George Gershwin was one of the most original and beloved American composers, a musical genius who bridged the worlds of popular song and the concert hall and helped create a distinctively American sound. Born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, he left school early to work as a "song plugger" in New York's Tin Pan Alley, plugging tunes for a music publisher.
He soon began writing his own songs, and with his older brother Ira as lyricist formed one of the greatest partnerships in the history of American popular music. Together they produced a stream of enduring standards — "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "They Can't Take That Away from Me" — for Broadway shows and, later, Hollywood films.
Gershwin's towering ambition was to fuse jazz idioms with classical forms. In 1924 his Rhapsody in Blue, with its famous wailing clarinet glissando, electrified audiences and announced a bold new American concert music; he followed it with the Piano Concerto in F and the tone poem An American in Paris.
His masterpiece was Porgy and Bess (1935), an ambitious "folk opera" set among the poor Black residents of Charleston, which produced the immortal "Summertime" and is now recognized as a landmark of American music. At the height of his powers, Gershwin died suddenly of a brain tumor in 1937, only thirty-eight years old, his loss mourned as a national tragedy.