George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait - Rilegato

Rimler, Walter

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0252034449 ISBN 13: 9780252034442

Casa editrice: Univ of Illinois Pr, 2009

Riassunto

George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place for himself--no family of his own and no real home in music.

 

He and his siblings received little love from their mother and no direction from their father. Older brother and lyricist Ira managed to create a home when he married Leonore Strunsky, a hard-edged woman who lived for wealth and status. The closest George came to domesticity was through his longtime relationship with Kay Swift. She was his lover, musical confidante, and fellow composer. But she remained married to another man while he went endlessly from woman to woman. Only in the final hours of his life, when they were separated by a continent, did he realize how much he needed her. Fatally ill, unprotected by (and perhaps estranged from) Ira, he was exiled by Leonore from the house she and the brothers shared, and he died horribly and alone at the age of thirty-eight.

 

Nor was Gershwin able to find a satisfying musical harbor. For years his songwriting genius could be expressed only in the ephemeral world of show business, as his brilliance as a composer of large-scale works went unrecognized by highbrow music critics. When he resolved this quandary with his opera Porgy and Bess, the critics were unable to understand or validate it. Decades would pass before this, his most ambitious composition, was universally regarded as one of music’s lasting treasures and before his stature as a great composer became secure.   

 

In George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

A dynamic, fast-paced biography that has the verve and staccato drive of the composer himself. A fuller, more complex, more humorous, and more vulnerable picture of Gershwin than has yet appeared in print. --Philip Furia, coauthor of The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists

Rimler shines in weaving together anecdotes, correspondence and a wealth of interviews with the composer and his contemporaries to create a vibrant, flesh-and-blood picture of the man and his music in a readable and enjoyable book. --Amanda Borschel-Dan, The Jerusalem Post, 15th Oct 2009

Compact in length and voluminous in its details, Walter Rimler s study of Gershwin is freighted with melancholy an appropriate parallel with Gershwin s own life. Hesitantly regarded by classical music s regard critics, Rimler s Gershwin emerges as a musical drifter, a stylist caught between styles chiefly because he had invented an aesthetic all his own.... The text is laden with psychological asides some seem much more cogent, and as far less melodramatic, than others. Gershwin s relationship with his brother Ira is well presented as a showbiz variant on classical fraternal archetypes. Foils and friends, they were also enemies in a passive, understated fashion.... There are some plum musical discussions in these pages, and enough backstage drama to satiate the anecdote hunters... Gershwin s life was dominated by extreme juxtapositions, and Rimler skilfully brings them to bear on the reader s expectations of Gershwin, the song-and-dance man. --Colin Fleming, Times Literary Supplement, March 26th 2010

L'autore:

Walter Rimler is the author of Not Fade Away: A Comparison of Jazz Age With Rock Era Pop Song Composers and A Gershwin Companion. His articles and fiction have appeared in Midstream, Prism International, and other publications.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of Illinois Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0252034449
• ISBN 13: 9780252034442
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 204