Rhapsody in Blue is a 1924 musical composition for solo piano and jazz band by George Gershwin. Commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the work combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects and premiered in a concert titled "An Experiment in Modern Music" on February 12, 1924, in Aeolian Hall, New York City. Whiteman's band performed the rhapsody with Gershwin playing the piano. Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated the rhapsody several times, including the 1924 original scoring, the 1926 pit orchestra scoring, and the 1942 symphonic scoring.
The rhapsody is one of Gershwin's most recognizable creations and a key composition that defined the Jazz Age. Gershwin's piece inaugurated a new era in America's musical history, established his reputation as an eminent composer, and became one of the most popular of all concert works. In the American Heritage magazine, Frederic D. Schwarz posits that the famous opening clarinet glissando has become as instantly recognizable to concert audiences as the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
History Commission
Following the success of an experimental classical-jazz concert held with Canadian singer Éva Gauthier in New York City on November 1, 1923, bandleader Paul Whiteman decided to attempt a more ambitious feat. He asked composer George Gershwin to write a concerto-like piece for an all-jazz concert in honor of Lincoln's Birthday to be given at Aeolian Hall. Whiteman became fixated upon performing such an extended composition by Gershwin after he collaborated with him in The Scandals of 1922. He had been especially impressed by Gershwin's one-act "jazz opera" Blue Monday. Gershwin initially declined Whiteman's request on the grounds that he would have insufficient time to compose the work and the score would likely need to be revised.
Soon after, on the evening of January 3, George Gershwin and lyricist Buddy DeSylva played a game of billiards at the Ambassador Billiard Parlor at Broadway and 52nd Street in Manhattan. George's brother, Ira Gershwin, interrupted their billiard game to read aloud the January 4 edition of the New-York Tribune. An unsigned Tribune article entitled "What Is American Music?" about an upcoming Whiteman concert had caught Ira's attention. The article falsely declared that George Gershwin had begun "work on a jazz concerto" for Whiteman's concert.
The news announcement puzzled Gershwin, as he had politely declined to compose any such work for Whiteman. In a telephone conversation with Whiteman the next morning, Whiteman informed Gershwin that Whiteman's arch rival Vincent Lopez planned to steal the idea of his experimental concert and there was no time to lose. Whiteman thus finally persuaded Gershwin to compose the piece.
Composition With only five weeks remaining until the premiere, Gershwin hurriedly set about composing the work. He later claimed that while on a train journey to Boston, the thematic seeds for Rhapsody in Blue began to germinate in his mind. He told biographer Isaac Goldberg in 1931:
Gershwin began composing on January 7 as dated on the original manuscript for two pianos. He tentatively entitled the piece as American Rhapsody during its composition. Ira Gershwin suggested the revised title of Rhapsody in Blue after his visit to a gallery exhibition of James McNeill Whistler paintings, which had titles such as Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Arrangement in Grey and Black. After a few weeks, Gershwin finished his composition and passed the score, titled A Rhapsody in Blue, to Ferde Grofé, Whiteman's arranger. Grofé finished orchestrating the piece on February 4—a mere eight days before the premiere.
Premiere
Rhapsody in Blue premiered during a snowy Tuesday afternoon on February 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall, Manhattan. Entitled "An Experiment in Modern Music", the much-anticipated concert held by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra drew a packed house. The excited audience consisted of "vaudevillians, concert managers come to have a look at the novelty, Tin Pan Alleyites, composers, symphony and opera stars, flappers, cake-eaters, all mixed up higgledy-piggledy." A number of influential figures of the era were present, including Carl Van Vechten, Marguerite d'Alvarez, Victor Herbert, Walter Damrosch, and Willie "the Lion" Smith.
In a preconcert lecture, Whiteman's manager, Hugh C. Ernst, proclaimed the purpose of the concert to be "purely educational". Whiteman had selected the music to exemplify the "melodies, harmony, and rhythms which agitate the throbbing emotional resources of this young restless age." The concert's lengthy program listed 26 separate musical movements, divided into two parts and 11 sections, bearing titles such as "True Form of Jazz" and "Contrast—Legitimate Scoring vs. Jazzing". The program's schedule featured Gershwin's rhapsody as merely the penultimate piece, which preceded Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1.
Many of the early numbers in the program underwhelmed the audience, and the ventilation system in the concert hall malfunctioned. Some audience members had departed the venue by the time Gershwin made his inconspicuous entrance for the rhapsody. The audience purportedly was irritable, impatient, and restless until the haunting clarinet glissando played the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue. The distinctive glissando had been created quite by happenstance during rehearsals:
Whiteman's orchestra performed the rhapsody with "twenty-three musicians in the ensemble" and George Gershwin on piano. In characteristic style, Gershwin chose to partially improvise his piano solo. The orchestra anxiously waited for Gershwin's nod, which signaled the end of his piano solo and the cue for the ensemble to resume playing. As Gershwin did not write the solo piano section until after the concert, exactly how the original rhapsody sounded at the premiere remains unknown.
