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Hersh Does Gersh
Sheli Teitelbaum / Los Angeles
 PHOTOS COURTESY BY HERSHEY FELDER |
Two generations of George Gershwin�s heirs have stood watch attentively over the great American composer�s enduring legacy, ensuring that no one ever plays fast and loose with their ancestor�s music or persona. As George had no children, and neither did his lyricist brother Ira, the stewards of the estate include younger brother Arthur�s son, Marc, and his son Adam; younger sister Frances�s son Leopold; and Michael Strunsky, the nephew of Ira�s wife; along with attorneys and artistic and executive advisors. Now, 63 years after Gershwin�s sudden death at the age of 38, the trustees of his estate have finally given someone permission to create the role of their esteemed ancestor for the commercial stage.
Although the man who will bring Gershwin back to life, 31-year-old concert pianist, actor and composer Hershey Felder, is now a close friend of the composer�s family, he had to win them over after, initially, unwittingly alienating them.
In 1998, Felder staged, a one-man show in Los Angeles, "Sing," that celebrated what is perhaps Gershwin�s best-known artistic achievement, "Rhapsody in Blue." "Sing" was based on the true story of an Auschwitz survivor who says he saved his own life by whistling themes from "Rhapsody" for the Germans. Felder had encountered the man, Helmuth Spryzcer, a Jewish gofer for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, in Poland a few years earlier during a stint interviewing Mengele twins as a volunteer for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation.
Shortly after the first (largely positive) reviews of "Sing" hit the stands, a cease-and-desist letter issued forth from Warner Bros., owners of the Gershwin catalog, and the Gershwin estate, claiming that the proper "grand rights" had not been obtained. When Felder called Warner�s to straighten things out, he was told that members of the family were less than thrilled by a Los Angeles Times theater critic�s laudatory promise that after seeing the show, no one would ever be able to hear "Rhapsody in Blue" the same way. A reviewer for Variety, in fact, called Felder�s rendition of the piece "supercharged and enveloping, in which you can hear the cries of the dying." It seemed to Felder that they didn�t want the man who had come to epitomize the brash and exuberant American psyche of the first half of this century to become associated with the Holocaust.
Felder understood their protectiveness. Since performing "Rhapsody in Blue" at his own 1988 debut, he had played Gershwin�s opus over 500 times worldwide, and in the process had become widely identified with the work. He felt impelled to try and make the family understand that "Sing" not only did not disparage Gershwin�s reputation or music, but actually celebrated it for having saved a Jewish life.
Felder contacted each of the family members and representatives individually and, after getting to know him and his work, they embraced his efforts. Although Felder wanted to mount "Sing!" in New York, a friend suggested that perhaps he should go there playing the role of George Gershwin himself, rather than a Holocaust survivor.
When Felder presented a staged reading of his first draft of a one-man show about George to the family in New York last June, they gave him the green light to develop the role for the commercial stage, the first time since the composer�s death that such a presentation would be allowed to move forward. Once the Gershwin trustees approve the current workshop production for a Broadway run, Felder will take the stage with "George Gershwin - Alone" in three daunting capacities - as playwright, actor and pianist.
In the show, says Felder, the audience meets Gershwin�s ghost right after his death, "just before he moves on - two hours with someone talking to us from the other world." To understand his subject better, Felder talked with Gershwin�s biog-raphers and surviving friends, examined his musical manuscripts in the Library of Congress�s Gershwin Archives, and read much of his correspondence. "I studied all the information that I could get, to learn about George�s personal life, thinking that I would find some deep dark personal secret that drove the man," he recalls. "After two years of covering every base available, I found it. George gave it to us himself: his music."
The scion of a prominent Canadian family of modern Orthodox immigrants from Poland and Hungary (his uncle was Rabbi Guedalia Felder of Toronto), Hershey attended a small co-ed yeshivah within the insular, largely Jewish suburb of C�te St. Luc. At the age of 9, he demanded, and ultimately received, piano lessons. By 11, he was making his professional concert debut in Montreal. And eight months after his bar mitzvah, he was accepted as a student at McGill University to study with Dorothy Morton, considered at the time Montreal�s top piano teacher.
Drifting from the yeshivah world, Felder complemented his music lessons with acting instruction, and began performing regularly with the city�s famed Yiddish repertory theater, for which he later directed music. He never stopped performing concert piano, though, sometimes making 50 appearances in a season as soloist or chamber musician. He made his TV acting debut at the age of 14 in 1983, meanwhile, in a supporting role in a production of the Mordecai Richler short story "Bambinger," and began appearing in various other Canadian TV and film productions.
