George Gershwin

Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody. He began his career as a song plugger but soon started composing Broadway theater works with his brother Ira Gershwin and with Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris, intending to study with Nadia Boulanger, but she refused him, afraid that rigorous classical study would ruin his jazz-influenced style; Maurice Ravel voiced similar objections when Gershwin inquired about studying with him. He subsequently composed An American in Paris, returned to New York City and wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, it came to be considered one of the most important American operas of the 20th century and an American cultural classic. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed several film scores. He died in 1937, only 38 years old, of a brain tumor. His compositions have been adapted for use in film and television, with many becoming jazz standards.

Training under Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell and Edward Kilenyi is recorded. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is music, jazz and musical play. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are opera, jazz and classical. Works named in the authority record are The Man I Love, Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess and An American in Paris. Work by George Gershwin is recorded in the collections of National Portrait Gallery. Distinctions recorded are Grammy Trustees Award, Congressional Gold Medal, star on Hollywood Walk of Fame and Pulitzer Prize Special Citations and Awards.

Gershwin's parents were both Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His paternal grandfather, Jakov Gershovitz, was born in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, and had served for 25 years as a mechanic for the Imperial Russian Army to earn the right of free travel and residence as a Jew, finally retiring near Saint Petersburg, Russia. Jakov's teenage son, Moishe, George Gershwin's father, worked as a leather cutter for women's shoes. George's mother, Roza Bruskina, was born in Saint Petersburg. Moishe met Roza in Vilna, Russian Empire (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where her father worked as a furrier. She and her family moved to New York because of increasing anti-Jewish sentiment in Russia, changing her first name to Rose. Moishe, faced with compulsory military service if he remained in Russia, moved to America as soon as he could afford to (arrived on August 14, 1890). Once in New York, he changed his first name to Morris. Gershovitz lived with a maternal uncle in Brooklyn, working as a foreman in a women's shoe factory. He married Rose on July 21, 1895, and Gershovitz soon Anglicized his name to Gershwine. Their first child, Ira Gershwin, was born on December 6, 1896, after which the family moved into a second-floor apartment at 242 Snediker Avenue in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

George was born on September 26, 1898, in the Snediker Avenue apartment. His birth certificate identifies him as Jacob Gershwine, with the surname pronounced "Gershvin" in the Yiddish-speaking community. He was named after his grandfather, and, contrary to the American practice, had no middle name. He soon became known as George, and changed the spelling of his surname to "Gershwin" around the time he became a professional musician; other family members followed suit after Ira and George, another boy, Arthur Gershwin (1900–1981), and a girl, Frances Gershwin (1906–1999), were born into the family. The family lived in many different residences, as their father changed dwellings with each new enterprise in which he became involved. They grew up mostly in the Yiddish Theater District. George and Ira frequented the local Yiddish theaters, with George occasionally appearing onstage as an extra. George lived a boyhood not unusual in New York tenements, which included running around with his friends, roller-skating and misbehaving in the streets. Until 1908, he cared nothing about music. Then, as a ten-year-old, he was intrigued upon hearing his friend Maxie Rosenzweig's violin recital. The sound, and the way his friend played, captivated him. At about the same time, George's parents had bought a piano for his older brother Ira. To his parents' surprise, though, and to Ira's relief, it was George who spent more time playing it as he continued to enjoy it. Although his younger sister Frances Gershwin was the first in the family to make a living through her musical talents, she married young and devoted herself to being a mother and housewife, thus precluding spending any serious time on musical endeavors. Having given up her performing career, she settled upon painting as a creative outlet, which had also been a hobby George briefly pursued. Arthur Gershwin followed in the paths of George and Ira, also becoming a composer of songs, musicals, and short piano pieces. George studied with various piano teachers for about two years (circa 1911) before finally being introduced to Charles Hambitzer by Jack Miller (circa 1913), the pianist in the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra. Until his death in 1918, Hambitzer remained Gershwin's musical mentor, taught him conventional piano technique, introduced him to music of the European classical tradition, and encouraged him to attend orchestral concerts.

In 1913, Gershwin left school at the age of 15 to work as a "song plugger" on New York City's Tin Pan Alley. He earned $15 a week from Jerome H. Remick and Company, a Detroit-based publishing firm with a branch office in New York. His first published song was "When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em" in 1916. It earned the 17-year-old 50 cents. In 1916, Gershwin started working for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls in New York City, recording and arranging. He produced dozens, if not hundreds, of rolls under his own and assumed names (pseudonyms attributed to Gershwin include Fred Murtha and Bert Wynn). He also recorded rolls of his own compositions for the Duo-Art and Welte-Mignon reproducing pianos. As well as recording piano rolls, Gershwin made a brief foray into vaudeville, accompanying both Nora Bayes and Louise Dresser on the piano. His first song to appear on Broadway was "Making of a Girl", written in 1916 with Sigmund Romberg and lyrics by Harold Atteridge. It was sung in The Passing Show of 1916. His 1917 novelty rag, "Rialto Ripples", was a commercial success. In addition to his musical activities, he took over the management of the popular and famous gay bathhouse Lafayette Baths together with his brother Ira. In 1919, Gershwin scored his first big national hit with his song "Swanee", with words by Irving Caesar. Al Jolson, a Broadway star and former minstrel singer, heard Gershwin perform "Swanee" at a party and decided to sing it in one of his shows. In the late 1910s, Gershwin met songwriter and music director William Daly. The two collaborated on the Broadway musicals Piccadilly to Broadway (1920) and For Goodness Sake (1922), and jointly composed the score for Our Nell (1923). This was the beginning of a long friendship. Daly was a frequent arranger, orchestrator and conductor of Gershwin's music, and Gershwin periodically turned to him for musical advice. Beginning in the early 1920s, Gershwin frequently worked with the lyricist Buddy DeSylva. In 1922, they created the experimental one-act jazz opera Blue Monday, set in Harlem. It is widely regarded as a forerunner to the groundbreaking Porgy and Bess introduced in 1935.

