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.

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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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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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.”

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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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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The post Music History Monday: Giovanni Gabrieli and the Miracle That is Venice! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.