George Gershwin

Born Jacob Gershwine in 1898, he studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody, starting out as a song plugger before writing Broadway shows with his brother Ira and Buddy DeSylva. When he moved to Paris hoping to study with Nadia Boulanger, she turned him down — afraid formal training would wreck his jazz style; Maurice Ravel said the same. He composed An American in Paris anyway, came home, and in 1935 finished Porgy and Bess with Ira and DuBose Heyward, an opera that flopped commercially but later became an American classic. He mov…