But Montreal was not the place to pursue either a musical or acting career and at 17, he made a beeline for New York and concert pianist Jerome Lowenthal. Lowenthal, who was not yet teaching at Juilliard, accepted private students at home, and Felder spent the next three years under his exacting tutelage, commuting weekly between Montreal and New York. He settled in New York in 1990, and composed, arranged, directed, conducted and acted for the concert stage, and Off-Broadway and regional productions.
In 1997, together with his "partner in life, love and the arts," former Canadian prime minister and current Canadian consul general in Los Angeles, Kim Campbell, he created the opera "Noah�s Ark." The kabbalistically inspired piece about the Great Deluge debuted at the UCLA Center for Performing Arts with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Felder told The Report that securing script approvals while drafting "George Gershwin - Alone" involved winning the consensus of no fewer than seven Gershwin estate trustees. Gershwin�s music has become a veritable gold mine for his heirs. In 1985, United Airlines, for example, reputedly agreed to pay the family $3 million over 10 years for the rights to use "Rhapsody in Blue" in a commercial campaign. And in 1990, according to Gershwin biographer Joan Peyser, Warner�s paid $200 million for the composer�s catalog in 1990, though the family still decides who can use the material and for what.
Friendship or not, the Gershwin heirs continue to involve themselves in Felder�s authorial efforts, as indeed they do with all other Gershwin-related projects. Felder participates in regularly scheduled creative workshops with the trustees, and must consider their sensitivities if he hopes to obtain their final blessing to take his show to Broadway. There are reported aspects of Gershwin�s personal life, insists Felder, that, having never met the man himself, it would be unfair for him to get into. He has refrained, for instance, from dealing with persistent speculation that Gershwin, a lifelong bachelor renowned, ironically, for womanizing, may have been homosexual. But Felder says this has less to do with concern for the family�s feelings than with the fact that "it simply isn�t of any enduring interest to me."
What is of great personal interest to him, Felder told The Report, is how Gershwin himself dealt with the question of his own artistic legacy. The man who "made an honest woman of jazz," in the words of radio star Rudy Vallee, thrilled many. But he also outraged others, some of whom even attributed his innovations to his ethnic origins. Diehard anti-Semite Henry Ford singled Gershwin out as "an insidious Jewish menace who infiltrated the world in the form of �Rhapsody in Blue.� There has to be some way," he ranted, in his Dearborne Independent in the 1920s, "of proving that a Jewish song-plugger from the Lower East Side, who has come up through the ranks of Tin-Pan Alley with little or no formal training, is nothing more than a fraud."
Felder�s take on Gershwin�s Jewishness is slightly different. "There are parts of Gershwin�s music," he says, "that are rooted in traditional Jewish melodies. In fact, George had once begun sketches for an opera based on �The Dybbuk.� He was Jewish to the core. Friends reported that he would only consider marriage to a Jewish woman; he conducted Passover Seders - to a jazz beat, according to one guest, Kitty Carlisle Hart - and he came from a traditional Russian-Jewish immigrant home.
"But more to the point, unlike Mendelssohn or Mahler, George was a Jewish composer who would never consider converting to Christianity to gain entree into the world of serious music. The Gershwins continue to identify as practicing Jews as well." In fact, Felder had the pleasure of hosting the brit milah of the newest Gershwin arrival, and just as George performed the "Rhapsody" at brother Ira�s wedding, Felder regaled the baby, Noah Gershwin, son of George�s great-nephew Adam, with his first live performance of the piece, as three generations of Gershwins looked on.
Gershwin�s contribution to American popular music is so great and lasting that it needs no endorsement. Songs ranging from his first hit, "Swanee," through "S�Wonderful" and "I Got Rhythm," are established standards of both jazz and com-mercial repertoires. But the artistic value of his "classical" works - "Rhapsody in Blue," "An American in Paris" and "Porgy and Bess" - was and is the subject of debate, and Gershwin died not knowing what would become of his legacy.
Says Felder: "We all have the perception that famous people lead charmed lives. George was very famous and well-to-do in his day. But the recognition that he craved from his composer peers eluded him. He died without that acceptance, but eventually became more renowned and celebrated than any of them.
"In bringing this story to the stage, I myself have come to recognize that we can never really know the lasting impact, if any, of anything we do. Ultimately, George believed that one must never compose to prove something. He insisted, and I think he was dead right, that one must simply hang out one�s imagination for the rest of the world to see."
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