Audience reaction and success
Upon the conclusion of the rhapsody, the audience tumultuously applauded Gershwin's composition, and quite unexpectedly, "the concert, in every respect but the financial, became a 'knockout'." The concert soon became historically significant due to the premiere of the rhapsody, and its program would "become not only a historic document, finding its way into foreign monographs on jazz, but a rarity, as well."
Following the success of the rhapsody's premiere, future performances followed. The first British performance of Rhapsody in Blue took place at the Savoy Hotel in London on June 15, 1925. The BBC broadcast the performance in a live relay. Debroy Somers conducted the Savoy Orpheans with Gershwin himself at the piano. Audiences heard the piece again in the United Kingdom during the second European tour of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, most notably on April 11, 1926, at the Royal Albert Hall, with Gershwin in the audience. His Master's Voice recorded, but did not release this performance.
By the end of 1927, Whiteman's band had performed Rhapsody in Blue around 84 times, and its recording sold a million copies. For the entire piece to fit onto two sides of a 12-inch record, the rhapsody had to be played at a faster speed than usual in a concert, which gave the recording a hurried feel with noticeably lost rubato. Whiteman later adopted the piece as his band's theme song and opened his radio programs with the slogan "Everything new but the Rhapsody in Blue."
Critical response
In contrast to the warm reception by concert audiences, music critics gave the rhapsody mixed reviews. Samuel Chotzinoff, music critic of the New York World, conceded that Gershwin's composition had "made an honest woman out of jazz", while Henrietta Strauss of The Nation opined that Gershwin had "added a new chapter to our musical history." Olin Downes, reviewing the concert in The New York Times, favorably noted the rhapsody as a "highly original form", and the composer as a "new talent finding its voice."
Nonetheless, other reviewers were less positive. Pitts Sanborn declared that the rhapsody "begins with a promising theme well stated" yet "soon runs off into empty passage-work and meaningless repetition." A number of reviews were particularly negative. Lawrence Gilman—a Richard Wagner enthusiast who would later write a devastating review of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess—harshly criticized the rhapsody as "derivative", "stale", and "inexpressive" in a New-York Tribune review on February 13, 1924.
Overall, professional music critics recurrently criticized Gershwin's piece as essentially formless and asserted that the composer had haphazardly glued melodic segments together.
Retrospective reviews Years after its premiere, Rhapsody in Blue continued to divide music critics principally due to its perceived melodic incoherence. Constant Lambert, a British composer whose oeuvre often incorporated jazz elements, openly dismissed the work:
In an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955, Leonard Bernstein, who nevertheless admitted that he adored the piece, stated:
Orchestration
As Gershwin did not have sufficient knowledge of orchestration in 1924, Whiteman's pianist and chief arranger Ferde Grofé played a key role in the rhapsody's meteoric success, and scholars have contended that Grofé's arrangements of the Rhapsody secured its place in American culture. Gershwin's biographer, Isaac Goldberg, noted in 1931 that Grofé played a crucial role in the premiere's triumph:
Grofé hastily arranged the famous 1924 score to take full advantage of the Whiteman orchestra's particular strengths. He developed this orchestration for solo piano and Whiteman's 23 musicians. For the reeds section, Ross Gorman (Reed I) played oboe, heckelphone, and B-flat, E-flat, alto, and bass clarinets, as well as sopranino, soprano, and alto saxophones; Donald Clark (Reed II) played soprano, alto, and baritone saxophones, and Hale Byers (Reed III) played soprano, tenor, and baritone saxophones, as well as flute.
For the brass section, two trumpets were played by Henry Busse and Frank Siegrist; two French horns were played by Arturo Cerino and Al Corral; two trombones were played by Roy Maxon and James Casseday, and a tuba and a double bass were played by Guss Helleburg and Alus Armer, respectively. The rest of the ensemble included a drum set, timpani, and a glockenspiel played by George Marsh; one piano typically played by either Ferde Grofé or Henry Lange; one tenor banjo played by Michael Pingatore, and a complement of violins.
Musicologists largely ignored this original arrangement—with its unique instrumental requirements—until its revival in reconstructions beginning in the mid-1980s, owing to the popularity and serviceability of the later scorings. After the 1924 premiere, Grofé revised the score and made new orchestrations in 1926 and 1942, each time for larger orchestras. He published his arrangement for a theater orchestra in 1926. Grofé orchestrated this adaptation for a more standard "pit orchestra", which included one flute, one oboe, two clarinets, one bassoon, three saxophones, two French horns, two trumpets, and two trombones, as well as the same percussion and strings complement as the later 1942 version.