Vernon Duke

Photo of Gertrude Stein seated in Godiva, Tchelitchew and Allen Tanner by Alice B. Toklas (Belley, France about 1927)

Portrait of Allen Tanner by Pavel Tchelitchew (1925), oil on canvas

Here is the view from Allen Tanner of his and Pavel’s time with Gertrude and Alice.  It is an interview with your narrator, Allen Tanner and Gertrude Hamill (my grandmother) from way back in 1984 on a Sony tape cassette player over afternoon tea.

Allen Tanner on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

AT: I think it was “Godiva.”

GH: Godiva.

AT: Bec when she purchased it, it had no…

LH: Oh, that is wonderful…

GH: Isn’t that a lovely picture.

AT: It had no fixtures. It was absolutely nude.

LH: See, Pavel Tchelitichew…

AT: So, she called it “Godiva.”

LH: Now, is this Belley? AIS…

AT: This is near Belley when we went to visit them, they took us out on a picnic. And here, here’s Gertrude and Godiva and Tchelitchew and me sitting on the fender.

GH, LH: Oh! Oh!

AT: I’ll show you this. This is all I have to show because I sent most of my valuable photographs to Hugh Ford as a kind of a…of course, he’s the official biographer of Paris.

GH, LH: Hmmm..oh!

GH: That could possibly be enlarged and be a lovely…

AT: Oh yes, they could. Here’s a snap that I took of Gertrude. And she said, “I want this to be a portrait of my new hat.”

LH: Well, that’s fantastic! Yeah!

AT: And this a famous photograph that I took that they’ve used in all the new books that have come out about her. They bedeviled me for a long while for that photograph.

LH: Isn’t that incredible?

GH: Obviously, it reproduced well.

AT: And here’s Alice and that’s the Roan River in the background.

LH: Wow!

AT: And here we are all settled down at the picnic and Alice was always doing something. And she was knitting.

GH: She was pretty impish, wasn’t she?

AT: Well, she could be. She was brilliant of course. Marvelous.

GH, LH: Yes.

AT: (says something in French)

LH: Wow.

GH: I’ll see if I can get that tea kettle to boil.

LH: Can I move up?

AT: And here, Gertrude – I want you to see this one, look – a portrait of Gertrude and me that Alice took.

LH: Oh my!

GH: Excuse me!

AT: And this is a portrait of Gertrude that I took at Belley.

GH: Oh isn’t that wonderful?!

LH: Oh, these are amazing, Allen.

AT: And this is really fantastic, look.

GH: That’s really a very good picture even though it’s…

LH: Oh.

AT: They loved Pavlik and Choura and me. And everywhere they went, they used to send us things from…

GH: From where they were travelling…

AT: From where they were traveling for Christmas, you know.

GH: A sweet family.

AT: They always gave us a wonderful Christmas party.

GH: “Yours” – I guess, is that a “G?”

LH: Yeah, that looks like a “G.” “Merry Christmas to…” “27 Rue de Fleuru.”

AT: That’s at Rue Fleures.

LH: Flueres. Ok. In Paris?

AT: Uh huh.

LH. Yes? Oh! Oh, these are splendid.

AT: Well, I guess that’s about all.

LH: It’s amazing. Gosh!

________________________________________________________________

An excerpt from a short biography from the ALLEN TANNER PAPERS at Yale University’s Beinecke Library:

Allen Tanner was born on September 29, 1898.  Early in life he showed signs of significant talent at the piano, and at age fifteen he went to Chicago, where he made his first appearance with an orchestra, followed by several concert ours in the West.  He then moved to New York, where he worked as a concert accompanist for various vocalists, including Marguerite D’Alvarez.  His talent in demand, Tanner performed often in New York and throughout the East.

In December of 1922, Tanner went to Berlin to pursue his musical career in Europe.  Almost immediately he met the artist Pavel Tchelitchew, who was working as a set designer for the Russian Romantic Theatre.  The two became friends, and this friendship soon grew into a relationship that would last over a decade.  In early summer of 1923, they left Berlin for Paris, where they lived with Tchelitchew’s sister, Alexandra Zaoussailoff, for several years.  In Paris, Tchelitchew worked on his painting while Tanner took work as a piano instructor (and rehearsal pianist for the Ballet).  Tchelitchew’s work soon caught the interest of Gertrude Stein, and for a time the two men were a part of Stein’s circle of literary and artistic friends, a group which also included Rene Crevel and Virgil Thomson, both represented in this collection.

