Brief Candles
With Donald Macleod.
George Gershwin left school at 15 to become the youngest pianist on Tin Pan Alley. At the same time he was working on his own compositions. With one foot in Carnegie Hall and another on Broadway, Gershwin was caught in a dilemma between his success as a songwriter and his ambition to be a serious composer. But the struggle soon became about his health, not his career. Doctors had put his mood down to emotional problems, but the cause, in fact, was a brain tumour.
He fell into a coma in 1937 and died shortly afterwards, aged just 38.
SOUNDING THE CENTURY