The "Rhapsody in Blue" of George Gershwin is the most familiar, most performed and, as they say in the entertainment world, highest-grossing piece of 20th-century music. It is also the most protean.
Since its premiere, in 1924, it has taken ever-changing forms, from multiple concert versions of varied lengths and orchestrations to 15-second commercial sound bites.So when the Boston Pops recently announced their premiere of an "authentic" version, restoring 50 measures of Gershwin's music to the score, critics and orchestra managers rushed to hear it. In a burst of irrational exuberance one writer claimed that the new version added four minutes to the piece and that the restored passages were "rich with jazzy blues interpolations."
Perhaps the Pops was giving free beer to the critics. On sober inspection, the expanded version, edited by Alicia Zizzo, a concert pianist and composer, is neither new nor improved. Although Zizzo claims that she has restored the score to its original form on the basis of her own "labor-intensive musicological `dig,' " beginning in 1989, most of her purported discoveries have been in print for 10 years.
The "restored" passages appear in the facsimile edition of Ferde Grofe's original score published by Warner Brothers in 1987, and all but one of them can be heard in a superb Musicmasters recording from that year, with Ivan Davis as soloist and Maurice Peress conducting.
The restorations - which add perhaps a minute to the piece, not four - consist of pedestrian extensions of piano solos that link the main sections of the piece.
These additions are not jazzier or bluesier than the rest of the rhapsody; they sound more like Liszt than Jelly Roll Morton. The editors at the work's original publisher, Zizzo suggests, were "classically trained in the 19th-century European tradition of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff," and did not understand Gershwin's "unique American style."
They made damaging cuts, she contends, which deprived the world of the authentic rhapsody. But this account may be a convenient fiction designed to lend authority to a new edition of a work that will lose its copyright protection and enter the public domain in two years.
Composers often revise and cut their music after premieres. Second thoughts are a normal part of the compositional process and do not require a conspiracy theory as an explanation.
"Rhapsody in Blue" was Gershwin's first large instrumental work, and he wrote it in three weeks. Much evidence suggests that he may have chosen to delete those passages himself. They do not appear in either of his recordings with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra or in his 1925 performance on piano roll. Nor did Gershwin, who lived for another 13 years and could easily have paid for a "restored" edition of his own, ever reinstate those measures to print.
Over the years, critics of the rhapsody, notably Leonard Bernstein, have cited its rambling connective passages as compositional flaws. Blaming the work's defects on malicious editorial cuts has a certain paranoid appeal; you can just picture those stuffy Europeanizing professors sniggering at Gershwin's infantile Americanisms as they wielded their editorial scissors.
But the charge is not borne out by Zizzo's own recording of the rhapsody on a 1996 Carlton CD, however attractive the performance.
The reinstated passages contain no new thematic ideas, and they certainly are not more difficult technically than familiar passages. They merely make the music, which many critics and musicians have always found flabby, a bit flabbier.
Why, in any case, should the notes in Gershwin's manuscript carry more weight than the notes he actually recorded? And why are cuts and changes automatically labeled "tampering" when they may be improvements? After years of browbeating by the early music movement, we tend to assume that the most authentic text of a piece is the earliest and that authentic performance-practice means a return to the style of the premiere. "Rhapsody in Blue," with its enduring popularity, resists both ideas.
The proliferation of versions, arrangements and approaches over the last seven decades have been signs not of disrespect or misunderstanding but of love. The public immediately took the piece to its heart and has refashioned it over the years in its own image, just as it has done with Gershwin's irresistible songs. Few today would care to hear Gershwin's songs bleated and Betty-Booped the way they were on Broadway in the 1920s.
At its inception, "Rhapsody in Blue" epitomized the cultural synthesis the historian Ann Douglas has termed "mongrel Manhattan." It brought together the idioms of jazz, popular song and concert music in a spirit of modern urban sophistication. The work itself was a collaboration.
