George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898, and grew up on the streets with other children living in tenement neighborhoods. He became infatuated with playing the piano that was purchased for his older brother Ira. He eventually studied with Charles Hambitzer, a pianist with the Boston Symphony and who introduced him to the music of the European classical tradition. At 15, Gershwin left school and worked on Tin Pan Alley, for $15 a week, and two years later his first song earned him 50 cents. He created and produced hundreds of piano rolls, collaborated on Broadway musicals, Blue Monday, a single act Jazz Opera, and Al Jolson heard him play Swanee at party one night. He decided to sing it in his show, and it became a national hit. Teaming up with his brother Ira, they wrote a string of successful musical comedies. 

At 26, Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue, which quickly became his most popular hit, and established his genius at incorporating a scope of musical styles in ways yet imagined. Keenly interested in French music, he moved to France hoping to study at the Paris Conservatory with Ravel. But he was rejected, with Ravel writing  “Why become a second-rate Ravel when you’re already a first-rate Gershwin?” After learning the amount of money that Gershwin earned, Ravel was to say, “You should give me lessons.” While there, Gershwin composed An American in Paris.

Returning to America, he went on to write music for films, and expanded a short piece from one into the Second Rhapsody. He and Ira created some of their most memorable shows, one winning the first Pulitzer for Drama. Gershwin then created Porgy and Bess, a work that defied the established parameters of opera and drama. In it, Gershwin employed leitmotif and recitative, a fugue and a passacaglia, atonality, polytonality, polyrhythm, and a tone row. Apparently Gershwin’s interests also included contemporary music – Berg, Stravinksky, Shostakovitch, Milhaud, and Schoenberg, whom Gershwin also approached to teach him composition, but who also declined him. 

Gershwin’s successes created expectations from critics and audiences who defined him through their own attachment to the styles and genres of music that he was so adept at communicating in. After the first string of musical comedies, he turned to writing the one act jazz opera, Blue Monday, which was a flop. With the expectations of another Rhapsody in Blue, his Concerto in F was criticized in the classical world for sounding too French influenced. At the height of popularity and critical acclaim for the music and stage presentations, he created Porgy and Bess, his most sophisticated work, which also was a commercial failure.

Perhaps Gershwin’s greatest achievement was his ability to integrate his broad musical interests and synthesize them into a singular voice, and freely adopt and refine them into a variety of different forms. From the roots of his Ukrainian Jewish heritage to Tin Pan Alley, from jazz to Debussy and Les Six, to the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Berg’s Wozzeck, George Gershwin simply remained himself. He died at the age of 39, from brain cancer.