Harold Meyerson: Gershwin and Bernstein

Once again, Harold Meyerson has sent an e-mail out to The American Prospect list that I couldn't agree with more (and once again I have to repost it to my blog because it's an e-mail instead of an entry on the Prospect Web site I could just link to]. I had the same observation myself when on a recent telecast I heard Leonard Bernstein referred to as "the quintessentially American composer" — and I immediately thought, "No, he wasn't. George Gershwin was.” Gershwin created stronger and more beautiful “classical” concert works AND wrote better songs for Broadway musicals (though in line with the general practice of the 1920's and 1930’s, most of the plots of the shows Gershwin’s songs appeared in were silly and dramatically uninteresting), despite having far fewer years to do it in (Gershwin died at 37, Bernstein at 72). — Mark Gabrish Conlan

Meyerson on TAP Before There Was Lenny, There Was George. This past weekend, the musical, theatrical, and critical worlds celebrated Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday with performances and essays of appreciation. They’ve been doing it all year, and the Lenny-Fest, which has reached some very distant shores, will joyously roll on until winter. Bernstein’s genius—as composer, conductor, performer; as the man who brought classical form to popular media and popular sounds to classical works; as the man who wrote profoundly American (which in his hands meant multicultural) music for classic European genres—has been treated not just as a kind of secular miracle, which it was, but also as sui generis, a one-of-a-kind achievement. Which it wasn’t. There was one other American composer before him who blazed the trail down which Bernstein was to parade: George Gershwin. Much as Bernstein shuttled between the concert hall and Broadway, so did Gershwin—though Lenny was clearly the maestro of the classical genres that Gershwin hadn’t gotten to when he died. Much as Bernstein electrified the American musical with West Side Story, so Gershwin electrified American music with Rhapsody in Blue. Much as Bernstein brought an American sound to his symphonies, so Gershwin brought an American sound to his opera, Porgy and Bess. As Bernstein melded his own version of Latino-American music into a number of his scores, so Gershwin melded his own version of African American music into his shows and opera. (In the early 1920s, it was Gershwin—not the African American songwriting teams of Sissle and Blake or Miller and Lyles—who brought the blue note into Broadway music.) They were rooted cosmopolitans, these two Jewish composers, taking in all manner of music from all manner of idioms and transforming it into their own sound—propulsive, poignant, raunchy, mournful, breathtaking. Gershwin seems to us a figure from a vanished world, while Bernstein is still a living presence. Gershwin emerged from the culture of song pluggers and Tin Pan Alley, now entries in the cultural histories, while Bernstein emerged from the culture of Tanglewood and other musical enclaves that are thriving to this day. Both were accomplished performers who loved displaying their brilliance before audiences, but Bernstein’s conducting is digitally with us still, while Gershwin’s piano recordings are the stuff of archives. It comes as a surprise, then, to realize that Gershwin was only 20 years older than Bernstein. If he seems more distant from us than his birthdate would suggest, it’s because died so young—of a brain tumor at age 38, just three years after his opera premiered. Had he lived even just through middle age, his work, which was growing deeper both musically and thematically, would have overlapped Bernstein’s, and how the two would have interacted would have been a source of endless fascination, just as Bernstein’s debts to and interactions with a longer-lived Gershwin contemporary—Aaron Copeland—are studied today. So I mean to take nothing away from Lenny the Magnificent to note that before him, there was Gershwin the Great. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON