Canadian singer’s family says she was instrumental in discovery of George Gershwin | Canada Voices

In 2024, Rhapsody in Blue turned 100 years old. As the background music to Leonardo DiCaprio raising his glass in The Great Gatsby or Lisa Simpson biking her way to musical fame in New York, the song has permeated pop culture.

Excerpts from the rhapsody were performed by 84 pianists at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and in 1987, writer Tom Shales labelled it the “rhapsody in bucks” in The Washington Post after airline giant United Airlines licensed it for its advertising campaign that is still used today.

But it might have been a Canadian who made this ubiquitous American musical voice possible.

On Nov. 1, 1923, the Ottawa-born singer Éva Gauthier was performing at the now-defunct Aeolian Hall in Manhattan. George Gershwin, a little-known musician at the time, accompanied her on piano. They were performing the Recital of Ancient and Modern Music for Voice.

For the “ancient” part of the recital, she sang classical opera pieces by Vincenzo Bellini and Henry Purcell. But then, after changing into a black velvet dress, a large green ostrich-feather fan and enormous diamond earrings, she sang modern jazz, including Swanee, which Gershwin had written in 1919.

The performance, says Howard Pollack, a musicology professor at the University of Houston, “would be like somebody going to a classical recital today and the singer sings a set of classical songs and then walks out and sings Taylor Swift.” Purists, in other words, were not happy.

In a review of the performance for The New York Times, critic H.C. Colles wrote that it would be “useless to patronize this sort of music and to say that because it is a national product of America it may develop into a greater form of art. It has developed into all it is capable of. … Its home is not the concert room.”

Colles’s review does note, however, that many in the audience were receptive to the musicians’ modern sound. That included bandleader Paul Whiteman, who, after the show, approached Gershwin and asked him to write a piece for his coming concert, An Experiment in Modern Music. For that, Gershwin created Rhapsody in Blue.

Mary Lou Gauthier, Éva Gauthier’s great-niece, says that Eva was instrumental in Gershwin being discovered. According to family legend, Éva first met Gershwin by accident, while walking on Tin Pan Alley in Manhattan. He was earning $15 a week playing the piano in the window of one of the department stores. At the time, she was looking for a pianist to accompany her to the recital, so she offered him a job, and he agreed to what would become his first-ever concert appearance.

“She definitely deserves the credit she was not given for having introduced Gershwin to musical society,” says Mary Lou.

Éva herself believed she was key to Rhapsody’s genesis. When, in 1941, she heard about the creation of a biographical movie about Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue, she contacted Gershwin’s brother Ira, curious about whether her recital would be included in the movie. In 1943, Warner Bros. responded, asking her to “forgive this omission,” which was done to “keep the picture within reasonable length.” The film was released in 1945, with no mention of Éva.

Éva, who was born in Ottawa in 1885, began her career as a singer with a performance commemorating Queen Victoria’s death in 1902 at Ottawa’s Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica. Later the same year she moved to Paris with the help of her uncle, prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and his wife, and performed across Europe and Asia.

In her final years, Éva lived in a small apartment in New York filled with memorabilia of the glorious years that had passed, says Holly Gauthier, Mary Lou’s daughter and Éva’s great-great-niece.

Éva died on Dec. 26, 1958, in New York.

It was only The New York Times that published a small obituary titled, “Éva Gauthier, 75, a singer, is dead,” giving the wrong year for her Aeolian recital.

“It’s like a party story,” says Holly. “If you want to tell someone a weird fact about your life, you say, hey, my great-great-aunt knew George Gershwin and happened to do a concert with him and introduced him to Paul Whiteman, who asked him to do the most influential piece of music. … It’s a good story.”