CM Notes » Eric Himy and “Gershwin in Paris”
“Gershwin in Paris”
Eric Himy, Piano
An American in Paris (1928) George Gershwin (1898–1937) / Himy
Preludes (1909–13) Claude Debussy (1862–1918) Danseuses de Delphes La fille au cheveux de lin Canope Minstrels
Liza (1924–1930) Gershwin / Wild Summertime
Fascinatin’ Rhythm Somebody Loves Me Who Cares? (original version) I Got Rhythm
Poisson d’or (1907) Debussy L’île joyeuse (1904)
Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894) (arr. Himy) Debussy
Three Preludes (1926) Gershwin I Allegro ben ritmato e deciso II Andante con moto e poco rubato III Allegro ben ritmato e deciso
La Plus que Lente, Valse pour Piano (1910) Debussy Golliwog’s Cakewalk (1908)
Liebesträume Franz Liszt (1811–1886) Valse Mephisto No.1
Eric Himy wants to explore Paris through some of the most sensitive psyches ever to live there. He uses the modern American composer George Gershwin, 1898 – 1937, to introduce his musical account of the City of Light but deepens and enriches his journey by adding Claude Debussy, a native Frenchman and Franz Lizst, a sparkling Hungarian immigrant, to his dramatis personae. There is also the humorous interplay of Debussy taking on some mannerisms of the American Jazz Age, with « Gollywog’s Cakewalk « .
An even more charming complexity emerges from Himy’s own transcription of « An American in Paris » for piano. In my mind Gershwin was primarily a pianist and composer for the piano. ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘An American in Paris’ succeed because they are pianistic in mood. Re-writing « An American in Paris « for piano returns the music to what I consider to be Gershwin’s natural element.
This is not an indictment of Gershwin’s music but a statement of fact. Chopin himself had similar problems. His harmony teacher inculcated a devotion to Bach in his pupil but once Chopin established himself in Paris, composing music for his own recitals, he did very little more in the way of studying musical theory.
Neither man’s genius was based on expressing complex orchestral ideas. Chopin was a miniaturist who floundered in the larger medium. Gershwin was enmeshed in the modern popular scene and found his strength there. He had more explicit classical training than is usually recognized but it was interspersed with his frenetic composing for Broadway shows and the need to earn a living. If there was conflict between the two the educational activity lost. The only classical teacher he ever had was Reuben Goldmark, a composer who had studied with Dvorak during the latter’s productive tenure in New York.
Gershwin showed immense musical talent very young, startling his friends and family by playing a complex piece completely by ear when his father bought a second hand piano for him. He had lessons and began to earn a living in the music world by composing and playing piano music for the Aeolian Music Company, part of that agglomeration of music businesses in New York known as « Tin Pan Alley ». Gershwin turned out hundreds of piano rolls for them. Soon after he started his professional career he met Irving Caesar and they wrote songs together. « Swanee » was a huge hit and made him famous.
It is rather touching to reflect on the fact that he was concerned about being thought artistic or intellectual when he was still in grade school. That sort of stuff was only for girls and sissies.
Pairing Gershwin with Debussy is not an idle whim. Pollack considers that the ecstatic clarinet opening of « An American In Paris » stems from the Debussy flute theme in « L’Apres-midi d’un Faune ». Gershwin adopted some of Debussy’s methods, using a free flowing melody « supported by unconventional harmonies ». Fashionable Paris may have moved on from Debussy but Gershwin went back to New York in 1928 treasuring bound volumes of Debussy’s music.
Other important influences on Gershwin ‘s composition included Edvard Grieg. Gershwin was aware of the great German masters but they did not have the profound impact on him that they had had on other young musicians. By the time he went to Paris to study, Classicism had long been dead and Romanticism was also over. The people he responded to were already post -Classical and largely post-Romantic.
The story of undiluted Romanticism in music can be said to begin with Berlioz. Beethoven was moving in that direction, loosening some of the more rigid constraints on musical expression when Berlioz broke new ground with the Symphonie Fantasque and The Damnation of Faust. Lizst brought his own dazzling technical and emotional gifts to the field, establishing new standards of performance and complexity in composition. Lizst added extreme bravura to the basic diatonic system but he was not an innovator.
