sitwell written for soprano, flute and harp.

 

Walton and Lambert were linked. They came together through the Sitwells. They were not exactly Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. Constant went firing off like a shooting star; Willie took everything so slowly that even his first symphony got first performed with only three of its movements before he had finished it. Constant was all things to all men and all ladies. Willie concentrated his career on one thing only, composing. When he did conduct it would be his own works only at which he was top rate. It was the classic tale of the tortoise and the hare and as in the tale, it was the tortoise which came out on top..

 

Another important contact for Constant was Arthur Bliss, then perceived as a firebrand, who had just completed his Colour Symphony.. The two always remained close. It was Bliss who introduced Lambert to the poems of Li Po leading to Lambert’s own song cycle written between 1927 and 1930. Lambert’s earliest work, though not published, was a ballet entitled “Prize Fight” lasting some nine minutes. It depicts a bare knuckle boxing contest. It has been suggested that it owes something to Milhaud without the sambas. It contains a touch of ragtime and a well known tune of Sousa played fugally. Other unpublished works which have only relatively recently come to light followed in1924. Another ballet, “Mr Bear Squash-you-all-flat”, is a Russian child’s tale learned from his father. The inspiration for this work with narrator may have come from Facade. The concerto for piano, two trumpets, timpani and strings followed. His better known piano concerto is that for piano and nine instruments but this earlier one had been left unknown in short score and edited and brought to life by Giles Easterby.

 

What brought Constant Lambert to notice, nationally and internationally, was his Romeo and Juliet, a ballet he wrote for Diaghilev when he was 20 whilst still at the Royal College. Here was the youngest composer to be commissioned by Diaghilev, younger than Poulenc who wrote Les Biches at much the same time when he was all of 25 years old. It was performed at Monte Carlo before its Paris production where it received its mandatory riot.

 

The works were pouring out. In 1926 he commenced his cycle, Songs of Li Po (also known as Li Bai – you can take your choice), an 8^th century Chinese poet from the mid-Tang dynasty whose verses celebrated the pleasures of friendship, the depth of nature, solitude, and the joys of drinking wine. This last would have appealed to the Fitzrovian Constant Lambert` who frequented most of the pubs from Langham Place to Soho. As an habitué of Soho pubs and an infatuation for the Chinese-American silent movie queen Anna May Wong to whom he dedicated the Songs of Li Po, Gerrard Street as it is today would have appealed to him. The songs are lightly scored and there is something slightly pre-Britten about the vocal line. Li Po was also the source for the poems used by Mahler in Das Lied von der Erde.

 

 

1927 saw the first performance of The Rio Grande. It is one of those works with a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of everything, somewhat a hybrid like the Beethoven Choral Fantasy. Best perhaps played on the move in a hybrid car. Solo piano, solo singer, solo violin, orchestra and chorus. It evokes a swampy Ellington atmosphere with an accent a tad like that of Delius in his Florida Suite.

 

The concerto for piano and nine instruments was the first work of Lambert’s I heard in the concert hall. It is a chamber music concerto but instead of conventional percussion it has a twenties dance band drum kit. It starts off flapper like, a kind of shimmy like my sister Kate, but this is a deception. It moves into dark colours. Its second movement seems to anticipate the sounds of Ravel who would have been writing his two concertos at much the same time. The last movement is more Stravinsky, reminiscent more of the second part of the Rite of Spring than his neo-classical works. This work more than any other starts out as unmistakably syncopated but its colouring now seems to reflect a growing sense of dark happenings following perhaps the emerging depression of coalition politics in England. Or was this the beginning of a black side within the mind of Constant Lambert? Of course, black moods do not necessarily result in tragic music. Music which is composed is more manufactured than subjective and one only has to look to Mozart to see what seemingly happy diversions he produced during his black moments for the proof of this. In relation to Constant Lambert this caused me to do some devilling and in my researches on his son Kit I came across an article that Constant had been sexually ambivalent and drawn to self-destruction. At the time of writing this concerto he had been in a relationship with Christopher Wood who in 1930 was killed falling under a train. The effect on Constant can only be imagined. Does this account for those dark moments in this concerto? There was also the suicide of his close friend, Philip Heseltine, the critic, who composed under the pen name of Peter Warlock, best known for his Capriol Suite, and to whose memory Lambert dedicated this concerto.

