Happy Birthday, George Gershwin

My partner has been going through his classical CD collection, in alphabetical order; I just read his blog so I know he is in the "V"'s and has been at it since last November. If I did a similar project, it would not take me nearly as long, and I would be spending a large portion of the time in the "G"'s. This is because I am a Gershwin fanatic and I have a huge collection. Of course, lots of Gershwin wouldn't really count as "classical" music, I suppose. He wrote hundreds of show tunes; by far the bulk of his output was popular songs. His "serious" works include a concerto for piano and orchestra, two rhapsodies, a set of piano preludes, variations on a theme ("I Got Rhythm," his own favorite of all of his tunes), and an opera. He was 38 when he died in 1937. He was born on September 26, 1898, so happy birthday, George!

In a way it is nice having a 20th-century composer for my favorite. This is because he flourished during the sound era, so there are a number of recordings of him playing piano, a few of him conducting his own works, and even a handful of radio broadcasts which he hosted. There are also films for which he wrote the score, and films which made use of his music posthumously (the classic is Gene Kelly's An American in Paris; Woody Allen also used Gershwin music for Manhattan).

In his songwriting, George was ably assisted by his brother Ira, who wrote lyrics for the vast majority of Gershwin tunes. Ira of course continued his career as a lyricist after his brother's death, and was still active into the latter part of the last century. I remember being ecstatic to read a newspaper article entitled "Ira Gershwin is Alive and Well and Living in Beverly Hills" when I was in high school (ca. 1971). I saved the article; it's in a box somewhere. I badly wanted to write Ira a fan letter, but never did (probably just as well; I write terrible fan letters).

I am off now to browse the web and see if there is any Gershwin music online that I don't have in my collection. I don't expect I'll find anything, but I'll listen to something by George, just to celebrate.