Written for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Not to be reprinted without permission.
Many French musicians of the 1920s were fascinated by jazz. At the end of the First World War, Black American artists in particular were welcomed into Paris’s cafés, concert halls, and nightclubs, finding freedom in a country without segregation or systematic discrimination. Meanwhile, writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway split their time between Paris and the Riviera, taking advantage of a favorable exchange rate and enjoying eccentric company.
George Gershwin was on both sides of this jazz-age exchange. In March 1928, he met Maurice Ravel at the French composer’s 53rd birthday party in New York—an event captured in a famous photo, and later dramatized in the 1945 film Rhapsody in Blue with the quip:
Gershwin: Monsieur Ravel, how much I’d like to study with you.
Ravel: If you study with me, you will only write second-rate Ravel instead of first-rate Gershwin.
Ravel was touring the United States, and Gershwin was about to embark on three months in Europe. He was a celebrity with Broadway successes and Rhapsody in Blue already in his portfolio; Irving Berlin called him “the only songwriter I know who became a composer.”
The first kernel of the symphonic poem An American in Paris came from a previous European trip, in 1926, that inspired a sketch labeled “Very Parisienne.” The second kernel was his discovery of French taxi-horns, which he picked up in a Paris automobile shop and added to his instrumentation. He worked on the piece in Europe through most of 1928, and it premiered on December 13 of that year at Carnegie Hall with Walter Damrosch leading the New York Philharmonic. Unlike Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin orchestrated the work himself, adding touches of French impressionist style.
Perhaps a bit self-seriously, Gershwin described his intent:
An American in Paris is an attempted reconciliation between two opposing schools of musical thought… It is program-music in that it engages to tell an emotional narrative; to convey, in terms of sound, the successive emotional reactions experienced by a Yankee Tourist adrift in the City of Light. It is absolute music as well, in that its structure is determined by considerations musical rather than literary or dramatic. The piece, while not in strict sonata form, resembles an extended symphonic movement in that it announces, develops, combines and recapitulates definite themes.
But Gershwin’s colleague, the composer and writer Deems Taylor, embellished the story in his program note for the premiere. In this telling, “You are to imagine, then, an American, visiting Paris, swinging down the Champs-Elysees on a mild, sunny morning in May or June.” The American is amused by the taxicabs, the old-fashioned music of a café, and something going on at a grand public building. He crosses the Seine to the Left Bank “where so many Americans foregather,” and gets a little drunk on pastis.
At this point, according to Taylor, “the orchestra introduces an unhallowed episode. Suffice it to say that a solo violin approaches our hero (in the soprano register) and addresses him in the most charming broken English.” But the tourist is getting homesick, and “realizes suddenly, overwhelmingly, that he does not belong to this place, that he is the most wretched creature in all the world, a foreigner.” The music turns more American with references to the blues and the rollicking Charleston dance. But when the tourist meets a fellow American, the “voluble, gusty, wise-cracking orchestra proceeds to demonstrate at some length that it’s always fair weather when two Americans get together, no matter where.” His mood lifted, the tourist “in a riotous finale decides to make a night of it. It will be great to get home but meanwhile, this is Paris!”
