Rhapsody in Blue

When conductor Paul Whiteman commissioned Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the composer was not enthusiastic. In fact, he was already occupied with writing his comedy Sweet Little Devil. But when he discovered that the New York Tribune announced, without his knowledge, that “George Gershwin is working on a jazz concerto,” he set to work immediately! Completed in a few days, Rhapsody in Blue successfully premiered in 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York in the presence of composers such as Kreisler, Stravinsky, Rachmananinov, and Stokowski. The original title should have been American Rhapsody, as the composition is very representative of the metropolitan culture of New York city. Gershwin declared that the program was conceived as “a sort of multichrome fantasy, an American kaleidoscopic musical, with our [...] blues, our metropolitan madness.” Merging jazz and classical music, Rhapsody in Blue is one of the most representative works of New York’s melting pot!