He actually represented the end of an era even as he was its apotheosis. It is not widely known that he foresaw the coming of the 12 tone system As he grew older he became much more radical about tonality and wrote at least one piece without a given tonality.
In the 1890s, Debussy and Ravel loosened things up even more with experimental harmonies that shocked their teachers and the public. Ravel was expelled from the Paris Conservatoire for failing to take the courses seriously. Debussy seemed to have had better luck with mentors and superiors. Madame Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovky’s benefactor, employed him for several summers to teach her sons music because someone in authority recommended him to her.
By the time Gershwin reached Paris the boundaries of what we think of as »classical music » were blurred. World War I had carried away most of the vestiges of « proper » behavior in all aspects of modern life, including music. American culture was in the ascendant, both because of a huge influx of soldiers in the war and the arrival of so many Americans after the war.
In Henry James’ “The American” set in the 1870s, the American and what he signified were anathema to the hidebound old French families. Their one goal was to thwart him in every respect. Such people were still around in the 1920s but they were deeply impoverished and socially impotent. Now their children and grandchildren could not get enough of American style. This was a two-way stream.
In music as in art and litérature post-war Paris was the centre of the universe. Aaron Copland studied there in the 1920s with Nadia Boulanger. Walter Piston, Virgil Thompson and Roy Harris were also her pupils at that same epoch. Only Samuel Barber struck out in his own direction, going to Italy for further education in music. Gershwin wanted to study with Mlle. Boulanger but she believed she could not add anything to his highly personal style and was concerned she might ruin it. Ravel also rejected Gershwin for similar reasons.
Leonard Bernstein was a second « derivative » of Mlle. Boulanger. He studied composition at Harvard with Walter Piston. There are other resemblances between him and Gershwin. Both are much more widely known for their popular music than for their serious, classical pieces.
The irony is that Gershwin quickly tired of the Paris musical scene and left after a short stay. He wrote « An American in Paris » while there but it was first performed at Carnegie Hall in December 1928. The critics did not like it but the public did. It quickly entered the orchestral repertoire.
Gershwin’s other undying hit was »Porgy and Bess », first performed on Broadway in 1935. This story of poor black Gullah people in Charleston set to music by the son of Russian Jewish immigrants is considered to be an exemplar of American music. This recognition reflects Dvorak’s insights forty years before. A truly American music had to take into consideration the folk song of the black slaves and the music of native Americans.
DuBose Heyward, a descendant of the man who signed the Declaration of Independence for South Carolina, wrote his novel Porgy in 1925. So far, so WASP.
Heyward’s journey to work took him past a rough section of Charleston which is the basis of Catfish Row. There really was a very poor crippled man with a goat and a cart whose petty troubles with the police caught Heyward’s eye in a local newspaper.
Heyward then modified his book into a play, changing the story quite significantly. The play was also successful and ran for many performances. Gershwin used the play as the basis for his work. Heyward wrote the libretto and some of the lyrics himself. Even Ira Gershwin, George’s older brother who championed his work all his life, believed that Heyward’s lyrics were masterpieces. Ira only stepped in when Heyward was stuck.
Where did the amazing music come from ? Gershwin had not spent any time in the deep South to hear the sounds at first hand. His own internal well springs were the principal source. In addition he had been listening to variants of Jazz for years and had internalized them.
The voice of the first singer to play Bess also had some influence. Ann Brown sang for Gershwin in 1933 while in her second year of graduate study at Juilliard. He insisted she take the rôle and because he only lived for a very short time after the opera had its début she was the only singer he ever heard in the rôle. Young black sopranos were not cherished in the 1930s the way they are now. The opera was not accepted at the Metropolitan Opera House because of segregation but produced in a Broadway theatre.