 

Another important game changer was the death in 1929 of Diaghilev and the collapse of the Ballets Russes. The ballet world without Diaghilev was like Hamlet without the Prince. Its successor company had not yet been formed. Pavlova’s company was to die with Pavlova herself in January 1931. One suggestion mooted was for Constant Lambert to take over the Ballets Russes but it was already bankrupt. In England there was no home grown ballet. Marie Rambert was just starting up a small ballet club with its first performance in 1931; Ninette de Valois was to found the Vic Wells Ballet with just six dancers. Against this background The Camargo Society was conceived by ballet critic and historian, Arnold Haskell. Its aim was to perpetuate the principles on which Diaghilev had run the Ballets Russes, and to encourage British talent. The committee included Constant Lambert as resident conductor, the semi-retired ballerina Lydia Lopokova as choreographic adviser and her husband John Maynard Keynes as treasurer. Its first and most successful production by Frederick Ashton was Pomona composed and conducted by Constant Lambert. Its repertoire included the orchestrated version of Walton’s Façade. It produced 16 one act new ballets in three years before merging with the Vic Wells Ballet. Constant remained on as director of music in the merged outfit. Thus it came about that by 1933 Constant Lambert had moved into the position he would hold more or less for the remainder of his life.

 

It was in this period that he wrote Music Ho and married Florence (Flo) Kaye, a photographer’s model of Lascar descent. In 1935 their son, Christopher (Kit), was born but it did not turn out to be a happy marriage. The world of ballet and touring exacted an absence from home and there were other distractions. He was a workhorse conductor, not an international star. It was the world of the Vic Wells Ballet, mounting productions of newly commissioned music by composers such as Bliss, Walton and Lambert himself, new dancers such as the Australian, Robert Helpman who arrived in 1933 and the fifteen year old Margot Fonteyn who joined in 1934. The lead dancers besides Ashton were Anton Dolin and Alicia Markova with design of scenery and costumes by the likes of Rex Whistler. Included in a brilliant literary and intellectual circle were Michael Ayrton, Sacheverell Sitwell and Anthony Powell. It has been said that Constant Lambert was the prototype for Hugh Moreland in “A Dance to the Music of Time”. Included in the Fitzrovian pub crawls were Jacob Epstein, the classical music writer and dance band leader, Spike Hughes (named as such after the spike of his double bass) and Dylan Thomas, newly arrived in London from Swansea to seek his fortune. These characters lit up the thirties, still the bright young things. Overseeing all from the rostrum was Constant Lambert, not a remote drop-in stick-waving front man but one of the boys both in the pit and the saloon bar, one who knew and understood both the ballet and the music better than anyone. He would himself describe being a conductor as ending up at the age of 80 with a fur coat and a fourth wife. As Stephen Boyd commented, Lambert barely made it half way, dying after a short life of prodigious achievement aged 45, worn out, hard up, chronically overworked, and still only on the second wife.

 

One begins to appreciate that his lifestyle left little time to compose throughout the thirties and beyond. The mid thirties saw the composition of what some consider to be his greatest work, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, based on a poem of that name by Thomas Nashe depicting death by plague in the 1590’s. It’s not very cheerful and it did not help having its first performance five days after the death of George V in 1936. Much warmer and traditional was the music for his ballet, Horoscope, written in 1938 for Margot Fonteyn. Constant had fallen in love with her watching her from the rostrum and a secret passion ensued in other places. It was to Fonteyn’s long regret that they did not marry. Horoscope is more in the ballet tradition of Tchaikovsky than Stravinsky. Its theme is astrological with crossed lovers (Lambert and Fonteyn?) who have the sun in one sign of the Zodiac and the moon in another with the man having his sun in Leo and the woman with her sun in Gemini with opposed signs—sorry I have lost the plot, but the music is beautiful.

