George Gershwin

George Gershwin rose from Tin Pan Alley song plugger to one of the defining American composers of the twentieth century, moving fluidly between Broadway, where he wrote a long run of hit shows with his brother Ira as lyricist, and the concert hall, where 1924's Rhapsody in Blue fused jazz idioms with symphonic form. Porgy and Bess (1935), his only full-length opera, drew on his time spent in the Gullah communities of South Carolina and met a cool commercial reception in his lifetime; it is now considered a landmark of American opera. Gershwin died of a brain tumour in 1937, at thirty-eight.