Person · 5659–5697 AM · 1899 CE — 1937 CE
George Gershwin
He fused jazz with the concert hall: Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess
He died on 11 July 1937 of a glioblastoma, at thirty-eight.
One detail is worth knowing. On 18 October 1929 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Gershwin was to write an opera based on S. Ansky's The Dybbuk, and that the Metropolitan Opera expected it. The project collapsed—the rights had gone elsewhere—and instead of The Dybbuk he wrote Porgy and Bess.
It must not be printed that he was a synagogue musician or wrote for worship. Nor that the famous clarinet glissando opening the Rhapsody is a deliberate klezmer quotation: that is an interpretation, not documented intent.
Sources
Scholarship
- JTA, 18 October 1929 — the plan for an opera on Ansky's Dybbuk for the Metropolitan Opera
Basis: documents and evidence.