George Gershwin
Composer

From Jacob to George, by way of a piano

I was born in New York City in 1898 with the name Jacob Gershwine, and I later tidied the spelling of my surname into Gershwin. My parents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, and my brother Ira, who became a lyricist, would one day write words for my tunes. I left school at 15, in 1913, and took a job on Tin Pan Alley playing new songs on the piano so that people would buy the sheet music, for $15 a week. Please don't picture a self-taught boy, though, because I studied piano seriously with Charles Hambitzer until his death in 1918.

A song about a river pays the rent

My first big national hit came in 1919 with a song called "Swanee", with words by Irving Caesar. Suddenly people all over the country were humming something I had written, which is a wonderful feeling after playing other people's songs for a living. Then, in 1924, the bandleader Paul Whiteman put on a concert called "An Experiment in Modern Music" at Aeolian Hall in New York. I was to play the piano in it, and that evening turned me from a songwriter people knew into a composer people talked about.

The city that never sat still

New York was both my home and my workshop, from the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley to the theatres of Broadway. On Broadway I wrote shows with Ira, and one of them, Of Thee I Sing, became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1931. The prize went to George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira rather than to me, and I was delighted for my brother all the same. The traffic, the chatter and the constant hurry of that city found their way into almost everything I wrote.

Blue, and in a hurry

The piece most people know me for is Rhapsody in Blue, and I began writing it on 7 January 1924, which left very little time before the concert. While I wrote the music, Ferde Grofé did the careful work of orchestrating it for Whiteman's band, and he finished on 4 February. It was first heard on 12 February 1924 with Whiteman conducting and me at the piano, and it sounds like jazz and a concert hall sharing a taxi: bluesy, swaggering and sometimes tender. A year later I followed it with my Piano Concerto in F, and in 1928 An American in Paris had its premiere at Carnegie Hall, though the reviews were mixed.

The lesson I never got

Even after my success I wanted to learn more, so in the 1920s I asked Maurice Ravel to give me lessons. He declined, and the story goes that he said I would only become a second-rate Ravel instead of a first-rate Gershwin. What seems certain is that he worried lessons would cost me my gift for melody and my spontaneity. I kept studying anyway, and from 1932 to 1936 I worked on composition with Joseph Schillinger, so nobody should say I had no training.

A grand opera and a sunny exile

In 1935 Porgy and Bess had its premiere in Boston on 30 September, with a libretto by DuBose Heyward, and it opened on Broadway that October. It ran for only 124 performances and struggled commercially, so I moved to Hollywood and wrote scores for Shall We Dance and A Damsel in Distress. In early 1937 I began to have severe headaches and sometimes smelled burning rubber, which was a frightening sign that something was wrong. I collapsed on 9 July 1937, doctors removed a large brain tumor, and I died on 11 July in Los Angeles at the age of 38.

The music kept going without me

Porgy and Bess was controversial from the start, partly because of how it portrayed African Americans, and Virgil Thomson was among its critics. Opinion warmed over the years, helped a great deal by the Houston Grand Opera production in 1976. My song "They Can't Take That Away from Me" received an Academy Award nomination after my death, and in 1985 Ira and I were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Since 2007 there has even been a Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in honor of us both, which is a pleasant thing to have your name on when you are no longer around to carry it.

What I'd like to hand you

If I could give you one thing, it would be the feeling that listening to this music takes no training and no special clothes. I always wanted concert music and popular songs to sit at the same table instead of eating in separate rooms. So when you press play on Rhapsody in Blue, don't worry about what you are supposed to notice. Just listen for the swagger, the sadness and the big-city bustle, and if it makes you smile, then I have done my job.