Gershwin finished Rhapsody in Blue in five frantic weeks
George Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue for piano and jazz band premiered 12 February at Aeolian Hall in Paul Whiteman’s An Experiment in Modern Music. Whiteman commissioned it after a 1923 classical-jazz trial; a Tribune leak and rivalry with Vincent Lopez forced Gershwin to write despite earlier refusal.
He began the two-piano manuscript on 7 January, first calling it American Rhapsody until Ira Gershwin, inspired by Whistler painting titles, suggested Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin later told Isaac Goldberg that Boston train rhythms crystallised the whole form. At the snowy premiere, twenty-three players backed Gershwin, who partly improvised the piano solo and nodded the band back in—the exact solo was written only afterward.
Opening clarinet glissando rescued a restless hall after a long, stuffy program. Applause was huge; by end of 1927 Whiteman’s band had played the piece about eighty-four times and Whiteman’s disc sold a million copies, albeit sped up to fit a 12-inch disc. London heard it at the Savoy Hotel on 15 June 1925 with Gershwin at the piano and a BBC live relay.
Critics split: some said he made jazz honest or opened a new chapter; others heard empty passage-work and formless glued tunes. Still, the work stamped the Jazz Age, fixed Gershwin’s stature, and remains among the most played American concert pieces—proof that a billiard-hall deadline can rewrite a nation’s soundtrack.
Much of the orchestral colour came from Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s pianist and chief arranger, who scored the piece in ten days because Gershwin still lacked orchestration skill in 1924, and scholars credit his arrangements with securing its place. Doubts lingered for decades: Constant Lambert called it neither good jazz nor good Liszt, and Leonard Bernstein, writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1955, confessed he adored it while arguing its sections could be cut or swapped without harm.
Source: Rhapsody in Blue
