A major turning point in his early career came in 1918, after he had left Remick's. The head of the publishing firm of Harms, Max Dreyfus, impressed by Gershwin's creative potential, engaged him for thirty-five dollars a week under an unusual arrangement: Gershwin was to have no set hours or duties but was merely to keep on writing songs and to show them to Dreyfus. With Dreyfus to promote his career Gershwin began to advance rapidly. He had his first smash song hit in 1919, "Swanee," popularized by Al Jolson in "Sinbad." In the same year he was commissioned to write his first complete score for a musical comedy, "La, La Lucille," a moderate success. Beginning with 1920 and continuing through 1924 he wrote all the music for the annual "George White Scandals," besides having songs interpolated into other Broadway productions. These scores yielded his first significant songs, including "Stairway to Paradise," "Do It Again," "Somebody Loves Me," and "Innocent Ingenue Baby." Their personal lyricism, together with a subtle use of rhythm, accentuation, and harmonic colorations, made even serious musicians sit up and take notice. Beryl Rubinstein, the concert pianist, described Gershwin in 1922 as having "the spark of musical genius. ... He is not definitely of the popular-music school, but is one of the really outstanding figures in this country's serious musical efforts." In 1923 the concert singer Eva Gauthier gave a recital in New York and Boston, which included a group of American songs, four of them by Gershwin, with the composer as accompanist. Commenting on Gershwin's part in the concert, Henry T. Parker [q.v.] remarked in the BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT: "He is the beginning of the age of sophisticated jazz." Gershwin was to grow increasingly ambitious in bringing sophistication to the area of popular music then somewhat loosely called jazz. In 1922, to a libretto by B. G. De Sylva, he wrote a one-act opera in the jazz idiom, originally named "Blue Monday" but subsequently retitled "135th Street." It was introduced in the "George White Scandals" on Aug. 29, 1922, but because of its somber mood was withdrawn from the production after only a single performance. "Blue Monday" had some pleasing individual numbers, but it was not an integrated work, and it was hardly an opera. Still, it was a major step forward for Gershwin: his first effort to think musically in terms larger than the song, his first attempt to adapt his skillful jazz technique to serious musical expression. The conductor of "Blue Monday" was Paul Whiteman, already designated a "king of jazz" by virtue of his orchestra's successful presentations of popular music in symphonic arrangements. Whiteman was planning a further step, however: a program in one of New York's regular concert halls, which would demonstrate the musical value of American popular idioms and approaches. Deeply impressed by Gershwin's one-act opera, Whiteman asked the young composer to write a new symphonic-jazz work for the occasion. Whiteman's concert took place at Aeolian Hall, New York, on Feb. 12, 1924, and it presented the world première of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. The "Rhapsody in Blue" was unquestionably the high moment of the concert. Its technical faults could not be denied, particularly its weakness in thematic development and its cliché-ridden harmonic language. But it was music filled with verve, excitement, spontaneity, and at moments genuine inspiration; it was American music to the core. The "Rhapsody in Blue" made Gershwin famous and wealthy. Probably no other composition in the serious repertory of the twentieth century has been played so often and in so many different versions. But it was also epoch-making, liberating jazz from its bondage in Tin Pan Alley and opening up for it new artistic horizons. While the application of popular American idioms to serious music was nothing new in 1924 (tentative efforts in this direction had previously been made by Debussy, Satie, Stravinsky, and Milhaud), the overwhelming success of the "Rhapsody" brought acceptance for American popular music among serious musicians everywhere. William Walton, Maurice Ravel, Kurt Weill, Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, Aaron Copland, and John Alden Carpenter were only a few of many composers who subsequently attempted to use jazz techniques with serious artistic purpose. Later works by Gershwin for either the concert hall or opera house were: "Concerto in F," for piano and orchestra, commissioned by the New York Symphony Society and introduced by that orchestra under Walter Damrosch, with the composer at the piano, on Dec. 3, 1925; "Three Piano Preludes" (1926); "An American in Paris," a tone poem introduced by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society under Damrosch on Dec. 13, 1928; "Second Rhapsody," first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky, again with Gershwin as soloist, on Jan. 29, 1932; "Cuban Overture" (1932); "Variations on I Got Rhythm" (1934); and his folk opera "Porgy and Bess," with a libretto by DuBose Heyward [q.v.] based on his dramatized novel "Porgy," and with lyrics by Heyward and Ira Gershwin, first given by the Theatre Guild at the Colonial Theatre in Boston on Sept. 30, 1935. back to page 1 continue to page 3