A few extra words from his cousin, your narrator:

Allen went to study in Chicago under scholarship by Victor Heinze who was a Leschetiszky pupil.  He met and befriended Margaret Anderson who went on to found the famous literary magazine called The Little Review. He used to joke about how she first published James Joyce and about how absurd it was to think that Ulysses had been called “pornagraphy” by some.  He worked as an accompanist to many singers and was part of the New York circle of Myra Hess, Arthur Rubenstein, Paul Kochanski and Karol Szymanowski.  He went to Berlin with a letter of commendation from Alexander Siloti who had been a great student of Franz Liszt and was the teacher to his cousin, Sergei Rachmaninoff.  In Paris, he studied with Mme. Chailley-Richez, a student of Alfred Cortot and later with that great master.  Even when I met him as a  young teen, Tchelitchew was the name always on his lips.  Though he never used the word “gay” he did speak of love and the spiritual and mystical in music and art.

I hope to share more about Allen’s life and work in the future.

Photo of Gertrude Stein seated in “Godiva,” Tchelitchew and Allen Tanner by Alice B. Toklas (Belley, France about 1927)

Self-Portrait by Pavel Tchelitchew (1925). Oil on canvas.

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Variation 2: Quasi toccata”

At about the same time as Diaghilev was about to commission a mythological ballet (Zephyr et Flore) from Vladimir Dukelsky, Gertrude Stein was about to ignite the equivalent of automatic writing in the painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. In Gertrude Stein Remembered, Linda Simon published a transcript of the Martin A. Ryerson Lecture at Yale University given by Tchelitchew in 1951.

Here he alludes to Stein as being a kind of Robert Gravian Mother goddess to him. Her great interest, as a student of William James, was in the functioning of the human brain, its reactions. He began a process of automatic drawing which led to thousands and thousands of drawings. He says that she knew her poetry originated in a magic of the bygone days and that the prolificness in his drawing was due to her. He gives the etymology of the word “Orpheus”–-aur (light), and rophoe (cheering health)—a healer by means of light.

“She wanted to know through the automatic writing the language of our psyche, ” he says. “Art is revealed life or psyche, through sounds, words, or forms…the sensory nerves, are for a quick, automatic, immediate reaction in our brain, in the hieratical reaction.”

He heard about Gertude Stein and about Alice Toklas from Jane Heap [then partner of Margaret Anderson of the Little Review], and met them at the Salon d’Automne. “That is the annual exhibition where you have to do it at least once in your lifetime. It is sort of an official appearance, like a debut, so I have to make that debut, too…

So I sent the picture and it was accepted, and there was among those pictures The Strawberry Basket, which you probably saw reproduced. And on the way back with Jane Heap from the vernissage on the Pont Royale just going to the Tuilleries, I saw Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. They were coming in their little car, that was, I couldn’t find out really what it was because I think it was a Model T Ford.

When she bought that car, after the war or during the war, that car was just stripped to the essences, it was naked, that’s why the car was called, ‘Lady Godiva,’ because she was naked.”

Portrait of Alice B. Toklas by Pavel Tchelitchew (Paris, about 1927)

Gouache on paper, circa 1926–1928
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Theme”

Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) was not the only one of his circle who would go on to work with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.  So would another aristocratic Russian, the painter, Pavel Tchelitchew.  They originally met in the same YMCA in Constantinople as ex-patriots where Vernon Duke first discovered Gershwin’s “Swanee.”   Oddly, too, Duke had known pianist Allen Tanner from New York as part of Gershwin’s and Eva Gauthier’s circle.

Allen Tanner was your narrator’s cousin and used to speak at length about Pavel Tchelitchew when I was a young teenager.  He also opened up the photo section of his copy of Parker Tyler’s The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, revealing the cover of the theater program that Tcheltichew designed for the premiere of Diaghilev’s Ode and for which he did the set designs.

