|
|
Nov. 25, 2005
Gershwin an unparallelled composer
Jewish book festival starts this weekend, so head to the JCC.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Audiences in the 1920s and ’30s had access to some of the
greatest musical talent. Belle Baker, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Marion
Harris ... just a handful of the great performers. Irving Berlin,
Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and George Gershwin ... just a handful
of the great composers.
All of people have fascinating life stories, but it was to hear
more about Gershwin and his music that people came out to the Jewish
Community Centre of Greater Vancouver (JCC) on Nov. 14. In a presentation
entitled George Gershwin – A Leader of North American Music,
Cantor Steve Levin ably mixed lecture and music to give the enthusiastic
audience an overview of the work of this great musician and the
forces that influenced him, including his Jewish background.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1898, Gershwin would have grown up with
Yiddish folk and theatre music, as well as vaudeville. His mother
played piano and his father was very interested in classical music,
particularly in opera, said Levin.
Throughout the lecture, the audience was treated to many samples
of the music that both influenced Gershwin and that he wrote. In
the former category, there was “Oy de Meydelech” by Aaron
Lebedoff (of “Rumenye, Rumenye” fame) and a beautiful
selection from a Mascagni opera sung by tenor Enrico Caruso. In
the latter, there was “Swanee,” “The Man I Love”
from Lady be Good!, “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Summertime”
from Porgy and Bess and several other selections.
When listening to his compositions, it is hard to believe that,
as a child, Gershwin wasn’t that keen on the piano. But he
always had a very good ear for it, said Levin: without a musical
score in front of him, he could pick out a song just like that.
Nonetheless, Levin continued, one of his friends – the eventually
well-known violinist Max Rosen – told Gershwin, after Gershwin
accompanied Rosen in a school performance, “You better give
it up, George. You don’t have the right feel for it.”
Gershwin eventually did take piano lessons and, by age 15, was an
accompanist at a New York publishing house. He started writing his
own songs and, “by the end of the teens, he was already trying
to find ways to make the musical trends a little bit more sophisticated,”
said Levin. “Up to this time, he was writing songs that were
typical of the cabaret, ragtime era.”
In 1919, “Swanee” (with lyrics by Irving Caesar) premièred.
It was a big hit when Al Jolson took it to the stage in his revue,
Sinbad.
Levin went on to highlight many aspects of Gershwin’s musical
career in the context of the changing nature of musical theatre;
from vaudeville, star-centred shows to more plot-driven productions.
Levin also noted another side to Gershwin: his artistic ability.
Gershwin dabbled in drawing and watercolors later in life, perhaps
taking so long to get back to it because of an incident with a teacher
when he was younger, said Levin.
“Around the age of 10, he made a drawing and took it in to
show his teacher at school and the teacher rebuffed him and threw
it away as something crude and humiliated him in front of his classmates.
He decided he was never going to draw again.”
But in late 1927, his equally famous brother and frequent musical
collaborator, Ira, presented Gershwin with a set of watercolors
and brushes and Gershwin took up art again as a hobby. He drew many
famous people, including his close friend, composer Arnold Schomberg.
Levin showed the JCC audience examples of Gershwin’s work and
the talent is obvious.
“Very often, as composers mature, age,” said Levin, “they
begin to – sometimes consciously, often subconsciously –
I don’t want to say this flippantly, but they tend to recognize
the roots where they came from, in a lot of musical output or artistic
output or even other spheres. By the time the time the 1930s came
along, George and Ira Gershwin had written a string of successful
shows ... and [George Gershwin] had long wanted to make a musical
setting of DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy and Bess. Finally, by
the mid-1930s, he decided to really get to work on it.”
With the musical setting of this opera, Gershwin wanted to get to
at the root of jazz, said Levin, and there is a religiosity to many
of the songs.
“Some of those melodies [from the opera] can easily be taken
almost for a Jewish prayer mode, because the Jewish prayer chants
all came from certain melodic modes and very often, if [even] just
by coincidence, it very well may be that he would write songs for
Porgy and Bess which, by this time in his maturity, would emulate
some of those modes in the context of the devotional nature of the
songs and the almost religious approach to the composition.
“I do believe that it is probably a subconscious thing on George
Gershwin’s part – after all, it was in his blood –
but in that maturity, to find an even deeper form of musical expression
than he had ever, ever found previously was the opera Porgy and
Bess.”
The show was very hard to produce, said Levin. “The critics
panned it up and down. They didn’t understand it. George Gershwin
insisted upon having a black cast in the first performance and,
in the Depression era of the 1930s, it was a very, very difficult
climate for that.”
But the songs of Porgy and Bess became popular right away, said
Levin, even though the opera had a relatively short initial run
and the Metropolitan Opera would not put it on because of the nature
of the music and the fact that the performers were African-American.
(In 1955, Marian Anderson, in the role of Ulrica, the Gypsy fortune-teller
in Verdi’s opera The Masked Ball, would become the first African-American
to sing an important role at the Metropolitan Opera as a regular
company member.)
Shortly after Porgy and Bess, in 1937, Gershwin died from a brain
tumor. He was in Hollywood at the time with his brother, Ira, working
on various movie scores. He was 38 years old.
“He left in his wake unparallelled work of music of that era,”
said Levin. “We can only imagine – as with Mozart, for
example – what he would have written if allowed to live a full
life.”
Levin finished his talk by playing the introduction to the song
“It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy and Bess. It
showed the most obvious Jewish influence, said Levin, as he chanted
“Barchu et Hashem hamevorach” to the opening bars, then
interchanged the English words of the song with the Hebrew words
of the Jewish prayer. The evening ended with another version of
“It Ain’t Necessarily So,” as sung by Ella Fitzergerald
and Louis Armstrong.
Levin’s lecture was part of the JCC’s Adult Jewish Studies
Institute (AJSI) series Movers and Shapers of the 20th Century.
For more information about other AJSI programs, call 604-257-5111
or visit www.jccgv.com.
|
|
