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By Stuart Mitchner
Mr. Gershwin was a child of the Twenties, the Age of Jazz. In the fast two-step time of the years after the war he was to music what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to prose.
—from the July 12, 1937 New York Times obituary
After pairing George Gershwin and Scott Fitzgerald as voices of the Jazz Age, the Times obit observed that “Four years after that mad decade began, Paul Whiteman sent the strains of Rhapsody [in Blue] cascading far beyond Broadway and the music they called Jazz had come of age. Serge Koussevitsky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra played his work and the capitals of Europe called for more.”
When Fitzgerald died three and half years later, the December 23, 1940 Times obituary spoke of a career “that began and ended” with the 1920s, its “promise never fulfilled.” The paper does at least note that “the best of his books” was The Great Gatsby, published “at a time when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” In it Fitzgerald was “at his best,” which was in his “ability to catch the flavor of a night, a snatch of old song, in a phrase.”
Playing the Numbers
I saw no reason to connect these two artists and their signature works until I put the numbers together. Born September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald was two years and two days older than Gershwin, born September 26, 1898; yesterday was his 125th birthday. A more significant coincidence is that both men were at work a hundred years ago completing their landmark creations: Rhapsody in Blue first performed on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1924; The Great Gatsby published on April 10, 1925.
An American Vision
According to Gershwin’s own account, quoted in Howard Pollack’s 2006 biography, “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is so often stimulating to a composer” that “I suddenly heard – and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end…. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America – of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.” It was “all New York, all America … a picnic party in Brooklyn or a dark-skinned girl singing and shouting her blues in a Harlem cabaret. I try to depict a scene, a New York crowd. And it’s vulgar. It’s full of vulgarisms. That’s what gives it weight. I never tried to prettify it.”
Midway into The Great Gatsby, speaking through his narrator Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald composes a variation on Gershwin’s “musical kaleidoscope of America” as he and Gatsby are driven across the Queensboro Bridge by Gatsby’s chauffeur. Seen from the bridge, the city rises up across the river “in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money.” The next sentence offers a melodic alternative to that atonal analogy: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.” After describing what appears to be a gangster’s funeral, Nick thinks, “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge…. Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.”
That freighted passage suggests a range of elements like those Gershwin imagines in his Rhapsody, the “vast melting pot,” the “national pep,” the “blues,” the “metropolitan madness.” It is “all New York, all America … and it’s vulgar ….”
Although the Times’ reference to gin and sex would seem to give Gatsby a head start on vulgarity, I find it hard to relate Gershwin’s “vulgarisms” to Rhapsody in Blue. The dictionary suggests “lacking sophistication or good taste; unrefined, as in the vulgar trappings of wealth.” It’s a given that one of New York City’s seedy charms, then and now, is the jazzy, honkytonk vulgarity of an area like Times Square, which can presumably be read into Paul Whiteman’s original recording, orchestrated by Ferde Grofé with Gershwin playing the piano part. A passage speculating on the Rhapsody in Edmund Wilson’s novel I Thought of Daisy mentions only “the sounds of the streets … the taxis creaking to a stop … some distant and obscure city sound in which a plaintive high note, bitten sharp, follows a lower note, strongly clanged and solidly based.” The soundscapes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky are also cited, but Gershwin himself would surely hesitate to equate modernism and atonality with vulgarity. By the end of Gatsby, the glow is off the “vulgar trappings” of Gatsby’s wealth as Fitzgerald takes his vision to another level.
“I Can Hear It Yet”
Phrases like the “wild promise” and “mystery and beauty” that Nick sees in the city across the river evoke music at its most powerful and moving, as in the Rhapsody’s glorious Andantino, the “middle theme” Gershwin says came to him while he was “rattling away” at the piano “without a thought of rhapsodies in blue or any other color” when “all at once I heard myself playing a theme that must have been haunting me inside, seeking outlet.”
In an early draft of Gatsby that Fitzgerald originally called Trimalchio, after a character in the Satyricon, he refers to a piece of music played by a hired orchestra at the party where he first meets Gatsby. Titled The Jazz History of the World, an apparent allusion to Rhapsody in Blue, it began, as Nick hears it, “with a weird, spinning sound,” followed by a series of interruptive notes which colored everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme…. Long after the piece was over it went on and on in my head — whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.”
Prose as Music
Fitzgerald’s most inspired prose music comes in the closing pages of Gatsby, where, after gazing at “the huge incoherent failure” of Gatsby’s mansion, Nick notices that “there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world,” where “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent … face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
The full measure of Fitzgerald’s rhapsody is achieved in the next paragraph when Nick imagines that “Gatsby’s dream must have seemed so close that he would hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
In My Life
If I could rewind a home movie of all the times my father sat down at the grand piano in our living room circa 1950-1958, I know I could find the afternoon or evening he played highlights from the Rhapsody that would end with a stirring performance of the Andantino that David Schiff called “the most famous melody in twentieth century concert music.” My mother, who might have been furious with him half an hour before, would be in tears, “reduced to rubble,” as she liked to put it.
I heard a recording of Rhapsody in Blue for the first time when I was 18, roughly around the time that I first read The Great Gatsby. The Gershwin melody that led to a turning point in my life, however, found me in the fall of 1998, his centenary year. The medium was the tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray (1921-1955), with his extraordinary improvisation on “The Man I Love” recorded in three takes in November 1946, nine years after Gershwin’s death. So began a quest to know more about the life and work of the man who would dominate my listening life for the better part of a decade. In June 2003 I finally put what I learned and felt into an article in the Village Voice called “Song of the Thin Man.” Besides leading to my job as a Town Topics reviewer, the article introduced me to Gary Giddins, who will soon publish a new biography of George Gershwin. Meanwhile, I’ve found a useful source in Howard Pollack’s George Gershwin: His Life and Work (University of California Press 2006).
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