Vernon Duke went home to No. 150 Blvd. Montparnasse and told Allen and Pavlik the news about auditioning his Piano Concerto for Diaghilev. Tyler gives us a view of this scene from both Tchelitchew’s and Dukelsky’s eyes (pg. 303):

“It is in the midst of expanding evenings at  No. 150 that Vladimir Dukelsky, the pianist from The Lighthouse in Constantinople, renews his acquaintance with Tchelitchew and meets Tanner. In the “big, untidy” flat, where Pavlik paints in the living room and Allen plays on an upright (or, while the other is at work, on his piano muet), Dukelsky thinks that Tchelitchew, “all golden hair and plump rosy cheeks,” and the “pale, willowy” Tanner are an “odd pair.” They certainly are a pair of busy hosts, even if sometimes for customers who come to look at pictures and leave without buying…

Dukelsky finds at Tchelitchew’s the “small, silent” Pougni, the “pugnosed, peasantish” Tereshokovitch, County Lanskoy and Boris Shatzman. Nicholas Nabokov, with his tossed mane and visionary eyes, is already a friend of the house. One day Dukelsky (or rather Duke as he come to call himself) is introduced to “Valitchka” (Walter) Nouvel, Dighilev’s manager. Another day he plays his concerto to the “odd pair” and catches Pavlik, amid his compliments, giving Tanner a large wink.”

In 1923, Tchelitchew began to paint portraits of all  the Paris avant-garde and gay elite.  Gertrude Stein noticed his works in the 1925 Salon D’Automne, Basket of Strawberries (1925) and bought the entire contents of his studio.  Tyler says on page 305 of The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew, “To Duke, a casual observer, Tchelitchew is still manipulating a Bakst-Soudeikine manner, but this impression must be owing to pictures, possibly old stage designs, left lying around the studio…”  It was in this ambiance that Vernon Duke would come to write Flore et Zephyr for Sergei Diaghilev.

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, “Theme”

Portraits of Vladimir Dukelsky (Pavel Chenmuyer) and Sergei Diaghilev (Leon Bakst)

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, Variation 1: Giacoso

The music which followed so soon after Vernon Duke’s collaboration with Eva Gauthier and George Gershwin testifies in the fullest manner to the great opportunity which had come to him to express both sides of his musical vision as Russian classical composer and Tin Pan Alley-Jazz improviser. In itself, the music provides us with a plentiful feast. Yet at the threshold of his compositional career, one may find in some of the circumstances of his life influences that turned his mind to the past, to the Russian country-side, to the beauty and simplicity of childhood memories and away from his new life as a New Yorker. We understand how it was that his first serious work was the Piano Concerto in C and not the orchestral ballet, Zephyr et Flore. Though Arthur Rubenstein had provided his passport to Paris, it was Sergei Diaghilev who brought him into the Ballet Russe after hearing a performance of a two-piano version of the Concerto (with Les Six composer Georges Auric on second piano).

His alliance with these compatriots had given him a sense of “home,” but in view of the circumstances and conventions it had also isolated him. We forget that by the time Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) arrived in Paris that Stravinsky had already triumphed with his own premieres of Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913) with the Ballet Russe. And that Vernon Duke was just twenty-two years old.

He wrote in his autobiography, Passport to Paris, about his first encounters with Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. “… Diaghilev desired me to play my concerto for him; and would I come to the Baron de Meyer’s house that afternoon, as the baron had an especially good piano and it was in tune? So the big moment had come, though, in the anticipation of it, my new self-assurance vanished. It was all working out too well; to a young man already used to the bitterness of bad breaks, such persistent good fortune appeared suspicious.

“What does he want with my concerto?” I thought sadly. “Nouvel doesn’t really like it and I myself think it reminiscent in spots.” I made up my mind to at least play it well and, pushing the indignant Allen off the piano stool, went on a four-hour practice jag.

The de Meyers lived in un hotel, which, in this instance, meant a private dwelling (hotel particulier), not an inn. The house and its owners were typical of the all-powerful tout Paris set Louis XV and Marie Laurencin with Vogue trimmings. There was a faint tinge of violet in the beautiful white hair of both de Meyers a decorative pair, aggressively agreeable, as people of their class are, when receiving; the class that labels everything that comes their way as either divin ord’un ennui mortel be it music, a new novel, a new restaurant or a new concubine. I was brought by Diaghilev, the magician and explorer, therefore there was a good chance of my being divine. I don’t think they knew that the frail youth with jet-black hair was in their home “on approval” and that his fate hung perilously in the balance.

