George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait

3. A Piano Concerto

three A Piano Concerto George commenced work on the concerto in his penthouse atop the family residence, where he was awash in relatives, friends, and callers. He had always been able to compose in the middle of a crowded room. In fact, he preferred it that way. But now the commotion was getting in the way. He had written the Rhapsody in Blue amid the usual hubbub, but the new piece needed more planning and thought. When the critics delivered their verdicts, they were going to judge it by stricter standards than had been applied to the free-form rhapsody. They would compare it to concertos by Chopin, Beethoven, and Brahms. There was also going to be a sophomore jinx—a big one, given the success of the rhapsody. It was one thing to have a flop show—even Kern and Berlin sometimes had them. But a concert hall flop might well mean an end to the public’s special ardor for him. Although he appeared to be approaching both strands of his career with equal confidence, he knew that songwriting was, for him at least, the easier job. Though some of his tunes, such as “The Man I Love,” were obviously the handiwork of the man who had composed the Rhapsody in 13 A Piano Concerto Blue, most of them, even some of the very good ones, could just as well have been written by some other Broadway craftsman. That would not be true of the concerto. In the new piece, he was revealing something of himself that had previously been withheld. In the struggle to get this right, he was for the first time in his composing career seeking solitude. First he retreated to the nearby Whitehall Hotel, and when visitors showed up there he traveled upstate to a cottage provided by the Chautauqua Institution—where music students inevitably knocked on his door and he, just as inevitably, opened it. Before the official rehearsals began, he hired a fifty-piece orchestra to try the piece out, with his friend William Daly conducting. Daly, eleven years Gershwin’s senior, was a tall, bespectacled Boston Irishman with a hedge of red hair that shot straight up from his skull. A musical prodigy in youth and a graduate of Harvard, he had, before settling on music as a career, had a stint out west as a laborer on the railroads and then a brief career as a literary editor, working with Lincoln Steffens on Everybody’s Magazine. He had known Gershwin since working with him on a Broadway show called Hitchy-Koo of 1918. By that time, he was a sought-after conductor and orchestrator of Broadway music. He wielded the baton at many Gershwin shows, orchestrated some of Gershwin’s Broadway work, and formed a duo-piano team with him at parties. Daly was also closely associated with Ira, having worked with him on songs as well as a neverproduced show based on Chopin piano pieces. Daly and the Gershwins were personally and professionally very close. George called him “The Irishman,” and he called George “Pincus.” That afternoon tryout of the concerto at the Globe Theatre was, Gershwin later wrote in Theatre Magazine, “the peak of my highest joy.”1 The sounds coming from the orchestra were those he had heard in his head. Apparently, just as there was a Gershwin piano style, there was also a Gershwin orchestral sound. Early in the first movement, the piano, upon making its initial entrance, presents a lonely, nocturnal theme that becomes more intense when, upon repetition, a countermelody is given to the English horn. In the second movement, a quiet melody played by a solo muted trumpet creates a lying-awake-in-the night stillness and restlessness . The third movement ends with the whole orchestra2 sounding four 14 george฀gershwin exultant trills. Three years later, Ferde Grofé would rescore the concerto for Paul Whiteman, and a recording of this different instrumentation makes it clear that Gershwin was a better orchestrator than Grofé, at least for his own works. Two weeks after the Globe Theatre tryout came the Carnegie Hall rehearsals with Damrosch conducting and with Gershwin playing, a pipe clenched between his teeth, as fellow songwriter Philip Charig turned the pages for him. At the December 3 premiere, the work was preceded by Glazunov’s Fifth Symphony, Rabaud’s Suite Anglais, and an intermission. Then came the first public performance...