Why It's Best Not To Listen to Your Critics...

George Gershwin

Of the reviews that were out for blood, the composer was reportedly most wounded by Virgil Thomson's assertion that "Gershwin was not and never did have the power of sustained musical development." Thomson's review is a dizzying mixture of perspicacity and poison. Asserting that Gershwin was a charming but not, of course, a "serious" composer, had adhered for too uncritically to his "melting pot" sources," Thomson conceded that "Porgy and Bess" was fully alive despite being afflicted by "fake folklore" and - as the phrase appeared in the journal Modern Music - "plum pudding orchestration" (In Thomson's collection, the phrase is "gefiltefish orchestration" One suspects that the editor of Modern Music found this choice of delicacy distasteful.)

"Porgy and Bess" closed in just over three months, losing its entire investment. The sudden demise of his most beloved work prompted Gershwin to leave for Hollywood in the summer of 1936 - he had a big success there five years earlier - although Hollywood was not particularly eager to have him. The boy genius had fallen down hard.

"I had to live for this," Gershwin grumbled, "that Sam Goldwyn should say to me, 'Why don't you write hits like Irving Berlin?'"
Claudia Roth Pierpont, New Yorker