I was the first to enter the de Meyer drawing room a regrettable mistake, as no one divine is ever punctual. My embarrassment was somewhat relieved by the cordiality of my hosts and the perfection of the dry Martini I was offered, a drink still misunderstood by Parisians, who call it un dry pronounced “dree” and make it almost entirely of vermouth, using gin as sparingly as if it were Fernet Branca. Some small talk followed, very small indeed on my part, and then Sergei Pavlovitch entered with Boris in tow, both splendidly shaven and eau-de-cologned.

I was much too nervous to listen to the gossip that made up the general conversation. I drank two more Martinis and, just as I emptied the second, was asked by Diaghilev to show him the concerto I had brought with me. After carefully wiping and then adjusting one of his monocles, he began perusing the manuscript, humming to him self in a strange catlike voice and conducting with a pudgy index finger. I watched the performance with awe and astonishment. Diaghilev, who never missed anything, smiled indulgently and put down my music. “Few people know it, but I’m a compositeur manque,” he remarked. “I was always behind in my harmony lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov, but once managed to write a piano piece, which I showed him. It was very bad and he said so.” Sergei Pavlovitch then rose brusquely and led me to the piano. “Let me hear your concerto: I’ll turn the pages for you.” With the determination of despair and, encouraged by the excellence of the instrument, I gave a creditable account of my “Passport to Paris.”

I remember vividly thinking as I played on: “I don’t care, here it is. It’s the best I can do, take it or leave it.” When I hit the last crashing C-major chord, there was a moment of dreadful, complete silence I didn’t turn around but knew that the two de Meyers and Boris were looking at Diaghilev, awaiting his verdict. To my astonishment, the great man began clapping his hands thunderously and with such determination that the others soon joined in the applause. “Bravo, jeune homme, and congratulations. Best new music I’ve heard in years. Now what shall we call your ballet?” he inquired suddenly. I was completely taken aback.

“What ballet, Sergei Pavlovitch?” I queried. “The one you will write for me, of course. You will write one, won’t you?” Kochno now intervened. He got up, embraced me and, smiling knowingly, declared that he already had an idea for “my” ballet and that the idea was certain to please Sergei Pavlovitch. I dimly remember that I was then made much of by the de Meyers and that a bottle of champagne appeared mysteriously and toasts to the new Diaghilev composer were drunk by all, including the tastee.

I was taken home to No. 150 by Diaghilev himself Kochno stayed on to dinner at the de Meyers’ in a large chauffered limousine. My discoverer had his arm around me and talked softly and earnestly about my talent, the future before me, the task he was entrusting me with and his hope that I would fulfill his expectations; I was so dazed and drunk with the Martinis, the champagne and my crashing, complete success, that I only understood half of what Sergei Pavlovitch said, but loved every word of it. He deposited me in Boulevard Montparnasse, kissed me heartily on both cheeks Russian fashion, and departed.

Both Allen and Pavlik were out; I dined alone extravagantly on a corner terrace, paying eleven francs for a copious meal, and, exhausted by the events of the day, went off to bed. That night I cried my first, and probably last, tears of happiness and realized that Victorian novelists had something there, for never did tears taste so sweet to me.

What ensued was equally dreamlike. The next morning, my recital to Tchelitchev and Tanner, to which they listened with eyes popping and mouths ajar, was interrupted by Valitchka, who dashed in with out bothering to telephone this time. He declared himself delighted with my success, there was more embracing all around, and then I was let in on the newest developments; apparently Diaghilev, Boris and Valitchka had supper late the night before and Boris talked a great deal about the proposed ballet. All I could learn about it was that two leading male dancers’ roles were envisaged one for Dolin, the other for Serge Lifar, the remarkable new Russian boy for whom Diaghilev entertained the highest hopes; that a girl called Alice Nikitina with the “most beautiful legs in the world” was a hot candidate for the female lead, and that I had better drop everything and concentrate on my job as if my life depended on it. This was easy, be cause there was nothing for me to drop and I had no other life than the one that was so miraculously opening before me.

The news of a new Diaghilev protege emerging from out of no where Russia via the United States was an unheard-of beginning spread rapidly through the Paris salons.”

