When George Gershwin brought together the worlds of jazz and classical in the premiere of his Rhapsody in Blue 100 years ago in New York, a whole new soundworld was born, as Mervyn Cooke relates
‘How trite and feeble and conventional the tunes are; how sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment, under its disguise of fussy and futile counterpoint! … Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!’ Such was the verdict of the New York Tribune on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, in a scathing review of the premiere in February 1924. Yet Gershwin’s piece is today considered to be a pioneering example of symphonic jazz and, with the passage of time, it becomes ever harder to recapture just how provocative and controversial the idea seemed at the time.
Gershwin would soon be no stranger to tetchy reviews. Four years later, the New York Telegram dismissed his An American in Paris as ‘nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane that the average movie audience would be bored by it… This cheap and silly affair seemed pitifully futile and inept.’ As late as 1935, fewer than two years before Gershwin’s untimely death from a brain tumour at just 38, New York’s Herald Tribune described the vocal numbers in Porgy and Bess – destined to become some of the best-loved songs of all time – as the new opera’s ‘cardinal weakness’ and the ‘blemish on its musical integrity’.
Why this thoroughly nasty critical backlash on the American East Coast, where Gershwin was fast becoming established as a pre-eminent figure in popular songwriting?
Cultural elitism was undoubtedly at the heart of the malaise – that a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith should dare to try his hand at composing concert music! It’s notable that the reviewer of Porgy disliked the commercial potential of the opera’s songs (describing them as ‘sure-fire rubbish’ which would ‘no doubt enhance his fame and popularity’), while An American in Paris was apparently so tawdry that even the cinema-going hoi polloi would tire of it. Similarly, Rhapsody in Blue was panned for being ‘trite’ and ‘sentimental’. True, Gershwin did play into the classical critics’ hands by making his Rhapsody rather loose in its structure – a criticism which used to be hurled at some of Tchaikovsky’s and Grieg’s best-loved pieces. This was a consequence of his bold attempt to meld elements drawn from jazz, popular mu