Claude Debussy, 1862 - 1918, used music to express his impressions of the world around him, a companion to the contemporary movements in art and literature. Other people called him an impressionist but he disliked the term intensely. He subordinated musical structure to a more easily realized emotional content than could be achieved with the tools of classicism or even romanticism. The Prelude was particularly useful with its open ended form. Debussy still used the diatonic system but stretched the rules very elastically. He was the pivotal figure in the modern transformation of music.
Debussy wrote two sets of preludes, 12 in each set. They did not have the key progression of Bach’s « Well Tempered Klavier » but were each intended to be heard as an individual piece. Eric Himy has combined three preludes from the first series with one, the last in this group, from the second series.
Franz Liszt, 1811 -1886, was born in the village of Raiding in Hungary. Music was very important in his family. His father Adam had played the cello for Haydn in the Esterhazy’s orchestra. Franz’s (or Ferenc which was his given name) talent was recognized by the time he was 6. His father taught the child everything he knew and then took him to Vienna to study with Carl Czerny. Salieri taught the boy theory. Neither charged Adam Liszt for their services. There was a great similarity with Mozart and his son.
At 11 Franz gave his first recital, somewhat against Czerny’s wishes but his father needed the money. From there the next move in building Franz’s career was to go Paris but Franz never studied at the Paris Conservatoire. The director, Luigi Cherubini, turned him down on the basis of being a foreigner. That was absurd on its face as Cherubini himself was foreign. (The following year 14 year old Jacques Offenbach from Germany was taken when he applied to study the cello.)
Liszt was like a force of nature by all accounts. He started to compose while still very young. He used his signature glittering arrangements both as a method of conserving the music of his predecessors and to get it more widely known. For many years he used Paris as his base, going on his great travels, the « Années de Pelerinage ». During that period, between 1843 and 1850, he wrote the « Liebestraume » set.
Much later, in 1885, nearing the end of his life when he was ostensibly living in the director’s accommodations at the Hungarian Academy of Music in Pest, he wrote « The Mephisto Waltzes ». The music of this very late phase has considerable economy of means, almost as if there were not enough notes to express what he wanted to convey. He was pre-occupied with death and called his final works his « mortuary pieces ».
Eric Himy, Piano
An American in Paris (1928) George Gershwin (1898–1937) / Himy
Preludes (1909–13) Claude Debussy (1862–1918) Danseuses de Delphes La fille au cheveux de lin Canope Minstrels
Liza (1924–1930) Gershwin / Wild Summertime
Fascinatin’ Rhythm Somebody Loves Me Who Cares? (original version) I Got Rhythm
Poisson d’or (1907) Debussy L’île joyeuse (1904)
Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894) (arr. Himy) Debussy
Three Preludes (1926) Gershwin I Allegro ben ritmato e deciso II Andante con moto e poco rubato III Allegro ben ritmato e deciso
La Plus que Lente, Valse pour Piano (1910) Debussy Golliwog’s Cakewalk (1908)
Liebesträume Franz Liszt (1811–1886) Valse Mephisto No.1
Eric Himy wants to explore Paris through some of the most sensitive psyches ever to live there. He uses the modern American composer George Gershwin, 1898 – 1937, to introduce his musical account of the City of Light but deepens and enriches his journey by adding Claude Debussy, a native Frenchman and Franz Lizst, a sparkling Hungarian immigrant, to his dramatis personae. There is also the humorous interplay of Debussy taking on some mannerisms of the American Jazz Age, with « Gollywog’s Cakewalk « .
An even more charming complexity emerges from Himy’s own transcription of « An American in Paris » for piano. In my mind Gershwin was primarily a pianist and composer for the piano. ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘An American in Paris’ succeed because they are pianistic in mood. Re-writing « An American in Paris « for piano returns the music to what I consider to be Gershwin’s natural element.
This is not an indictment of Gershwin’s music but a statement of fact. Chopin himself had similar problems. His harmony teacher inculcated a devotion to Bach in his pupil but once Chopin established himself in Paris, composing music for his own recitals, he did very little more in the way of studying musical theory.