Excerpt, Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Zephyr et Flore, Variation 1: Giacoso

It is disappointing not to have brought back from that momentous November night in 1923 at Aeolian Hall a recording of Eva Gauthier with George Gershwin accompanying her on the piano.  Innocent Ingenue Baby, Stairway to Paradise and Swanee seem lost to us forever.  The last morsel left to us of Eva seems to be Panis Angelicus (Angels’ Bread).  Through the hiss and tumble of the 78 rmp, we hear the clear articulation of a highly trained recitalist accompanied by a small orchestra, not a solo pianist.  Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for an original 20s soprano-with-just-piano.  It would be better to close the curtains; to shut out distractions; to turn on a strong light; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the search engine for a scholar, a musicologist perhaps, who documents facts and describes the conditions in which classically trained singers and Russian composer-pianists lived, in New York city, in the 1920s.

For it is a perennial puzzle why Tin Pan Alley-Broadway musics have been challenged by “serious” music circles as to their artistic validity.  What conditions were present so that a Conservatory trained Russian emigré (Vernon Duke) and a Tin Pan Alley Alban Berg admirer (George Gershwin) could advance?  I asked myself; for songs–melody, lyric, harmony and rhythm, human bodies, acoustic instruments–are not fixed like foundations of houses (stones in the ground).  Songs are something like clouds, appearing and untouchable, somehow felt, passing, first an apple, an Eiffle tower, a locomotive train and so forth.

I went, therefore, to the new Google Chrome browser and typed in “Eva Gauthier, Vernon Duke, the International Composers Guild,” remembering that Vernon Duke wrote that Eva had “sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild.”  We THINK George Gershwin first heard his music here and that Eva introduced them after the concert.  We imagine without knowing. We know one thing: Just as Eva Gauthier introduced Vernon Duke’s songs for the ICG in New York, so she sang George Gershwin’s at Aeolian Hall.  Not everyone discredited the maverick move on Gauthier’s part.  Henry T. Parker, a reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript, wrote, “[George Gershwin] is the beginning of the age of sophisticated jazz.” And in Google Books and Question, we find a priceless reference, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s by Carol J. Oja.  Clicking there on “International Composers Guild,” we read that it was spun off from the League of Composers and founded by—goodness!—Edgard Varèse.  Just dropping into the chapter entitled “Crossing Over George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman and the Modernists,” one learns that Gershwin himself felt in 1926 that the word “jazz” had ceased to have any definite meaning.

So if we could not bring back something of Eva’s singing and George’s playing from that Aeolian night, we do have one golden document of Vernon Duke, pianist-composer, accompanying a Russian-school trained singer, Luba Tcheresky, on one of his songs, Ages Ago.  It is the portrait of a mature Vernon Duke and a little known soprano Tcheresky in her independently released recording, In this Life –  A Celebration Honoring Vernon Duke’s Centennial (CD Baby/2003).

Vernon Duke at the piano with Luba Tcheresky singing his song, Ages Ago

Eva Gauthier singing Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus

So then, we learn from Vernon Duke that he met George Gershwin through Eva Gauthier, “the fine artist who did so much for new music.  Miss Gauthier sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild. I don’t remember Gershwin’s reaction to them…”  She also was the first one to introduce George Gershwin’s songs in an experimental jazz-classical concert on November 1, 1923 in Aeolian Hall, the Alice Tulley Hall of its time. Her program included Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. It also included a selection of songs from American musical revues by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Walter Donaldson and George Gershwin, accompanied by Gershwin himself, “shy and awkward and earnest at the piano.”

And yet what do we really know of Eva Gauthier, we ask, racing toward the Wikipedia?  Some sites say she was, “the first woman to introduce Jazz and Oriental Music to America,” another, “the first Western classically trained female to study the music of the Orient and Javanese gamelan ensemble,” still another, “high priestess of modern song,” that she “sang with the Sultan’s wives” and “upset the musical establishment.”

H.C. Colles, a music critic for The Times in 1923 wrote, “Eclecticism in the making of a program is an excellent thing, and Miss Eva Gauthier was evidently determined to exploit its excellence to the full in the song recital which she gave last night at Aeolian Hall…Between [the classical pieces], Miss Gauthier offered half a dozen ragtime songs straight from the vaudeville entertainments of Broadway, accompanied by Mr. George Gershwin, one of the ablest exponents of the craft, beginning with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ending with songs by Mr. Gershwin, continued by request of the audience until the singer had to confess that her repertory in this ‘lovely music’ was exhausted…and so the thing was a failure.  It [ragtime and jazz] has developed into all it is capable of.  It has become a thing which captivates people all over the world and hypnotized them into dancing the night away: It is impossible to say why.  But its home is not the concert room.”

