This comprehensive biography of George Gershwin (1898-1937) unravels the myths surrounding one of America's most celebrated composers and establishes the enduring value of his music. Gershwin created some of the most beloved music of the twentieth century and, along with Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, helped make the golden age of Broadway golden. Howard Pollack draws from a wealth of sketches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, books, articles, recordings, films, and other materials—including a large cache of Gershwin scores discovered in a Warner Brothers warehouse in 1982—to create an expansive chronicle of Gershwin’s meteoric rise to fame. He also traces Gershwin’s powerful presence that, even today, extends from Broadway, jazz clubs, and film scores to symphony halls and opera houses. Pollack’s lively narrative describes Gershwin’s family, childhood, and education; his early career as a pianist; his friendships and romantic life; his relation to various musical trends; his writings on music; his working methods; and his tragic death at the age of 38. Unlike Kern, Berlin, and Porter, who mostly worked within the confines of Broadway and Hollywood, Gershwin actively sought to cross the boundaries between high and low, and wrote works that crossed over into a realm where art music, jazz, and Broadway met and merged. The author surveys Gershwin’s entire oeuvre, from his first surviving compositions to the melodies that his brother and principal collaborator, Ira Gershwin, lyricized after his death. Pollack concludes with an exploration of the performances and critical reception of Gershwin's music over the years, from his time to ours.

George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place for himself--no family of his own and no real home in music. He and his siblings received little love from their mother and no direction from their father. Older brother and lyricist Ira managed to create a home when he married Leonore Strunsky, a hard-edged woman who lived for wealth and status. The closest George came to domesticity was through his longtime relationship with Kay Swift. She was his lover, musical confidante, and fellow composer. But she remained married to another man while he went endlessly from woman to woman. Only in the final hours of his life, when they were separated by a continent, did he realize how much he needed her. Fatally ill, unprotected by (and perhaps estranged from) Ira, he was exiled by Leonore from the house she and the brothers shared, and he died horribly and alone at the age of thirty-eight. Nor was Gershwin able to find a satisfying musical harbor. For years his songwriting genius could be expressed only in the ephemeral world of show business, as his brilliance as a composer of large-scale works went unrecognized by highbrow music critics. When he resolved this quandary with his opera Porgy and Bess, the critics were unable to understand or validate it. Decades would pass before this, his most ambitious composition, was universally regarded as one of music's lasting treasures and before his stature as a great composer became secure. In George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs.

In this welcome addition to the immensely popular Yale Broadway Masters series, Larry Starr focuses fresh attention on George Gershwin’s Broadway contributions and examines their centrality to the composer’s entire career. Starr presents Gershwin as a composer with a unified musical vision—a vision developed on Broadway and used as a source of strength in his well-known concert music. In turn, Gershwin’s concert-hall experience enriched and strengthened his musicals, leading eventually to his great “Broadway opera,” Porgy and Bess. Through the prism of three major shows—Lady Be Good (1924), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)—Starr highlights Gershwin’s distinctive contributions to the evolution of the Broadway musical. In addition, the author considers Gershwin’s musical language, his compositions for the concert hall, and his movie scores for Hollywood in the light of his Broadway experience.

A collection of articles, biographical reminiscences, reviews, musical analyses, and letters relating to the life and music of George Gershwin.

George Gershwin couldn't seem to stay out of trouble when he was a boy. He was a tough kid who got in a lot of fights and frequently skipped school. When his family bought a piano, his life was transformed. He quickly mastered the instrument, and then dropped out of school when he was fifteen to become a musician. Within a year, he had sold his first song. When he was 20, he wrote his first big hit. Five years after that, Rhapsody in Blue catapulted him to international fame. With his brother Ira as lyricist, George went on to compose some of the most famous musicals of the twentieth century, and he wrote several movie scores.?

“Elegant and authoritative.” —Thomas Brothers, author of Help!: The Beatles, Duke Ellington, and the Magic of Collaboration New York City native and gifted pianist George Gershwin (1898–1937) blossomed as an accompanist before his talent as a songwriter opened the way to Broadway, where he composed a long run of musical comedies, many with his brother Ira as lyricist. But his aspirations reached beyond commercial success. Appealing to listeners on both sides of the purported popular-classical divide, his first instrumental composition, Rhapsody in Blue, was an instant classic. He pushed boundaries again a decade later with the groundbreaking folk opera, Porgy and Bess—his magnum opus. In 1936, he and Ira moved west to write songs for Hollywood, but their work was cut short when George developed a brain tumor. He died at thirty-eight, a beloved artist who had fashioned his own brand of American music. Drawing extensively from letters and contemporaneous accounts, acclaimed music historian Richard Crawford traces the arc of Gershwin’s remarkable life, seamlessly blending colorful anecdotes with a celebration of his unforgettable music-making.

Challenging and musically rewarding advanced duo piano arrangements of four of Gershwin's most popular songs: But Not for Me * It Ain't Necessarily So * Someone to Watch over Me * 'S Wonderful/Funny Face. This addition to the two-piano repertoire was an official requirement of the 2008 Murray Dranoff International Piano Competition. "But Not for Me," "It Ain't Necessarily So," and "'S Wonderful / Funny Face" are Federation Festivals 2016-2020 selections.

Rhapsody in Blue has been restored to Gershwin's original manuscript by the talented Alicia Zizzo. This special edition includes an addendum to the two piano, four hands edition and the fully restored piano manuscript. When preparing the Rhapsody in Blue for publication, editors at Sam Harms Music Co. applied their own 19th century compositional conservatory training to the piece. With good intentions and due respect to Gershwin, they discreetly altered chords, phrases, dynamics, and accents, deleting whole passages to create a more concise work. Oddly, with the exception of four bars, all the deletions were from the piano solo sections, leaving the orchestration mostly undisturbed. Over 50 measures were deleted from the manuscript for the two-piano, four-hands publication, and the piece was shortened by several minutes. Approximately 80 measures were deleted from the original manuscript for the piano solo version and the editors used the second piano/orchestral reduction as a basis for it, further distancing the piano solo edition from Gershwin's original intent. After 70 years, the majesty of the complete Rhapsody in Blue as originally conceived and performed is finally available to future generations in this special annotated edition.