 

The world of Sadlers Wells, as it had become, like so much else ended with the 1939 war when the company was on tour in Holland. Whilst German paratroopers were dropping from the skies the company had to make its way back to England. Sadlers Wells was able to continue throughout the war despite its theatre in Roseberry Avenue having to close. It was a hand to mouth time involving much touring to and from cold theatres which were as bleak as the boarding houses, air raids and rationing. Lambert wrote music for a documentary on the merchant fleet which sounds typical of one of those Pathé Gazette black and white films called “The March of Time”. In 1942, two years after the debacle in Holland and the hurried escape of the Sadlers Wells company, Lambert wrote an orchestral piece in remembrance entitled “Aubade Héroique”. It is one of his least known compositions. In my view this six minute piece is the most pastoral work he composed. It is clearly influenced both in title and style by Debussy with a nod towards Vaughan Williams here and there. Debussy had written his Berceuse Héroique in 1914 dedicated to the King of the Belgians at the time of the collapse to the Kaiser’s advancing forces. Now in similar mood, including adopting Debussy’s whole tone scale, was Lambert’s melancholy reminiscence of his own retreat in 1940. The work was dedicated to Vaughan Williams on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

 

Further conducting opportunities arose following the death of Henry Wood in 1944 and Constant Lambert becoming an assistant conductor at the Promenade concerts. He was a great favourite and thrived with a more professional orchestra than he was accustomed to directing. He was a burly Churchillian figure who had a strange manner of turning his head to one side when conducting. Few would have known he was deaf in one ear. Still he was left with an ear for music!

 

With the war coming to an end, Kit was sent to boarding school where Constant would visit him but Kit had been missing out on a father figure.   Constant’s troubled broken down marriage with Flo was to end in divorce in 1947 but, instead of marrying Margot Fonteyn as she expected, that relationship too came to an end and she was particularly hurt. Their relationship was doubtless tempestuous, the dance company being no place for monogamy. Instead Constant married painter, Isabel Delmer. After his death Isabel was to marry Constant’s friend and fellow cat lover, composer Alan Rawsthorne. Margot Fonteyn made only two references to Constant Lambert in her biography. He had been written out of her life. Kit too carved out a musical career for himself, discovering, re-inventing and managing the pop group whom he renamed as “The Who”.

 

With the end of the war further conducting opportunities arose. In 1946 the BBC founded the Third Programme (now Radio 3) and Constant Lambert was a regular conductor. He was also called upon by Walter Legge to be one of those who would conduct the newly founded Philharmonia Orchestra.

 

As time moved on, the Sadlers Well Ballet was taken over by Covent Garden opera under its new director, David Webster. This led to Lambert being dropped as music director to his sadness but he went on conducting till the end. It was then that he returned to a long cherished idea to write a ballet called Tiresias set in Ancient Crete. It was one of three commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. This was his first ballet since Horoscope in 1938. The scenario and music were by Lambert; it was the fourth Lambert/Ashton collaboration and it went down with the critics like a lump of lead. Without going into the convoluted story because most ballet plots are convoluted anyway, everything about it was other than a Covent Garden audience would expect. With the then Queen (later Queen Mother) attending, it was seen as a gala performance leading to the same expectations and disappointment that Britten would have in coronation year two years later with his opera, Gloriana. The music had none of the warm romanticism of Horoscope but owed more to the Concerto for piano and nine instruments with piano and plenty of drum kit interventions but omitting upper range strings. The plot involved the lead players changing sex and then exploring which of the sexes obtained more sexual enjoyment. This went down with shock and horror with its 1951 audience. The critics slated it and after four weeks and eight performances Constant Lambert was dead. It was a shock for all. It turned out that he had undetected diabetes which bore out his lack of confidence in doctors. It is also suggested that this condition gave rise to a perpetual thirst which was satisfied in his case by more and more beer. Osbert Sitwell in his obituary blamed the critics claiming “He would be alive today had it not been for the savage onslaught of the critics”.

 

So ended the life and career of a bright star which suddenly extinguished. What would have become of him had he gone on? Would he have got his fur coat and fourth wife? Would he have had more time for composition or had he simply gone the same way as his drinking companion, Dylan Thomas, would do two years later? How would he have fared with the BBC establishment which took over at the end of that decade under the proscribing black listing pen of William Glock? One doubts that that gentleman would have been invited to join Connie and his gang in one of the nearby pubs to the BBC. The problem with Constant Lambert was that he undertook too much, a jack of all trades, expert in all for all that but with no single direction with the exception of that of the musical leadership of Sadlers Wells. To say he was unorthodox would be an understatement as a man or a musician, as a painter or a critic, as an author or a conductor devoting as much time to these as also to being an excellent writer of limericks and of over a hundred poems in English and French and never forgetting his having made his home a shelter for numerous refugee cats. On top of all else he had been chief conductor of Camargo/Vic-Wells/Sadlers Wells ballets for twenty five years and equally uniquely president of the Kensington Kitten and Neuter Cats Society of which he was justly proud.