However, in viewing some photographs of her, one cannot escape the conviction that the serious face with its expression of royalty and discernment and equine power has stamped itself upon the minds of people who remember Eva Gauthier, so that we wish for the voice to come ringing out at us from the computer screen.

Her grandson, simply known as “Mark” in a review of the online article, “Grand tradition: Eva Gauthier: 1885-1958: Great Canadian Musical Figures of the Past” at Amazon.com in 2006, has left us a personal and pleading reflection:

“Eva Gauthier was my great-grandmother and I obtained this article from another (public) source instead of Amazon. I gave it 3 stars because it is very short and does not even come close to describing my great-grandmother’s rich and interesting history. There’s a lot of other available information about how Eva is credited with giving George Gershwin his start, and that she was very close friends with Maurice Ravel (wrote “Bolero”). I have a photo in my living room featuring Eva, Gershwin, Ravel and others at a birthday party she hosted for Ravel in 1928. Beautiful!”

Ned Rorem, an American composer especially praised for his song settings, has described her as he encountered her in 1957:

“Eva Gauthier, she of the blue hair and endless supply of satin hats, inhabited a tiny flat in the now defunct Hotel Woodward on East Fifty-third, with an upright Knabe, ten crates of scores, and a yapping Pekingese. Mme. Gauthier was four feet ten inches worth of experienced opinion, always precise, sometimes precisely wrong. She was already seventy when I began playing for her coaching sessions in 1957…Debussy had taught her “Yniold” in Pelléas et Mélisande by rote, she claimed.

She also claimed intimacy with Ravel and Gershwin, showing us her programs devoted exclusively to this pair. During those programs she changed garb with each group, involving vast swatches of stuff from Java, where for years she had lived with an importer husband…”

In all these records, except for her grandson, one feels that the recorder, even when he was in her actual presence, kept his distance and caricatured this innovative woman and failed to measure the significance of the cross-continental musical experiments of her early years.  Only her grandson seems to know the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In concert singing, where so much of the personality is subsumed into the song, the absence of a imaginative intelligence is a great lack; and her critics, who have been mostly of the opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, the great abundance of a quality which has been held to be distasteful, especially in her day.  Eva Gauthier was not unwise; she was not a dabbler; though she did not read music and possessed some inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.

One feels that to most people now, as to Ned Rorem in 1957, that she was “a fantastic teacher, if ‘teacher’ means one whose enthusiasm is transferable—who leads horses to water and makes them drink. Gauthier’s enthusiasm was for the intelligence of music, and though she couldn’t read music she could talk it…What students sought from Pierre Bernac in Paris and from Maggie Teyte in London—French repertory from someone who knew the words—they could find from the Canadian Gauthier in New York, plus the bonus of native literature… After her death, Jennie Tourel remained the only active singer in New York (the musical center of the world!) equipped to coach Franco-American repertory. Today, no one.”

And if we consider these portraits more closely, we find that they are the records of a daring woman, a woman who had crossed oceans and languages back and forth and from whom issued a desire to make unknown things knowable. We do know about her days of youth; we know that the culture, the philosophy, the fame and the influence were all built upon a strong foundation—she was the daughter of an explorer and astronomer and the niece of Canada’s first French-Canadian Premier.

One of the few remaining recordings of her singing is preserved.

Panis Angelicus by Franz Liszt
(based on a gregorian chant with a very loose paraphrase translation
by the narrator)

Panis angelicus…….The angels’ bread
fit panis hominum…….is our bread
Dat panis coelicus…….heaven’s bread
figuris terminum…….ends all symbols
O res mirabilis!…….O what a miracle!
Manducat Dominum…….our teacher becomes our food
Pauper, servus et humilis…….poor, serving endlessly, and humble.

