George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue

• Theme: Urban vitality, jazz-classical fusion, American optimism

• Musical Essence: A one-movement rhapsody for solo piano and jazz orchestra, composed for Paul Whiteman’s concert “An Experiment in Modern Music”; blends jazz idioms with classical form; opens with iconic clarinet glissando, then cycles through varied episodes of lyrical, playful, and dramatic energy

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

The opening clarinet glissando—sliding upward with a smeared, irreverent grin—is not just a musical gesture. It is a philosophical rupture. It breaks open the European concert tradition with a shriek that is playful, rude, seductive, and absolutely new. Nietzsche would laugh: “Ah! Finally—someone not ashamed to begin in joy.”

This is not the tragedy of Beethoven, nor the metaphysical yearning of Mahler. This is music as kinetic energy, as a city leaping forward into itself. And Nietzsche—enemy of stagnation, lover of becoming—would recognize in Gershwin a force that does not apologize for being modern.

“Give me a body that dances.”

Gershwin gives it. Rhapsody in Blue is the sound of a culture refusing to mourn the loss of metaphysics, and instead building jazz cathedrals out of taxis, telegraphs, and Tin Pan Alley. This is American Dionysus, not as myth, but as momentum, wit, swing.

And yet—this is not mindless exuberance. Beneath the swagger is real longing. The central piano theme—tender, chromatic, blue—is not ironic. It is melancholy stylized, like a dreamer gazing out the window of a train, believing in tomorrow not because it is guaranteed, but because someone has to believe in something.

Nietzsche would see in this a new aesthetic type: not the priest, not the tragic hero, but the artist as improviser, affirming life not through system but through style, flexibility, and rhythm. The pianist in Rhapsody is not a prophet. He is a trickster, a hustler, a dreamer, a sage in swing-time.

“The secret of the greatest joy is the capacity to forget.”

Rhapsody in Blue forgets the weight of tradition—not out of disdain, but out of vital necessity. And yet, Gershwin’s genius lies in how much of tradition he remembers while transforming it. He doesn't destroy classical form—he syncopates it. He doesn't reject beauty—he bends it, smiles through it, slides it into blue notes and brass swagger.

Nietzsche would admire this not as rebellion, but as a higher innocence—an art that doesn't look backward in mourning, nor forward in utopian faith, but sideways, grinning as it dances into the flux of Now.

And yet, within the exuberance, there is no illusion of permanence. The music surges, stalls, swings, and hesitates. The orchestra and piano flirt, argue, reconcile. There is no closure—only motion, gesture, exclamation.

This is affirmation without system, a rhapsody without ideology.

And in that, Nietzsche would find not superficiality—but authentic post-tragic joy. A joy that knows the world is absurd, and still chooses to swing.

Rhapsody in Blue is not salvation. It is flirtation with fate, the musical embodiment of the eternal recurrence in American tempo: Yes, and again, and again—yes!