Neither man’s genius was based on expressing complex orchestral ideas. Chopin was a miniaturist who floundered in the larger medium. Gershwin was enmeshed in the modern popular scene and found his strength there. He had more explicit classical training than is usually recognized but it was interspersed with his frenetic composing for Broadway shows and the need to earn a living. If there was conflict between the two the educational activity lost. The only classical teacher he ever had was Reuben Goldmark, a composer who had studied with Dvorak during the latter’s productive tenure in New York.
Gershwin showed immense musical talent very young, startling his friends and family by playing a complex piece completely by ear when his father bought a second hand piano for him. He had lessons and began to earn a living in the music world by composing and playing piano music for the Aeolian Music Company, part of that agglomeration of music businesses in New York known as « Tin Pan Alley ». Gershwin turned out hundreds of piano rolls for them. Soon after he started his professional career he met Irving Caesar and they wrote songs together. « Swanee » was a huge hit and made him famous.
It is rather touching to reflect on the fact that he was concerned about being thought artistic or intellectual when he was still in grade school. That sort of stuff was only for girls and sissies.
Pairing Gershwin with Debussy is not an idle whim. Pollack considers that the ecstatic clarinet opening of « An American In Paris » stems from the Debussy flute theme in « L’Apres-midi d’un Faune ». Gershwin adopted some of Debussy’s methods, using a free flowing melody « supported by unconventional harmonies ». Fashionable Paris may have moved on from Debussy but Gershwin went back to New York in 1928 treasuring bound volumes of Debussy’s music.
Other important influences on Gershwin ‘s composition included Edvard Grieg. Gershwin was aware of the great German masters but they did not have the profound impact on him that they had had on other young musicians. By the time he went to Paris to study, Classicism had long been dead and Romanticism was also over. The people he responded to were already post -Classical and largely post-Romantic.
The story of undiluted Romanticism in music can be said to begin with Berlioz. Beethoven was moving in that direction, loosening some of the more rigid constraints on musical expression when Berlioz broke new ground with the Symphonie Fantasque and The Damnation of Faust. Lizst brought his own dazzling technical and emotional gifts to the field, establishing new standards of performance and complexity in composition. Lizst added extreme bravura to the basic diatonic system but he was not an innovator.
He actually represented the end of an era even as he was its apotheosis. It is not widely known that he foresaw the coming of the 12 tone system As he grew older he became much more radical about tonality and wrote at least one piece without a given tonality.
In the 1890s, Debussy and Ravel loosened things up even more with experimental harmonies that shocked their teachers and the public. Ravel was expelled from the Paris Conservatoire for failing to take the courses seriously. Debussy seemed to have had better luck with mentors and superiors. Madame Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovky’s benefactor, employed him for several summers to teach her sons music because someone in authority recommended him to her.
By the time Gershwin reached Paris the boundaries of what we think of as »classical music » were blurred. World War I had carried away most of the vestiges of « proper » behavior in all aspects of modern life, including music. American culture was in the ascendant, both because of a huge influx of soldiers in the war and the arrival of so many Americans after the war.
In Henry James’ “The American” set in the 1870s, the American and what he signified were anathema to the hidebound old French families. Their one goal was to thwart him in every respect. Such people were still around in the 1920s but they were deeply impoverished and socially impotent. Now their children and grandchildren could not get enough of American style. This was a two-way stream.
In music as in art and litérature post-war Paris was the centre of the universe. Aaron Copland studied there in the 1920s with Nadia Boulanger. Walter Piston, Virgil Thompson and Roy Harris were also her pupils at that same epoch. Only Samuel Barber struck out in his own direction, going to Italy for further education in music. Gershwin wanted to study with Mlle. Boulanger but she believed she could not add anything to his highly personal style and was concerned she might ruin it. Ravel also rejected Gershwin for similar reasons.
Leonard Bernstein was a second « derivative » of Mlle. Boulanger. He studied composition at Harvard with Walter Piston. There are other resemblances between him and Gershwin. Both are much more widely known for their popular music than for their serious, classical pieces.