In 1924, Gershwin composed his first major work, Rhapsody in Blue, for orchestra and piano. It was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé and premiered by Paul Whiteman's Concert Band, in New York. It subsequently went on to be his most popular work, and established Gershwin's signature style and genius in blending vastly different musical styles, including jazz and classical music, in revolutionary ways. In the following year he wrote his "Piano Concerto in F", which has also become an established part of the classical repertoire. In the same year, George and Ira Gershwin collaborated on a stage musical comedy Lady Be Good, which included such future standards as "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Oh, Lady Be Good!". In April 1925, the Broadway musical Tell Me More opened at the Gaiety Theatre in New York. In May 1925 it opened at the Winter Garden theatre in London which was directed by Clifford Whitley from The Co-Optimists. A massive smash hit that ran for 263 performances. This show officially anchored Elsa Macfarlane as an elite West End star, she performed alongside comedy king Leslie Henson. George and Ira Gershwin followed this with Oh, Kay! (1926), Funny Face (1927) and Strike Up the Band (1927 and 1930). Gershwin allowed the latter song, with a modified title, to be used as a football fight song, "Strike Up The Band for UCLA". In the mid-1920s, Gershwin stayed in Paris for a short period, during which he applied to study composition with the noted Nadia Boulanger, who, along with several other prospective tutors such as Maurice Ravel, turned him down, afraid that rigorous classical study would ruin his jazz-influenced style. While there, Gershwin wrote the tone poem An American in Paris. This work received mixed reviews upon its first performance at Carnegie Hall on December 13, 1928, but it quickly became part of the standard repertoire in Europe and the United States.

In 1929, the Gershwin brothers created Show Girl; the following year brought Girl Crazy, which introduced the standards "Embraceable You", sung by Ginger Rogers, and "I Got Rhythm". 1931's Of Thee I Sing became the first musical comedy to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the winners were George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin. Gershwin spent the summer of 1934 on South Carolina's Folly Island after he was invited to visit by DuBose Heyward, author of the novel Porgy. It was there that he was inspired to write the music to his opera Porgy and Bess. Porgy and Bess was considered another American classic by the composer of Rhapsody in Blue — even if critics could not quite figure out how to evaluate it, or decide whether it was opera or simply an ambitious Broadway musical. "It crossed the barriers," per theater historian Robert Kimball. "It wasn't a musical work per se, and it wasn't a drama per se – it elicited response from both music and drama critics. But the work has sort of always been outside category."

After the commercial failure of Porgy and Bess, Gershwin moved to Hollywood, California. He befriended Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he played tennis. In 1936, he was commissioned by RKO Pictures to write the music for the film Shall We Dance, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Gershwin's score, which married ballet with jazz in a new way, runs over an hour. It took Gershwin several months to compose and orchestrate. George and Ira also wrote the songs for A Damsel in Distress, like Shall We Dance released in 1937, and some of the songs for The Goldwyn Follies. After George's death in 1937 Ira continued working with Vernon Duke on the latter film and it was released in 1938. George and Ira's songs for those three films included an extraordinary number of popular hits and future jazz standards: "They All Laughed", "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" and "They Can't Take That Away from Me" from Shall We Dance, "Nice Work If You Can Get It" and "A Foggy Day" from A Damsel in Distress, and "Love Is Here to Stay" from The Goldwyn Follies.

