Music History Monday

We mark the London premiere on August 26, 1952 – 72 years ago today – of the film “An American in Paris.” With music by George Gershwin (1898-1937), directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it, George Gershwin’s programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.

Here’s how we’re going to proceed. Today’s Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute workfor orchestra composed in 1928.

Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on (and excerpting) four of its musical numbers.

Statement

George Gershwin (1898-1937) on the cover of Time magazine, July 20, 1925

George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States. His death at the age of 38 (of a brain tumor) should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert (at 31), Mozart (at 35), and Chopin (at 39).

He was born Jacob Gershovitz (though his birth certificate reads “Jacob Gershwine”), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, on September 26, 1898.  He was born at home, in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  

(In 1963, a bronze plaque commemorating Gershwin’s birth was affixed to the building.  By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times: the plaque was stolen – it is still MIA – and the building vandalized.  It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.)

Rarely has a major composer begun his life in an artistically less promising manner.  Tall, athletic, and charismatic, Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime.  By his own admission, he cared nothing for music until he was ten, when George’s parents Morris and Rose bought his elder brother Ira a piano.  But it was George who attacked the thing, with an intensity and precocity that shocked everyone.  …

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Addendum: A Heartfelt Postscript

This will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post.  I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years – since September 5, 2016 – during which I have created over 400 of them.  It’s been a wonderful run, and now it’s time for me to return to writing music.  From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic. 

If you are not already part of my Patreon family, I would urge you to consider joining us!

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Serge (or Sergei) Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1916

We mark the death on August 19, 1929 – 95 years ago today – of the Russian impresario, patron, art critic, and founder of the Ballets Russes Serge (or “Sergei”) Pavlovich Diaghilev, in Venice. Born in the village of Selishchi roughly 75 miles southeast of St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872, he was 57 years old when he died.

Movers and Shakers

Serge Diaghilev was one of the great movers-and-shakers of all time. In a letter to his stepmother written in 1895, the 23-year-old Diaghilev described himself with astonishing honesty and no small bit of prescience, given the way his life went on the develop:

“I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio [meaning vivacious and spirited!]; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly I have any amount of cheek [meaning chutzpah; moxie; nerve!]; fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I think I have no real gifts. All the same, I think I have found my true vocation – being a patron of the arts. I have all that is necessary except the money – but that will come.”

Diaghilev at 17, circa 1889

Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with the audacious and spectacular career of one Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Without Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky would never have become STRAVINSKY: the enfant terrible of Western music in the years before World War One. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have seen his career reborn and finances recover after the war. Conversely, without Stravinsky, Diaghilev might have made his mark but not his legend. Consequently, I’m going to dedicate this post to not just Monsieur Diaghilev, but to his discovery of and ongoing relationship with Igor Stravinsky!

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Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612)

We mark the death on August 12, 1612 – 412 years ago today – of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli. Born in Venice circa 1555, he grew up and spent his professional life in that glorious city, and died there as a result of complications from a kidney stone.

Gabrieli’s magnificent, soul-stirring music went a long way towards helping to define the expressive exuberance of what we now identify as Baroque era music. The impact and influence of his music was ginormous, an impact and influence that culminated a century later in the German High Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)!

To a degree beyond any other composer before or after him, Gabrieli’s music has come to be identified with his hometown of Venice, in particular the acoustically unique Venetian performance venues for which so much of his music was composed.

It is necessary, then, for us to spend some time in Venice, if only to get some inkling of what makes this singularly remarkable city so spiritually, artistically, and architecturally unique; and why Gabrieli’s music is uniquely Venetian.…

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Easy Times!

We’ve been having a good time, an easy time here at Music History Monday these last few weeks. Five of our last six MHM posts have featured fairly recent musical events from the “popular” side of the musical aisle. Music History Monday for June 24 focused on Disco; on July 1, the invention and marketing of Sony’s Walkman; on July 8, the American crooner Steve Lawrence (who was born, as I know you recall, Sidney Liebowitz); on July 22, Taylor Swift; and on July 29, Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen).

Today we get back to the historical repertoire. But let me assure you: the composer we will focus on was as ground-breaking as Sony’s Walkman; his music as gorgeous as the silken voices of Steve Lawrence and Cass Elliot; his rhythmic sensibilities as sharply honed as those of the Bee Gees and Taylor Swift (though, to my knowledge, a concert of his music never simulated a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in downtown Seattle, as did Ms. Swift’s on July 22, 2023).

“Portrait of a Young Man” (1432) by Jan van Eyck; possibly Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474)

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Guillaume Du Fay!

We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 627 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay. He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime.

Guillaume Du Fay as The First Professional Composer

Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Venezuelan -American musicologist, conductor, and composer Alejandro Enrique Planchart observes that:

“Before Du Fay’s time, the concept of a “composer” – that is, a musician whose primary occupation is composition [and not a priest, choir master, or teacher] – was largely unfamiliar in Europe. The emergence of musicians who focused on composition above other musical endeavors arose in the 15th century, and was exemplified by Du Fay.”

Early Life

He was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today spelled Beersel), just south of Brussels.  He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France in the city of Cambrai.…

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We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District. Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.

Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen); 1941-1974

Brief Biography

Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland. According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”

The Pale of Settlement

(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties. As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live. Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)

It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!

Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground. (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)

It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark.  She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.”  In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show.  In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps.  Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…

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