Gershwin Alone
(Jan. 1, 2010)
“…you know as well as I do that the Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It’s a string of separate paragraphs stuck together—with a thin paste of flour and water. Composing is a very different thing from writing tunes, after all. I find that the themes, or tunes, or whatever you want to call them, in the Rhapsody are terrific—inspired, God-given. At least four of them, which is a lot for a twelve-minute piece. … But you can’t just put four tunes together, God-given though they may be, and call them a composition. Composition means putting together, yes, but a putting together of elements so that they add up to an organic whole… . Your Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable, or even pretty inevitable. You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections, and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another, and no harm done … Each work got better as he went on, because he was an intelligent man and a serious student, and he worked hard. But the American in Paris is again a study in tunes, all of them beautiful, and all of them separate.”
- Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music
I caught Hershey Fedler’s one-man show Gershwin Alone at the Chicago Drury Lane Water Tower Theatre last week. There’s an extended piano performance of the Rhapsody in Blue about three-quarters of the way through the night and I couldn’t help but think back to Bernstein’s commentary on the piece. It’s true; snatches of melody are restated over and over—at different intervals sometimes, sometimes with slight rhythmic variation—but there’s no development leading the listener from one section to the next. Instead there’s filler, series of ascending and descending arpeggios, mostly.
Turning this thought over in my mind, I was struck by how simultaneously applicable it was to Felder’s show. The stories I’d been hearing for the last hour-and-a-half touched upon themes in Gershwin’s life—never living up to the archetype of musical success for which Irving Berlin was emblem, never quite succeeding in love—but little was added to them each time save the accumulation of years. Mama Gershwin’s invocation of Berlin was not substantially different from that of Sam Goldwyn.
The final effect of the writing was that we learned facts about George Gershwin but received little access to any kind of interiority of the man. There was no sense of thewhy behind this piece, what Felder found there that made it worth sharing. Presumably there are depths to be mined in the story of a talent who died tragically young, feeling unfulfilled despite popular success, but it never went there. I had a good time, but as a whole the experience came up a little empty.
