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for May 19 30
19
Gershwin, and Me
The Famous Composer of "The Chocolate Soldier" Writes His Own Introduction to America and the Movies
This will most certainly prove of incalculable importance in the evolution of the race. Music is of universal appeal; it is a language which needs no translation. And its message is a message of beauty, of harmony, which will inevitably contribute to the unification of mankind.
But I do not believe that the music of the future will be jazz.
To me, jazz is astonishing; sometimes it is distressing; often it is amusing, and sometimes it infects me with its wild abandon so that, for a fleeting moment, I can almost understand the extreme claims that are occasionally made for it. But such moods soon pass. The appeal of jazz is not lasting. It is virile, emphatic, strenuous; but those qualities are not peculiar to jazz. Its role in the music of years to come will, I feel sure, be a minor one. The present jazz craze is simply a craze, a fad. It reminds me always of fireworks being exploded under the eternal stars. Sometimes a flight of blazing rockets lights up the entire landscape with a dazzling glare; but when they fall the stars are still shining.
I have never written jazz. I have no intention of writing it. As I told Gershwin, it is not my music. But one of
Straus in action. An autographed caricature of the Viennese light opera king by Schreiher.
Hollywood's most talented young singers hope to be cast in Oscar Straus' screen operettas. Be/nice Claire, pictured here with the composer, will be one of the lucky ones.
my sons is the author of a jazz operetta which is soon to be produced in Berlin.
Perhaps, he, too, will be in Hollywood ere long.
Despite my very limited liking for jazz, I have found myself fully able to understand it since coming to America. Life moves at a fast pace here. Now and then, the leisurely European finds it somewhat bewildering. Out of this swiftness of movement, this intensity and eagerness, has sprung the soul of jazz.
But can even the American people maintain this rapid pace permanently? I doubt it; and I think I can already discern signs of a reaction. Americans more and more are coming to realize the advantages of a calmer outlook. After hustle comes fatigue; after jazz, I am sure, will come a return to melody, to pure beauty, to the genuine art of music.
As the entire world becomes educated in music, the universal taste will be, I think, a refined and delicate taste. It will be — shall we say? — semi'dassical. It will favor the music that endures; and in years to come, I have no doubt that successful Vitaphone operettas will be revived again and again just as operettas of the stage have been.
In my own work here in Hollywood at the Warner Studios, I am proceeding as I have done in writing all my former operettas. That is to say, I am writing for the screen exactly as I have written (Continued o~i page 127)