The irony is that Gershwin quickly tired of the Paris musical scene and left after a short stay. He wrote « An American in Paris » while there but it was first performed at Carnegie Hall in December 1928. The critics did not like it but the public did. It quickly entered the orchestral repertoire.
Gershwin’s other undying hit was »Porgy and Bess », first performed on Broadway in 1935. This story of poor black Gullah people in Charleston set to music by the son of Russian Jewish immigrants is considered to be an exemplar of American music. This recognition reflects Dvorak’s insights forty years before. A truly American music had to take into consideration the folk song of the black slaves and the music of native Americans.
DuBose Heyward, a descendant of the man who signed the Declaration of Independence for South Carolina, wrote his novel Porgy in 1925. So far, so WASP.
Heyward’s journey to work took him past a rough section of Charleston which is the basis of Catfish Row. There really was a very poor crippled man with a goat and a cart whose petty troubles with the police caught Heyward’s eye in a local newspaper.
Heyward then modified his book into a play, changing the story quite significantly. The play was also successful and ran for many performances. Gershwin used the play as the basis for his work. Heyward wrote the libretto and some of the lyrics himself. Even Ira Gershwin, George’s older brother who championed his work all his life, believed that Heyward’s lyrics were masterpieces. Ira only stepped in when Heyward was stuck.
Where did the amazing music come from ? Gershwin had not spent any time in the deep South to hear the sounds at first hand. His own internal well springs were the principal source. In addition he had been listening to variants of Jazz for years and had internalized them.
The voice of the first singer to play Bess also had some influence. Ann Brown sang for Gershwin in 1933 while in her second year of graduate study at Juilliard. He insisted she take the rôle and because he only lived for a very short time after the opera had its début she was the only singer he ever heard in the rôle. Young black sopranos were not cherished in the 1930s the way they are now. The opera was not accepted at the Metropolitan Opera House because of segregation but produced in a Broadway theatre.
Claude Debussy, 1862 - 1918, used music to express his impressions of the world around him, a companion to the contemporary movements in art and literature. Other people called him an impressionist but he disliked the term intensely. He subordinated musical structure to a more easily realized emotional content than could be achieved with the tools of classicism or even romanticism. The Prelude was particularly useful with its open ended form. Debussy still used the diatonic system but stretched the rules very elastically. He was the pivotal figure in the modern transformation of music.
Debussy wrote two sets of preludes, 12 in each set. They did not have the key progression of Bach’s « Well Tempered Klavier » but were each intended to be heard as an individual piece. Eric Himy has combined three preludes from the first series with one, the last in this group, from the second series.
Franz Liszt, 1811 -1886, was born in the village of Raiding in Hungary. Music was very important in his family. His father Adam had played the cello for Haydn in the Esterhazy’s orchestra. Franz’s (or Ferenc which was his given name) talent was recognized by the time he was 6. His father taught the child everything he knew and then took him to Vienna to study with Carl Czerny. Salieri taught the boy theory. Neither charged Adam Liszt for their services. There was a great similarity with Mozart and his son.
At 11 Franz gave his first recital, somewhat against Czerny’s wishes but his father needed the money. From there the next move in building Franz’s career was to go Paris but Franz never studied at the Paris Conservatoire. The director, Luigi Cherubini, turned him down on the basis of being a foreigner. That was absurd on its face as Cherubini himself was foreign. (The following year 14 year old Jacques Offenbach from Germany was taken when he applied to study the cello.)
Liszt was like a force of nature by all accounts. He started to compose while still very young. He used his signature glittering arrangements both as a method of conserving the music of his predecessors and to get it more widely known. For many years he used Paris as his base, going on his great travels, the « Années de Pelerinage ». During that period, between 1843 and 1850, he wrote the « Liebestraume » set.
Much later, in 1885, nearing the end of his life when he was ostensibly living in the director’s accommodations at the Hungarian Academy of Music in Pest, he wrote « The Mephisto Waltzes ». The music of this very late phase has considerable economy of means, almost as if there were not enough notes to express what he wanted to convey. He was pre-occupied with death and called his final works his « mortuary pieces ».
