In 1928, George Gershwin walked into Nadia Boulanger's Paris studio carrying what most composers would kill for: a transatlantic reputation, a Broadway fortune, and a hunger for stricter classical training. She sent him away. The most influential composition teacher of the century told the man who wrote Rhapsody in Blue that formal study would flatten the very thing that made his music breathe.
The refusal stings less once you consider what Gershwin had already built by then. Born Jacob Gershwin in Brooklyn on September 26, 1898 — 128 years before this September day in 2026 — he started out as a song plugger, demonstrating sheet music for publishers. His first national hit, Swanee, came in 1919, and by 1924 he had written both Fascinating Rhythm and the orchestral jazz experiment that defined an era.
Gershwin's unconventional training
His training was never conventional. Piano came from Charles Hambitzer, composition from Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody — names that mattered to musicians but never anchored a conservatory myth. Gershwin absorbed what he needed and kept moving. The 1925 Piano Concerto and 1928's An American in Paris showed a composer treating the concert hall as a workshop rather than a cathedral.
Boulanger wasn't alone in her refusal. Maurice Ravel voiced the same fear: that classical discipline would sand away the jazz impulse that made Gershwin's harmonic language unpredictable. It's a strange compliment disguised as rejection. Two pillars of European modernism agreed that this American was already doing something they couldn't teach and shouldn't touch.
Two pillars of European modernism agreed that this American was already doing something they couldn't teach and shouldn't touch.
Broadway hits and a Pulitzer
The music kept proving them right. Embraceable You arrived in 1928, I Got Rhythm in 1930, and with each song the vocabulary expanded. His brother Ira wrote lyrics for the Broadway collaborations, with Buddy DeSylva in the mix as well. In 1931, Of Thee I Sing became the first musical awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama — though the Pulitzer committee pointedly excluded Gershwin the composer from the citation.
Porgy and Bess followed in 1935, an opera built from Gullah-inflected melody and blues-soaked orchestration, with Summertime tucked inside its first act. By then the pattern was unmistakable: a composer who refused to choose between opera, jazz, and popular song because he heard them as one continuous conversation. Film scores came too, alongside a serious painting habit that occupied his Hollywood years.
The family behind the legend
The family story behind the music is less glossy than the legend. His father Morris Gershwin fled Russia in the early 1890s to avoid conscription, married Rose Bruskin in New York on July 21, 1895, and worked as a designer of women's shoes. Rose had settled in the city years earlier. They moved constantly, chasing clients, mostly through the poorer East End, though claims of grinding poverty have been overstated by biographers.
George was the second of four children, grandson of a St. Petersburg furrier who brought his wife and daughter to America in 1892. The household was crowded, mobile, and musically indifferent at first — a piano arrived for Ira, not George. None of that explains the output, which is precisely the point. Gershwin's sound came from the street and the song plugger's booth, not from a conservatory lineage.
He died in Hollywood on July 11, 1937, at an age that makes the catalogue almost impossible to reconcile with a single life. Rhapsody in Blue is now 102 years old, Porgy and Bess 91, and Swanee has been in the air for 107. On the first Victor Talking Machine Company pressings, the label credit read simply: George Gershwin, pianist. No genre. No apology. Just the name and the keys.