 

 

 

 

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

 

Matthew has now reached the last lap in his mammoth series of lectures on the Concerto (1900-1950). In his nine lectures so far, he has visited 21 different composers, a feat in itself. The last of the series will take us upon a flying visit to America for two more with concertos by Copland, Barber and George Gershwin – Matthew has earlier examined the clarinet concerto of Copland. I have chosen Gershwin as the subject of my final note for the term partly because we have touched upon him recently in both Matthew’s lecture and my last note on Ravel. More importantly because Gershwin is a completely different kettle of fish from every other composer we have dealt with before.

 

George Gershwin for many was a brilliant composer of popular songs and music theatre who could, given his due, dabble in classical music, but, let’s face it, could not be said to be in the top rank. For others, whatever his provenance and whatever else he produced or lacked he was the first true composer to spring out of the American soil.

 

America had been around a long time from its colony era to its independence, its expansions westwards and the war of the states as the civil war was called. It had developed its home grown authors and playwrights, its own painters, poets and theatre. Yet it had not developed a musical style of its own being both derived from the European tradition and yet American at the same time. It had welcomed new arrivals from all over Europe who brought with them their traditions and their folk music. The slaves, the African Americans – no-one called them that then – thought to be without souls or culture, developed their own spirituals which travelled the length of the country after the civil war. As it happened most of the negro spirituals as we know them were recorded or composed by one man, Harry Burleigh at the instance of Dvorak. Dvorak had gone to America in 1892 when offered the position of composition professor at the New York Conservatory. It had been spelt out to him that he was expected to pave the way for an “American” musical style. Just like that. So it was that Dvorak enlisted the help of Harry Burleigh (1867-1949), one of the earliest African-American composers. It was he who introduced Dvorak to traditional American spirituals. It was Dvorak who urged Burleigh to collect and arrange the spirituals he sung, which he then set about doing, about 300 of them. His works included, Deep River; Steal Away; Go Down Moses. Without Harry Burleigh there would have been no Dvorak New World Symphony as we know it. Many towns and cities had developed their own styles, New Orleans, St Louis and Kansas City developing from the spirituals the blues and most had syncopated rhythms in common developing into ragged time to be called ragtime. There were classical composers about in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, notably Edward Macdowall whose second piano concerto owes something to Grieg, and Amy Beach who was a child prodigy, mainly self taught as a composer and pianist. She married a surgeon, Dr H H A Beach who insisted as a married woman she only played twice a year and that she appear and compose as Mrs H H A Beach. I can feel the women libbers amongst you trembling with rage.

 

Jewish immigration into America had been gradual over the early nineteenth century, mainly German speaking. Between 1880 and 1914 there arrived waves of Ashkenazy Yiddish speaking Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement fleeing from pogroms in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus. There were similar arrivals in England at the same time and I myself can empathize as my paternal grandparents arrived in this country in or about 1895. Whether in America or England their achievement was that within a generation they and their children had integrated in their new countries whilst able to retain at home their traditional customs. It was in 1895 also that Morris (formerly Moishe) Gershowitz married Rose (Roza) Bruskina in New York. She had arrived from Vilnius. He had followed her. They lived in Brooklyn where he became a foreman leather cutter for women’s shoes. Their first son, Israel, but always known as Ira was born in 1896. George was born in 1898 and always known as George although his birth certificate describes him as Jacob Gershwine. Two further children were to follow.

 

Morris moved jobs and family home several times and his standard of living increased such that he bought a piano in 1910 principally for Ira to learn. George meantime was a typical back street roller skating boy without any apparent musical leanings but he heard his friend Maxie Rosenzweig’s playing a violin. It was his earliest encounter with classical music. The sound and the way his friend played captured him. His parents, having bought a piano for Ira to have lessons, found to their surprise and Ira’s relief, that it was George who played it. The theatre also was prominent already in Ira and George’s lives. The Yiddish theatre was very popular and the boys attended performances and ran errands for the theatre. George sought various lessons in the piano and after two years was introduced to Charles Hambitzer who became his mentor. Hambitzer taught him conventional piano technique, introduced him to classical music tradition and encouraged him to attend orchestra concerts. At home, following such concerts, George would then try to play at the piano the music that he had heard. Later on, he took composition lessons from the American composer, Henry Cowell thought to be quite avant garde.

