George Gershwin’s career is a great American success story, tempered (as with Mozart and Schubert) by early death in his 30s that cut it short. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he grew up in a poor household. As Aaron Copland, his slightly younger Brooklyn contemporary, also discovered, music offered opportunities. But while Copland went to study abroad as an American in Paris, Gershwin dropped out of school and started working his way up as a “song-plugger,” playing Tin Pan Alley songs for perspective customers at a music store. Soon he was writing his own songs (his first big hit was “Swanee” in 1919) and enjoying success on Broadway.

Rhapsody in Blue was commissioned in January of 1924 by Paul Whiteman, the best-known American bandleader at the time, for his concert titled, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” with the goal of alerting the public audience to the importance and influence of jazz music. It was premiered on February 12, 1924 at the Aeolian Theater in New York with Gershwin as the soloist and was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s personal arranger.

George Gershwin wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” at the young age of 25, as a way to present himself as a more serious composer. Labeled as a “jazz concerto,” it is scored for solo piano and jazz ensemble and exhibits characteristics of popular song forms while highlighting elements of jazz and blues within its free-form outline.

The title itself was thought up by Ira Gershwin who was inspired by the abstract names of James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s paintings such as Arrangement in Gray and Black. This curious title piqued the interest of the Gershwin brothers and they then created a musically equivalent title with the word “blue” suggesting “the Blues” and in addition, jazz.

The premiere of this piece hit the public audience by storm which led to Grofé eventually reworking the orchestration to fit the more commonly seen arrangement today with piano solo and symphony orchestra. Rhapsody in Blue catapulted George Gershwin into a world-famous career. It brought jazz into the concert hall using a musical language that was fresh, spontaneous, and uniquely American.

To provide greater availability for a work of such importance, the original publishers secured from Gershwin a solo piano version wherein the orchestral parts are fused together with the solo piano part. (Due to concerns that the composer's arrangement presented too many technical demands, a modified arrangement was delicately solicited from pianists of the time. Gershwin's untimely death precluded any modification from the composer himself.)