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Self-Portrait with Allen Tanner, circa 1924-28 by Pavel Tchelitchew

Portrait of Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) by Pavel Chenmuyer

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

But by becoming marked as the “new Diaghilev protege merging from out of nowhere Russia via the United States” of the Paris salons, Vernon Duke gained the power to move on notable terms among his kind; and that gain for a young exiled Russian pianist-composer was serious.

To speak of gain while Vernon Duke, basking in the light and sunshine of Diaghilev’s invitation to write a ballet (Zephyr et Flore), and feeling a young man’s mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world to his remotest past, seems appropriate.  Everything to such a mind was gain.  All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.  The utmost we can say, is that he had taken to heart the lessons of his work with George Gershwin, Rubinstein and the Piano Concerto.

Perhaps the most branded upon him was his bucolic Prokokievian sense of melody and chord voicings.  His tendency to lean upon the musical thinking and structures of his Russian peers rings out most happily in homespun Russian joys and sorrows.

Because he also was a prolific diarist, we are now able to see into a window in time to the very moment when this branding must have began.  It might have begun in his home with Allen Tanner and Pavel Tchelitchew at No. 150 Blvd. Montparnasse, as recorded in his autobiography, Passport to Paris, pgs. 109-110:

“Well, let’s hear this music that you came to conquer Paris with,” Tchelitchew said, winking good-naturedly at Tanner. I sailed into the the Concerto with gusto and was rewarded by the astonished faces of my two listeners.

“What’s gotten into you, Dima?” Allen queried, pouting no longer. “This is a really good concerto—a little too much Prokofiev, a bit of undigested Rachmaninoff here and there, but you can write music—of that there is no doubt.”

Pavlik roared with pleasure, then sat down, suddenly pensive: “Yes, you might do…for Beaumont, not for Diaghilev. Diaghilev is too great a snob and wants names. However, the Count de Beaumont is launching a ballet season with Picasso, Massine and Satie, is calling it Soirées de Paris, and we all know him. He may commission a score from you.”

Allen made a face.  “What about Valitchka?” he asked Pavlik.

“Not Valitchka Bolm, surely?” I cut in.

They both laughed.“No, silly—Nouvel, Valitchka Nouvel, Diaghilev’s business manager and business administrator—a man, not a girl. He’s crazy about Allen and who can tell, may take a fancy to you,” went on Tchelitchew. He knows a lot about music, having founded the Contemporary Music Group with Nourok in Russia. Valitchka is a crotchety old boy, but he means well.”

I expressed my delight at the prospect of meeting the the male Valitchka and Allen promised to telephone him in the morning.

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

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”

What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin? Of Vernon Duke? To answer such questions as well as those raised last week in this web log, perhaps we might parse an answer by examining the lyrics of Ira Gershwin himself. Perhaps the first clue lies in the opening lyrics of Ira Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started”:

I’ve been around the world in a plane /
Settled revolutions ….

All three of these young men had been affected by a series of military conflicts in Russia. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia forced Vladmir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), educated at the Kiev Conservatory as a music student of Reinhold Gliere and Marian Dombrovsky, to flee to Istanbul, Turkey. In 1921, he and his mother arrived in New York where he became a protégé of—George Gershwin. An earlier revolution in Russia which began with the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 led to the birth of these two Gershwin brothers in Brooklyn, New York, 1896 and 1898 respectively. And too, all three Russia descendents, now Americans, George and Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, were masters of song and lyric which console sadness and return torment for joy.

But since Ira and George were first to arrive in the Lower East Side, how did it all really begin, way back in the old country? With a love story, it seems.

Jacob and Israel Gershovitz’s parents had dated in St. Petersburg, Russia in the late 19th century. Their mother, Rose Bruskin, was the daughter of a furrier and their father, Moishe Gershovitz, was the son of Yakov Gershovitz, an inventor who had completed his twenty-five years of compulsory military service. About Yakov, George is thought to have said, “The only creative ancestry that I have seems to have been my father’s father who, he tells me, was an inventor. His ingenuity had something to do with Czar’s guns.” They met when Rose was 15 and Moishe, 19. But shortly after they met, Rose’s father decided to move his furrier business to New York.

Rose’s father was one of many thousands of Russian emigrants to the United States somewhere around the late 1880s. In 1881, the assassination was blamed on the Russian Jewish population and so began a series of massacres, known as “pograms” in Russia, meaning “to demolish violently.” Immigration records show that between 1820 and 1920, over 3,250,000 emigrated from Russian to the United States. And too, Moishe Gershovitz, required by law to serve in the military for twenty-five years, left St. Petersburg in 1892 to propose to Rose.

As soon as Moishe arrived, he began searching for Rose Bruskin, already somewhere in New York City. But first he had to find his uncle, a tailor named Greenstein. He knew where Rose was. Moishe, now “Morris,” not only found Rose, but he married her on July 21, 1895. They lived above Simpson’s Pawnshop at the corner of Hester Street and Eldrige Street when they had their first child, Israel Gershovitz, (Ira Gershwin) on December 6, 1896. Two years later, Jacob Gershovitz or George Gershovitz was born. To seem more American, they changed their Russian last name from Gershovitz to Gershwin.