 

George staying on at school for continuing education was not on the agenda. He left school at 15 and took a job as a song plugger at Jerome H. Remick and Co. on Tin Pan Alley. The recording industry had not yet started and piano rolls were a popular form of musical reproduction. However the main turnover business was sheet music. Song pluggers were employed in a store or publishing house and would sit on a balcony or landing demonstrating at the piano the latest sheet music for prospective buyers. Frequently they plugged the same tune over and over again, a bit like Classic FM playing Holst’s Jupiter. In 1915 George was writing his own songs and mixing them in with his playlist.

 

In 1916, George moved to the Aeolian Company with whom he cut his first piano rolls. He went on to produce hundreds of others, sometimes under his own name, others under pseudonyms. His first published song was when he was 17 and tells us something about George’s progress with the opposite sex. It is entitled “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em, You Don’t Want ‘Em”. Others followed but it was in 1919 he scored his first big national hit with his song, “Swanee”. Al Johnson heard Gershwin perform it at a party and decided to sing it in one of his shows. Swanee sold one million sheet music copies and an estimated two million records, and it earned George $10,000 in royalties in the first year alone. It was the biggest song hit of Gershwin’s entire career. Before that success George had left song plugging behind and become a rehearsal pianist on Broadway and managing rather cheekily to interpolate his own music into the shows.

 

From individual songs George teamed up with others to create their own musicals. First with the song writer William Daly with whom he wrote three musicals between 1920 and 1923 and also with Buddy de Silva who jointly created an experimental one-act jazz opera called Blue Monday and set in Harlem. It is widely regarded as a forerunner to Porgy and Bess. However there is no doubt that the ground breaking partnership came about in 1924 when George and Ira teamed up to form the greatest combination.

 

1924 was also the year when George’s first “classical” work, Rhapsody in Blue, described as “for Jazz Band and Piano”, came into the world. The bandleader, Paul Whiteman had been impressed with Blue Monday and was himself planning a big modern jazz concert. So he approached George for a concerto-like jazz work. To begin with, George turned the suggestion down. A month or two later George got persuaded to take it on although there was not enough time left for orchestrating it. The idea of the theme came to him on a rail journey to Boston “with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang”. It was a combination of a Liszt type Hungarian Rhapsody mingled with the blues. His original thought was to call it American Rhapsody but Ira suggested Rhapsody in Blue as the title after having visited a Whistler exhibition. He was taken in particularly by titles such as ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’ and ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black’ which you would know better as Whistler’s Mother. George actually wrote Rhapsody in Blue for two pianos and then handed it over to Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s arranger, for him to orchestrate. The orchestration we hear today is that of Grofé who knew and understood the workings of the Whiteman orchestra. Whiteman was trying to develop jazz of the traditional variety into formalised symphonic jazz with an extended orchestra with saxophones, clarinet, trumpets, trombones supplemented with two horns and tuba. There was an orchestra pianist and drums and timpani combined. The basic orchestra was surrounded by an array of strings and in the middle of the orchestra to cover the jazzier aspects were an accordion and banjo. What is amazing is that Grofé was able to anticipate the Gershwin orchestral sound. Although he had never heard any Gershwin orchestration he had an uncanny instinctive feel which would produce the same sound as Gershwin would later create.   If anything marks out the Rhapsody in Blue over anything else it must be that opening glissando on clarinet. It is the most famous sound in all of Gershwin and yet it was not even written by George or Grofé. It actually came about as a joke in rehearsal by the orchestra clarinettist, Ross Gorman. He played the opening bars with a deliberate wobbling glissando to which George reacted by asking Gorman to do it that way at the concert and to put in as much of a wail as possible.