Eva Gauthier singing Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) became a kind of omni-present shadow to Sergei Prokokiev in the circle of creative geniuses who composed Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, one more refugee in a group of Russian patronage system trained artists in exile. Prokokiev, his childhood friend from their composition class with Reinhold Gliere at the Kiev Conservatory, reviewed the Piano Concerto in C, saying that it was “full of superior melodies, very well designed, harmonically beautiful and not too ‘modernist’.” Igor Stravinsky, had him perform as one of the four pianists, along with Francis Poulenc, George Auric and Vittorio Rieti in the Ballet Russe’s London premiere of his Les Noces. All except Rieti would go on to compose scores for upcoming ballet seasons. His Piano Concerto became his passport into a sub-group known as Les Nouveaux Jeunes, forerunners to Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Aurey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre). Conductor Sergei Koussevitsky introduced his First Symphony on the same program as Prokokiev’s Fiery Angel as if they were companion compositions, reflecting their shared ongoing musical dialogue.

An ocean away, George Gershwin had been enchanted by the second theme of the Piano Concerto in private rehearsals by Dukelsky. Some of the few remaining first hand accounts from someone who knew Gershwin well is preserved here in an article Vernon Duke wrote called, “Gershwin, Schillinger and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences”:

“I first encountered George Gershwin’s name in 1921 in Constantinople I was then seventeen, just out of a Russia torn by the Civil War that followed the October Revolution of 1917. In the club run for the Russian refugees by the YMCA, I found some American popular songs—mostly Turkish reprints. Except for Irving Berlin’s All By Myself, with its fine ragtime gait, I was not impressed with the banal syncopations of this music.

Then one day a Turkish edition of a piece bewilderingly entitled Swanee by composer bewilderingly named Gershwin fell into my hands. The dash and drive, the rhythmic vigor, and, above all, the unmistakable musicality of the number made me sit up instantly.

I reached the United States in 1922 and met George in the same year through Eva Gauthier, the fine artist who did so much for new music. Miss Gauthier sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild. I don’t remember Gershwin’s reaction to them, but I do remember mine to George’s playing of his tunes. To anyone who has not heard Gershwin play, his piano magic hard to describe.

Gershwin impressed me as a superbly equipped and highly-skilled composer—not just a concocter of commercial jingles. His extraordinary left hand performed miracles in counter-rhythms, shrewd canonic devices, and unexpected harmonic shifts.”

George Gershwin, Swanee from Artis Wodehouses’s Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls)

To listen to Vladimir Dukelsky’s Piano Concerto in C attentively, is to become aware how little one knows about him. It is also to become aware of the gullibility with which we had accepted his more popular incarnation as Vernon Duke. At what moment and by what means this alias version of Sergei Prokokiev’s dear friend and Vladimir Horowitz’s classmate way back at the Kiev Conservatory fades into a montage of Vladimir Dukelsky is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the first performance of the concerto in 1999 as part of the “The Gershwin Circle,” a series of performances which focused on the international impact of American pianism, with George Gershwin and his music as a nucleus, presented by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall.

This composition is Dukelsky-Duke’s ‘lost’ concerto, originally written in 1923 at the request of the rising concert pianist and Aeolian Duo-Art and AMPICO player piano recording artist, Arthur Rubinstein. Perhaps Arthur Rubinstein with his phrase about ‘a one-movement, pianistically grateful, not too cerebral’ piece gave momentum to this 20 year old Russian emigré who was playing the piano in restaurants and conducting and composing for vaudeville and burlesque. Or perhaps it was the phrase ‘go to Paris’ where a premiere would be easier for Rubinstein to stage. Vladimir Dukelsky went to Paris, Arthur Rubinstein did not. The ‘lost’ Piano Concerto in C stayed in its original two-piano score for 76 years until Scott Dunn orchestrated it for its 1999 premiere.

Although, Gershwin left behind him (at the age of 37), more than one thousand popular songs and more explorative musical obras such as Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and the opera, Porgy and Bess, much of his music was disdained by classical music critics. On the other hand, Hollywood film producers criticized the opera composer as being “too highbrow.” So runs a dialogue about the two Gershwins—Gershwin the jazz and Gershwin the classical; Gershwin the lowbrow and Gershwin the highbrow. And too, brother-lyricist Ira Gershwin was symbiotically tied to the jazz/classical dichotomy. The Gershwin team wrote “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” for their first joint effort, Lady Be Good, in 1924 which also introduced the young brother and sister dancing team, Fred and Adele Astaire.