Early in 1937, Gershwin began to complain of blinding headaches and a recurring impression that he smelled burning rubber. As early as February 1934, he had said he smelled burning garbage at the Detroit railway station, though those with him did not. On February 11, 1937, he performed his Piano Concerto in F in a special concert of his music with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the direction of French maestro Pierre Monteux. Gershwin, normally a superb pianist in his own compositions, suffered coordination problems and blackouts during the performance. He was at the time working on other Hollywood film projects while living with Ira and his wife Leonore in their rented house in Beverly Hills. Leonore Gershwin began to be disturbed by George's mood swings and his seeming inability to eat without spilling food at the dinner table. She suspected mental illness and insisted he be moved out of their house to lyricist Yip Harburg's empty quarters nearby, where he was placed in the care of his valet, Paul Mueller. The headaches and olfactory hallucinations continued. On the night of July 9, 1937, Gershwin collapsed in Harburg's house, where he had been working on the score of The Goldwyn Follies. His last words were "Fred Astaire". He was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, and fell into a coma. Only then did his doctors come to believe that he was suffering from a brain tumor. Leonore called George's close friend Emil Mosbacher and explained the dire need to find a neurosurgeon. Mosbacher immediately called pioneering neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing in Boston, who, retired for several years by then, recommended Walter Dandy, who was on a boat fishing in the Chesapeake Bay with Harry Nice, the governor of Maryland. Mosbacher called the White House and had a Coast Guard cutter sent to find the governor's yacht and bring Dandy quickly to shore. Mosbacher then chartered a plane and flew Dandy to Newark Airport, where he was to catch a plane to Los Angeles; by that time, Gershwin's condition was critical and the need for surgery was immediate. Before Dandy could arrive, in the early hours of Sunday, July 11, 1937, doctors at Cedars removed a large brain tumor, believed to have been a glioblastoma, but Gershwin died that morning at the age of 38. The fact that he had suddenly collapsed and become comatose after he stood up on July 9 has been interpreted as brain herniation with Duret hemorrhages. Gershwin's friends and admirers were devastated. John O'Hara remarked: "George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to." He was interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. A memorial concert was held at the Hollywood Bowl on September 8, 1937, at which Otto Klemperer conducted his own orchestration of the second of Gershwin's Three Preludes.

Gershwin had a ten-year affair with composer Kay Swift, whom he frequently consulted about his music. The two never married, although she eventually divorced her husband James Warburg to commit to the relationship. Swift's granddaughter, Katharine Weber, has suggested that the pair were not married because George's mother Rose was "unhappy that Kay Swift wasn't Jewish". The Gershwins' 1926 musical Oh, Kay! was named for her. After Gershwin's death, Swift arranged some of his music, transcribed several of his recordings, and collaborated with his brother Ira on several projects.

In 1970, the New York City Ballet premiered Who Cares?, a ballet by George Balanchine to sixteen songs by Gershwin, orchestrated by Hershy Kay.

Gershwin died intestate, and his estate passed to his mother. The estate continues to collect royalties in the United States from licensing the copyrights on his post-Rhapsody in Blue work. The estate supported the Sonny Bono Copyright Term extension Act (that extended the U.S. 75-year copyright protection an additional 20 years) because its 1923 cutoff date was shortly before Gershwin had begun to create his most popular works. The copyrights on all Gershwin's solo works expired at the end of 2007 in the European Union, based on its life-plus-70-years rule, and in the U.S. on January 1, 2020, on Gershwin's pre-1925 work. In 2005, The Guardian determined using "estimates of earnings accrued in a composer's lifetime" that George Gershwin was the wealthiest composer of all time. The George and Ira Gershwin Collection, much of which was donated by Ira and the Gershwin family estates, resides at the Library of Congress. In September 2013, a partnership between the estates of Ira and George Gershwin and the University of Michigan was created and will provide the university's School of Music, Theatre, and Dance access to Gershwin's entire body of work, which includes all of Gershwin's papers, compositional drafts, and scores. This direct access to all of his works provides opportunities to musicians, composers, and scholars to analyze and reinterpret his work with the goal of accurately reflecting the composers' vision to preserve his legacy. In 2023, The Gershwin Critical Edition, "the first-ever scholarly edition of the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin", was published.

The Gershwin Theatre on Broadway is named after George and Ira. The Gershwin Hotel in the Flatiron District of Manhattan in New York City was named after George and Ira. In Brooklyn, George Gershwin Junior High School 166 is named after him. One of Holland America Line's ships, MS Koningsdam, has a Gershwin Deck (Deck 5)

The 1945 biographical film Rhapsody in Blue starred Robert Alda as George Gershwin.

In George Lucas's The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones a fictional George Gershwin appears as a friend of Indiana Jones in the made-for-TV movie from 1999, Scandal of 1920. He also briefly appears in Hollywood Follies. He is portrayed by Tom Beckett. Since 1999, Hershey Felder has produced a one-man show with him portraying George Gershwin Alone, which has played over 3,000 performances and won two 2007 Ovation Awards. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Felder launched a global live-streaming Hershey Felder Presents: Live from Florence featuring a performance of "Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone" in September 2020. Paul Rudd portrays an imaginary friend based on George Gershwin, said to be his creator's favorite composer, in the 2015 series finale of the Irish sitcom Moone Boy, "Gershwin's Bucket List".

George Gershwin at the Internet Broadway Database George Gershwin at IMDb Free scores by George Gershwin at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)

George Gershwin biography at the Jewish-American Hall of Fame The Gershwin Initiative at The University of Michigan Gershwin's An American in Paris, a performance/lecture with Bruce Adolphe

The George and Ira Gershwin Collection at the Library of Congress The Harvey Granat Collection of George and Ira Gershwin Materials at the Library of Congress The Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart Collection of Gershwin Research Materials at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (Archived January 27, 2025, at the Wayback Machine) George Gershwin oral histories at Oral History of American Music