 

The concert had George himself as solo pianist and was a success with the audience, although panned by some critics. It has become today a cult work but it was not always that way. At the time traditional jazz of the New Orleans or Dixieland variety was still just emerging. It had its great names like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. The style of jazz that was performed from the late teens to the late 1920s was improvisatory and by nature contrapuntal and might well have been enjoyed by a toe tapping J S Bach had he been around two centuries later. Its adherents were the purists and appalled at what Paul Whiteman was about. The latter had been a violist in the Denver Symphony Orchestra and after the First World War formed his own band using jazz and hailed as the King of Jazz. His orchestra contained some thirty five players for which formal monothematic composition was necessary. He was already earning over a million dollars a year in the 1920’s. However he was seen by the traditional jazz followers as a thieving magpie and a typical white man taking over black culture. At least, the Duke Ellington orchestra, founded in 1926, only consisted of blacks. So there was a split both between classical and jazz and a racial divide between white and coloured to start with. Yet the adherents to classical music, the so-called high brows, were equally hostile to hear jazz sounds with growl trumpets played by an orchestra in a symphony concert. In black and white films the high brow women were depicted with anachronistic lorgnettes frowning down their long noses. So who were its fans and followers? One can say it was the great uncultured mass of the white American middlebrows. Many would eventually opt for a brand of music they could dance and swing to, rather than symphonic jazz, and which by 1935 would come to dominate the American musical scene led by the likes of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

 

By the end of 1927, Whiteman’s band had played the Rhapsody eighty-four times, and its recording sold a million copies. Later, for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics during the Reagan presidency it was played at the opening ceremony with 84 grand pianos!. Whiteman adopted the piece as his band’s signature tune, and opened his radio programmes with the slogan “Everything New but the Rhapsody in Blue.” It has had its detractors, many of them, but in more recent years it has come to be symbolized as A Portrait of New York, an iconic background in the film Manhattan, for romantics such as Woody Allen. However even Gershwin’s greatest supporters cannot lay claim to it being a great classical work. No one could have given greater love or support to Gershwin than Leonard Bernstein who nevertheless wrote in 1955

 

“The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It’s a string of separate paragraphs stuck together. The themes are terrific, inspired, God-given. I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky. Your Rhapsody in Blue though is not a real composition in the sense that it must seem inevitable. You can cut parts of it without affecting the whole. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. It can be a five-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And it’s still the Rhapsody in Blue.”

 

On the popular musical front, 1924 was the year when George and Ira Gershwin teamed up, a team like Mozart and da Ponte or Verdi and Boito or Gilbert and Sullivan were teams. George and Ira’s first successful collaboration was Lady Be Good, which included the song, “Fascinating Rhythm”. They followed this with one after another. Oh Kay! (1926); Funny Face (1927) Show Girl (1929) Strike Up The Band (1930) and in the same year Girl Crazy which included “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You” and made Ginger Rogers a star. The Wall Street Crash did not slow down the productivity in Gershwin musicals. In 1931 there followed “Of Thee I Sing”, a musical based on a presidential election campaign which won a Pullitzer Prize for Drama, the first musical comedy to do so. Its sequel was “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” involving the sale of blue shirts following the growth of brown shirts and black shirts in Europe. Back in 1926 George had met Kay Swift, a composer, with whom he had a relationship for 12 years. They didn’t marry although Kay got divorced so as to be able to do so. Kay’s grand-daughter thought that George held back because his mother Rose – shades of the Jewish momma with Maureen Lipman – was unhappy that Kay Swift wasn’t Jewish. The musical “Oh, Kay” was named for her.

 

Covering this same period is George Gershwin’s progress with “classical” music. Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra had been present at the first performance of Rhapsody in Blue and commissioned Gershwin to write a piano concerto which might be be closer in form to a classical model and, unlike the Rhapsody, would be orchestrated by its composer. Whilst George would later receive formal training from Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg in composition and advanced harmony and orchestration, he had had no such training in 1924. Under the pressure of a deadline to complete the work in 1925, George bought books on theory, concerto form and orchestration and taught himself the skills needed. Because of contractual obligations for three different Broadway musicals, he was not able to begin sketching ideas until May 1925. He began scoring for two-pianos in late July following a trip to London. The original title was intended to be “New York Concerto”. Its three movements were written between July and September with full orchestration carried out by November. The Concerto in F shows considerable development in Gershwin’s compositional technique, particularly as he orchestrated the entire work himself. The first performance was a sell out at the Carnegie Hall in December 1925, and George was the soloist. It was well received by the public but as usual the reviews were mixed, with many critics unable to classify it as jazz or classical. Indeed, there was a great variety of opinion among Gershwin’s contemporaries. Stravinsky thought the work was one of genius, although I doubt he was at the performance or in America at that time. Prokofiev is said to have disliked it intensely. William Walton is said to have commented that he adored Gershwin’s orchestration of the concerto but I have no idea as to when he said it or to whom. Without the Gershwin concerto there never would have been the Ravel, that’s for sure.