Grofe (of "Grand Canyon Suite" fame) arranged Gershwin's two-piano score for the Whiteman Orchestra, the most famous jazz band in the country. In a series of ingenious orchestrations for White-man, Grofe had invented the band's sonority, and he gave Gershwin's music its pungent jazz coloring by exploiting the distinctive styles, colors and technical tricks of the group's individual members.
Contrary to the usual account, Gershwin was the more "classical" partner in the collaboration. He contributed well-made melodies, a solo piano part reminiscent of Romantic concertos and a fragrant ambience of Debussian harmony, considered "modernistic" at the time.
More subtly, Gershwin made the piano part the semiclassical foil to the Whiteman band's "jazzy" barnyard antics.
Gershwin's first recording of the rhapsody, made five months after the premiere, crackles with Jazz Age insouciance. It also cuts a good third of the piece, a precedent Gershwin honored in later performances. The recording sold a million copies. The work's instant popularity created a demand for a more conventional scoring. Oddly, although Gershwin soon learned to orchestrate his own music, it was Grofe, not Gershwin, who recast the music for theater orchestra and, later, symphony orchestra.
These arrangements retained some jazz colors, but the White-man effects were now either re-enacted or lost, and the burden of jazziness fell on the piano part: a reversal of roles that lured some pianists toward a mannered and manufactured "swing" not present in Gershwin's performances.
Thus the Hollywood Bowl-style rhapsody familiar from the great recordings by Oscar Levant and Earl Wild, a style now commonly put down by the authenticity police. But the rhapsody had changed meanings. It no longer signified Jazz Age brashness but had become virtually a national anthem and was performed accordingly.
The Hollywood Bowl-style rhapsody came apart in the '60s, as rock wiped out the cultural consensus of the "standard tune" era. The rhapsody's elements of Broadway dazzle, Tchaikovskian bathos and contrived jazziness were all losing their former allure, and even the tunes were fading into Muzak.
But a solution was at hand: the retro-rhapsody. If "Rhapsody in Blue" no longer sounded contemporary, it could be put back in its historical time capsule. Suddenly everyone wanted to play the "original" Whiteman version even though Whiteman, once known as the King of Jazz, had become an outcast in jazz history.
Taking this quest for the original rhapsody an "unforgettable" step farther, Michael Tilson Thomas used not only the Whiteman arrangement but also Gershwin's piano-roll performance for the solo part.
Perhaps the finest, if most perverse, "authentic" performance is James Levine's with the Chicago Symphony. It's fun, at least for a while, to hear America's greatest orchestra mimic the sound of the Whiteman band with a finicky stylistic attention it normally reserves for Mozart.
Over 70 years, "Rhapsody in Blue" evolved from a lively experiment to a national icon and then a dutifully worshiped relic. You can hear the evolution clearly in the way the most famous melody has changed shape. The Tchaikovskian "love theme," once the theme song of the Whiteman band and now the musical logo of United Airlines, sounds surprisingly limp in early recordings. Whiteman played it as a moderate fox trot, which Gershwin reshaped with a subtle rubato in his piano solo.
It may seem perverse that the most famous theme in 20th-century music is never played as written, but its evolution transformed a Guy Lombardo-esque slow dance, the least effective idea of the original, into a passionately throbbing love theme that has on its own come to stand for the entire rhapsody.
While knee-jerk "authenticity" may reduce the rhapsody to a period piece in the concert hall, classical performances, fortunately, are only a part of the work's evolution. From the beginning, it has also served as a theme song (or sound bite) and as a jazz composition.
In both forms, the spirit of the score has been kept alive even though the letter (the original order of tunes, their harmonies and the orchestration) has been left far behind.
The last paragraph of the Boston Pops report promised that for Gershwin's 100th anniversary, in 1998, "many of his works are being restored." The claims for these editions should be greeted with a rousing chorus of "It Ain't Necessarily So."
For years now, Gershwin's masterpiece, "Porgy and Bess," has been performed as a grotesque, overlong, overorchestrated monstrosity, devoid of musical and dramatic coherence but chock-full of every note Gershwin ever contemplated putting in the opera.
It would be a terrible fate if his entire output were to be freighted with such scholarly zeal - and interpretive sloth.