About this Piece

George Gershwin left school to start his career at age 15 as a song plugger (a musician hired by publishers to promote new sheet music) on Tin Pan Alley. Three years later he earned 50 cents from his first published song, “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em, When You’ve Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em.” He continued his work as a song plugger while writing his own music, until in 1920 he collaborated with William Daly on Piccadilly to Broadway, Gershwin’s first Broadway musical.

Another George, the choreographer Balanchine, became familiar with Gershwin’s songs while working with the Ballets Russes in the ’20s. After immigrating to the US in 1933, he was invited to collaborate with Gershwin on the 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies. Gershwin gifted Balanchine a book of his songs arranged the way the composer would play them in concert, and the two discussed future collaborations. These plans were dashed with the composer’s untimely death, at the age of 38, during production of The Goldwyn Follies.

Balanchine held on to the book of songs, which would serve as inspiration for Who Cares?. He wrote in Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets that he would play Gershwin’s music “and thought to myself, Beautiful, I’ll make a pas de deux. Then I played another, it was just as beautiful and I thought, A variation! And then another and another and there was no end to how beautiful they are.” Balanchine selected 17 of the songs to choreograph and commissioned Hershy Kay to orchestrate the score. The title of the show comes from a song that the Gershwin brothers, George and Ira, originally wrote for the musical Of Thee I Sing. Who Cares? premiered February 5, 1970, over 30 years after Gershwin and Balanchine’s initial collaboration.

Tonight’s performance focuses on the second half of Balanchine’s production, featuring eight of the original 17 dances. In this arrangement, focus is given to individual members of the company, in solos and in pairs—as the titles suggest (“The Man I Love,” “Embraceable You,” “My One and Only”), there’s more than a touch of romance. For the finale, all the dancers join for the Gershwin classic “I Got Rhythm.”

At the time of his death, Gershwin was among the best-known American composers of the day, and an admiring Arnold Schoenberg would write: “I grieve over the deplorable loss to music, for there is no doubt that he was a great composer.”

—Robert Alexander