 

Further down the line it was Walter Damrosch again who also commissioned from George a symphonic poem for the NYSO.   George made two trips to Paris in the 1920’s, first in 1926 when he stayed with friends, and he returned with more serious purpose in 1928. His object, having met Ravel in America and on his recommendation, was to seek lessons from Nadia Boulanger, a celebrated French composer, conductor, and teacher who taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the day. She also performed as a pianist and organist. Boulanger replied that she had nothing to teach him. Here it is interesting to compare with Aaron Copland, also an American Jewish composer with immigrant parents. He had set out on a different path and took lessons from Boulanger for three years. None of this set George back, as his real reason in coming to Paris was to complete a new work based on that city as well as to write a second rhapsody for piano and orchestra as a possible sequence to Rhapsody in Blue. An American in Paris is his greatest orchestral achievement. He described the piece as a “rhapsodic ballet” because it was written more freely than his previous works. He stated “My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere.” It is a bustling impressionist scene written in five sections. Its principal theme is interspersed by honking motor horns and with a show off trombone theme which I seem to recall was used for an advert by Wrigley’s Chewing Gum. There is a solo jazz trumpet nocturne, pure Beiderbecke, a blues in the night theme, which paints a moment of nostalgic loneliness of the American visitor. Its mood is more Manhattan than Hot Club de France. Later in 1951 there would be the film which also contains music from the piano concerto. Still, when it comes to Gershwin musicals, nearly every film, although containing a few standard songs, had its story line completely changed. The film of An American In Paris is a typical clichéd view of Paris, France as seen by Americans, not that they are any worse than any other tourists but Hollywood happens to have made more films about it than anyone else, except the French. I am afraid that, energetic a dancer as Gene Kelly was, I suffer a bout of nausea when seeing him and the film, which I try not to do.

 

After returning to America, accompanied by a set of klaxon horns for the first performance of An American in Paris, George was signed up in 1929 by the Fox Film Corporation to compose the score for the film, Delicious. This was the beginning of the talkies. The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson had come out in 1927 but feature films were largely only for music to begin with. To George’s infuriation, only two pieces got used in the final version and the rest of the score was rejected. It would be seven years before George worked in Hollywood again. Still, as we have seen, the stage musicals continued to come out.

 

Gershwin now turned his attention to opera and a venture he had had in mind for some time. “Porgy and Bess” is now regarded as an important American opera or folk opera as George liked to call it. It is based on a novel “Porgy” by DuBose Heyward, the action of which takes place in a fictional all-black neighbourhood of Charleston called Catfish Row. Just as well, it wasn’t Ferguson. The critics weren’t quite able to make it out. It crossed the barriers. Was it opera, or was it simply an ambitious Broadway musical? All the principal characters were black. That itself was shock enough. The music combines elements of popular music of the day but, as with his other “classical music”, with the clear influence of negro, as it was called, music, not just jazz but spirituals, as well. Yet it contained techniques typical of opera. The songs were sung with operatic voices. It also had recitative and Gershwin introduced an extensive system of leitmotifs. He was no longer writing in pseudo Liszt style but experimenting. It includes a fugue, a passacaglia; there is the use of atonality, polytonality and polyrhythm, and, God Bless Schoenberg, a serial row. Of course we know it best from its individual set numbers, “Summer Time”, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin”, “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So”. These bear a relationship to his other melodies and works, an identifiable Gershwin sound. Take Summer Time, for example, it is more refined but it has the same family relationship to “Some Day He’ll Come Along. The Man I Love”. Take “Bess, you is my woman now” and now think about that steamy trumpet solo in “An American In Paris”. Surely they come out of the same stable? The work was first performed in 1935; it was a box office failure. What Gershwin did achieve was a spirit of mutual sympathy between two peoples, unrelated but with oppressions in common, the Blacks and the Jews. Michael Tippett would do the same in a different way in “A Child Of Our Time” five years later.

 

After the commercial failure of Porgy and Bess, George was signed up in1936 by RKO to write the music for the film “Shall We Dance” which would star Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The music was to marry ballet and jazz in a new way. For this he needed to move to Hollywood. The music for the film which runs for over an hour took several months to complete. By this time he was a very rich man and lived in luxury in a 14-room duplex, with a gymnasium, an artist’s studio and space for his own paintings and art collection. He was living the “American Dream” but not for long. Photographs of the time show him smoking a cigar at the piano and as having lost his shiny hair leaving a sizable bald patch from the recession. As to that I know what it’s like. I’ve been there. Shall We Dance was followed by “A Damsel In Distress” with Astaire and Joan Fontaine. It was based on a novel by P G Wodehouse and instigated by George as its main character is a songwriter. The film did not get released until four months after George’s death.

