World Premiere: February 12, 1924
Last HSO Performance: October 13, 2019
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings
Duration: 16 minutes

For George White’s Scandals of 1922, the 24-year-old George Gershwin provided something a little bit different — an opera, a brief, somber one-acter called Blue Monday (later retitled 135th Street) incorporating some jazz elements that White cut after only one performance on the grounds that it was too gloomy. Blue Monday, however, impressed the show’s conductor, Paul Whiteman, then gaining a national reputation as the self-styled “King of Jazz” for his adventurous explorations of the new popular music styles with his Palais Royal Orchestra. A year later, Whiteman told Gershwin about his plans for a special program the following February in which he hoped to show some of the ways traditional concert music could be enriched by jazz, and suggested that the young composer provide a piece for piano and jazz orchestra. Gershwin, who was then busy with the final preparations for the upcoming Boston tryout of Sweet Little Devil and somewhat unsure about barging into the world of classical music, did not pay much attention to the request until he read in The New York Times on New Year’s Day that he was writing a new “symphony” for Whiteman’s program. After a few frantic phone calls, Whiteman finally convinced Gershwin to undertake the project, a work for piano solo (to be played by the composer) and Whiteman’s 22-piece orchestra — and then told him that it had to be finished in less than a month. Themes and ideas for the new piece immediately began to tumble through Gershwin’s head, and late in January, only three weeks after it was begun, the Rhapsody in Blue was completed. 

The premiere of the Rhapsody in Blue — New York, Aeolian Hall, February 12, 1924 — was one of the great nights in American music. With this concert, billed as an “Experiment in Modern Music,” Whiteman wanted to demonstrate both the historical development of jazz as a particularly American phenomenon and the manner in which the jazz style might be utilized in modern concert compositions. The program included piano solos by Zez Confrey (notably his deathless Kitten on the Keys), arrangements for the full orchestra of such pop tunes as Alexander’s Ragtime Band and Limehouse Blues, examples of various jazz treatments of well-known songs, a Suite of Serenades by Victor Herbert, and, as the center piece for the evening, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Many of the era’s most illustrious musicians attended: Mischa Elman, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Moriz Rosenthal, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Walter Damrosch, Leopold Stokowski, Willem Mengelberg. Critics from far and near assembled to pass judgment; the glitterati of society and culture graced the event. Gershwin fought down his apprehension over his joint debuts as serious composer and concert pianist, and he and his music had a brilliant success. “A new talent finding its voice,” wrote Olin Downes, music critic for The New York Times. Downes’ predecessor at the Times, Carl Van Vechten, wrote to Gershwin, “You crowned the concert with what I am forced to regard as the foremost serious effort by an American composer.” Conductor Walter Damrosch told Gershwin that he had “made a lady out of jazz,” and then commissioned him to write the Concerto in F. There was critical carping about laxity in the structure of the Rhapsody in Blue, but there was none about its vibrant, quintessentially American character or its melodic inspiration, and it became an immediate hit, attaining (and maintaining) a position of popularity almost unmatched by any other work of a native composer.