In that same year, Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky), would go to Paris and write music for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, even though it had been George Gershwin who had told him first, “Don’t be afraid to go lowbrow.”

George Gershwin’s own piano recording of his song, “Swanee”

The aspiring songwriter wrote a song called “Swanee” and recorded it on a piano roll. This song was a take off on Stephen Foster’s 1850s song, “Old Folks at Home” or “Way Down upon the Swanee.” It had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its time. Gershwin’s 1919 song was written in just twelve minutes with lyricist Irving Caesar at Gershwin’s apartment where a ruckus card game was going on. Sixty young women dancing with electric lights in their shoes tapped along with the song at a Capitol Theater revue called Demi-Tasse in October of that year but it got no notice. Though Foster’s song and this one has since raised haunting racial issues, Foster’s intended meaning was no matter how far we may travel or what sadness comes to us in the world, our hearts yearn for the best memories of childhood and the security of family, parents and home. Gershwin’s song made allusions to the “old folks at home” and “down by the Swanee.” But if home is where the heart is, then perhaps there’s likely to be a life-giving river nearby too.

A few weeks after the song’s revue flop, Gershwin played the song at a piano sing along at a party and Al Jolson was there. He put it in his stage show, Sinbad, and recorded it for Columbia. The song sold a million music copies and a million records. Gershwin was just 20 years old.

And so,  though possessing a potentially negative pedigree in his early life—a first generation American, the son of two immigrants, new homes in different parts of town, a high school dropout—George Gershwin’s ascent began. He was a piano accompanist-song demonstrator on Tin Pan Alley; he wrote songs of his own; he collaborated with aspiring lyricists to bring a fuller form to his songs than simple pianistic versions; he was taken into the service of the Standard Music Roll Company and the Aeolian Company to make player piano rolls; he was a part of the technical innovations in recording when the Aeolian, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon companies introduced their unique reproducing systems; he created arrangements for two and four hands, adding all kinds of inner voices, obbligato counterpoints and codas to embellish simple songs; he became a rehearsal pianist on Broadway; he wrote the musical, La, La, Lucille, that ran for 104 nights; and we already know that other singers sang his songs, (Al Jolson).

But there was one society in which he was not popular—perhaps only because of a financial-legal agreement that prevented its coming into existence. This hugely gifted young person wanted to write an opera called The Dybbuk, based on a Yiddish play by S. Ansky which documents some of the folk beliefs and stories of Hassidic Jews. However, when Gershwin found that the rights to the play were owned by the Italian composer, Lodovico Rocca, he gave up. This echoed another situation earlier in his life in the time when he was an admirer of the music of Joseph Rumshisky, one of the main composers in the Yiddish Theater scene on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side. Boris Thomashevsky, then the biggest star of this theater, invited Gershwin and to Sholem Secunda collaborate on a Yiddish operetta. Secunda, however, refused to work with an “unproven” song-plugger.

And yet his passion for music (arranging, composing, transcribing, recording) was profound. When he held forth upon stride and ragtime styles, upon the varied harmonies Chopin and Liszt or Debussy had structured; and about what violinist Jascha Heifitz might accomplish, no doubt he created for Vernon Duke—then, a new immigrant to New York—that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity, spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young composer-pianist. So it might have been how Vernon saw him (narrator’s creation):

George was the happy of happiest men, and

I, a looker-on of this fusion of angelic and hellish New Country sounds,

An admirer, noting his ardent interest in each situation where

He and music met each other.

Musicians need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle, who warns, who foresees. It must have been pleasurable for Duke to listen as Gershwin talked and then to cease to listen, to let the insistent, confident voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and improvised a few riffs of his own making in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tightly to accommodate the formlessness of life. So when Gershwin ceased to theorize and commandingly began to play in twenty different “American” styles, sight reading this and that, changing keys easily, instantly, there issued forth ceaseless variations of Russian, German, French, English-Irish and Latin and African musical syntaxes from all corners of the world, forging this new American musical language.

He had achieved being a song plugger as he had achieved being a songwriter and collaborator, as he had achieved being a piano roll recording artist and a Broadway composer, as he achieved, it might seem, in everything he undertook. And he had won the friendship of Vernon Duke and the undying devotion of his elder brother, Ira Gershwin.