 

At not quite 39 years old, George had developed blinding headaches and a recurring impression that he smelled burning rubber. In February 1937 he was the soloist in his own piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux and began hitting the wrong notes.  In July he collapsed and was rushed to hospital. For five hours, doctors tried to remove what turned out be a deeply embedded brain tumour. He never regained consciousness and died on 11 July, 1937. Within six months of each other Ravel and Gershwin, each mutually influential on the other, would die during brain operations!

 

George Gershwin died one of the richest men in the graveyard and his estate still collects royalties. Undoubtedly he was a great popular song writer. In many ways he can be compared to Schubert. Both wrote songs which were popular within their own milieu. Most who listen to Schubert today do so with reverence without realising that he was giving his fans the same pleasure that George would do for his a hundred years later. Their styles were different, that’s all. George Gershwin was not a great giant of classical music but a talented genius to emerge from the American Melting Pot and to lead the way where others would follow. I end by making a comparison between Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin. Arnold Schoenberg was a Jewish émigré from Vienna who through force of circumstances lived in America. George Gershwin was the son of a Jewish émigré but himself born in New York. Arnold Schoenberg may have been a great composer but he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. George Gershwin may not have been such a great composer but he was the right man in the right place at the right time.

POSTSCRIPT

 

AN ALMOST ELEVEN YEAR OLD’S VIEW OF GEORGE GERSHWIN

 

In 1946, with my father demobbed, we moved to London from Swansea and stayed for a week with my aunt and uncle in Tufnell Park. Already I missed the Swans (Swansea Town FC). My uncle generously gave me some pocket money and suggested I go to see the Arsenal at Tottenham. (Highbury had been closed down and Arsenal played at White Hart Lane when Spurs were away). I was told to get any trolley bus going to Stamford Hill and change for Tottenham. As I waited at the bus stop I saw a trolley opposite clearly going to Tottenham in the other direction. I crossed and got on. I couldn’t be wrong. It had “Tottenham Ct Rd” on the front. Of course the conductor put me down, somewhere in Kentish Town I believe, and it was too late to see the match. Anyway I was not really interested as it was only Arsenal, not the Swans.

 

Across the road was a cinema, the Rex or the Ritz or whatever. There, they were showing something called “Rhapsody In Blue”. I had no idea what it was about but with my pocket money I went in and sat in the front stalls. The seats were good. They didn’t have springs that stuck in your arse like the Carlton in Swansea. The film was a biopic – not that anyone used that word – of George Gershwin of whom I knew nothing but whose name had been known to me from the wireless. I saw the young George thumping the piano in excitement to his brother Ira. I found that strange because in Wales that was a girl’s name. I loved the way George sung his new song, “Swanee, how I love you, how I love you” and how the two of them in trousers, shirt and braces wearing trilbies on the backs of their heads tapped danced on a desk-table “D-I-X-I-E-ven know my mammy’s waiting for me, waiting for me”. I saw Al Jolson sing Swanee with his face painted black and a great white circle round his mouth. I saw the Paul Whiteman orchestra and the portly figure of Paul Whiteman playing Paul Whiteman himself; also a pianist called Oscar Levant played by Oscar Levant. George was played by an actor I have since learned was Robert Alda, father of Alan Alda. He had a lady friend played by an actress called Alexis Smith. That was the yucky part of the film. I don’t remember much else until it came to the end. George was due to play the Rhapsody in Blue at a concert and had not turned up. A note was given to Oscar Levant who took George’s place at the piano. Paul Whiteman started to conduct and the clarinet started up with a wail like a cat. Somehow Alexis Smith who was sitting in the audience seemed to know by telepathy that George was dead. The camera zoomed in on her face, which got larger and larger until it filled the whole black and white square screen. The tears rolled down her magnified face but then women always cried in films. Men didn’t. It was all so silly but there in the darkness of the Rex or the Ritz or whatever, although she did not know it, I cried with Alexis Smith. I cried for George Gershwin.