Jewish Elements in the Music of George Gershwin

George Gershwin's music, though composed mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, has remained popular to the present day. Most listeners know that Gershwin's musical base was the American commercial scene of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. Not generally, recognized, however, is that Gershwin's music contains many Jewish elements.

Gershwin (1898-1937), son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in a poor Jewish section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. The family had little involvement with Jewish customs, but Gershwin naturally heard and absorbed Jewish music.

During his summer vacation from school in 1913, he had a job as a pianist at a Jewish resort in the Catskill Mountains. After leaving school in 1914 to work as a pianist in Tin Pan Alley, he frequented the National Theater on Second Avenue to learn as much as he could about the Yiddish musical theater.

His aim at that time was to compose for the Yiddish theater, not for ethnic reasons but for financial security. However, Gershwin's career in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway soon moved ahead, and he never composed anything explicitly for the Yiddish theater. In 1929 he signed a contract to compose a Jewish opera, The Dybbuk, for the Metropolitan Opera, but the plan fell through when the rights to the play were lost.

Nevertheless, in his American commercial music, Gershwin incorporated a number of characteristics that resemble Jewish prayer chants and secular tunes. One such trait is the recurring prominence of the melodic interval of a minor third, as in the second of the three Preludes for Piano (1926), "Funny Face" from the Broadway musical Funny Face (1927), "Wintergreen for President" from the musical Of Thee I Sing (1931), and "It Ain't Necessarily So" from the musical/opera Porgy and Bess (1935). His song "'S Wonderful" from Funny Face opens with minor-third motives that appear to be a direct borrowing from the song "Noach's teive" ("Noah's Ark"), a number from the Yiddish operetta Akeidas Izchok ("The Sacrifice of Isaac") by Abraham Goldfaden.