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Two years ago in Vienna I heard the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, which many American critics have hailed as the finest orchestra in this country, perform Wagner's Rienzi Overture, Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin, Strauss's Don Quixote, and, almost as an encore, Gershwin's An American in Paris - a difficult program, chosen to show off the orchestra's technical prowess and stylistic range. Even today Gershwin's music exposes the gaps between European and American musical sensibilities and the ambivalence in our musical culture. To say, however elegantly, that Gershwin's identity might not survive such study was to assume that Gershwin was a freak of nature rather than a true artist.
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Almost all the great European modernists, Ravel and Stravinsky included, had received rigorous musical training, which did not prevent them from writing highly personal and innovative music. Stravinsky's alleged response made clear who was the master and who the Lower East Side parvenu. Although Gershwin may have thought he was being polite, an unsympathetic ear might have heard him saying that he could buy any composer, no matter how famous. Gershwin's request for lessons, usually made at some fancy party where he had dazzled everyone at the piano, may have seemed charming in an unpolished, American way, or annoyingly naive, or just insulting. A hundred years after Gershwin's birth and sixty-one years after his death, it is difficult to say just who was patronizing whom in these little dances of fake humility and silk-glove rejection. One Gershwin biographer, Charles Schwartz, tracked down the sources of these stories after finding that they all led back to the Gershwin family, he speculated that the composer had floated them himself. The dapper Frenchman declined, saying, "Why should you be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?" The Russian, notorious for his one-liners, supposedly asked Gershwin how much money he made when Gershwin told him, Stravinsky said, "Then I should take lessons with you." Stravinsky later insisted that the exchange never took place, and claimed that before he had even met Gershwin, he had heard the money story from Ravel. He is said to have requested them from Varèse, Schoenberg, Bloch, and Toch, among others, but the two legendary responses are attributed to Ravel and Stravinsky. WHENEVER George Gershwin met a famous composer, so the stories go, he would ask for lessons.