Glass half-Full and Glass Chimera: Those Times for Rhapsodies

Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Those Times for Rhapsodies

For such a time as that . . . a time of recovery, a time for digging out of Flanders trenches, a time to recover innocence and confidence, a time to relocate peace and hope, a time between two world wars. . . ’t’was a time for jazz, a time of Rhapsody.

You see, a funny thing had happened on the way to America. . . so much of our celebratory American rhapsodizing had been conceived, years earlier, in Russian angst and trouble.

George Gershwin’s father and mother had gotten out of Russia by 1895. They had managed to elude Russian antisemites and make their way over to that classic destination where the tired and weary huddled masses of the world were still yearning to embark, New York.

Sergei Rachmaninoff had been born in Russia in 1873, but had managed to leave that tempest-torn nation in 1906. By 1918, the end of World War I , the composer/pianist had made his way to the land of the free, the home of brave immigrants.

In such a place as this: the United States of America, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue came gushing out of New York potentialities in 1924.

Ten years later, 1934, in a Baltimore opera house, sounding forth from a Philadelphia orchestra, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini broke through Depression era gloom to shine a fantastic theme, even in the midst of darkening shadows of Euro-fascism.

Now, here in America, we can still hear those crescendoing hopes and dreams, which had been pounded out by the insistent keyboarding of musical masters Gershwin and Rachmaninoff back in the day. They had risen out of orchestral celebrations back in that old terrible time, almost a century ago.