An American in Paris

An American in Paris is the title shared by two of the most celebrated works in American musical culture: an orchestral tone poem composed by George Gershwin in 1928, and the 1951 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) musical film directed by Vincente Minnelli, which drew its title and its climactic music from the Gershwin composition. The title was revived again for a major Broadway stage musical in 2014–2015. Beyond its association with these works, the phrase has passed into common usage as shorthand for the romance, glamour, and artistic ferment that Paris represented to American artists, musicians, and expatriates during the first half of the twentieth century.

Background and Cultural Context

During the 1920s, Paris was the unrivaled capital of the art world and a magnet for Americans abroad. Writers of the so-called Lost Generation, painters such as Man Ray and later postwar artists, jazz musicians, and composers all gravitated to the city, where American jazz was avidly received and where the line between popular and concert music was actively debated. George Gershwin, who had rocketed to fame with "Rhapsody in Blue" in 1924, visited Paris several times in the 1920s and became fascinated by its street sounds, its boulevardiers, and its taxi horns. It was from this experience that both the tone poem and, indirectly, the film took their identity: the figure of the American wanderer in the French capital, intoxicated by the city yet nostalgic for home.

Gershwin's Tone Poem (1928)

The orchestral work bearing the title was commissioned by conductor Walter Damrosch, music director of the New York Symphony Society, following the success of Gershwin's Concerto in F. Gershwin sketched the piece during an extended stay in Paris in the spring of 1928, during which he reportedly purchased actual Parisian taxi horns to incorporate into the orchestration. He described his intent as portraying "the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere." The full orchestration was completed in New York later that year.

The work premiered on December 13, 1928, at Carnegie Hall, with Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony Society. From the podium, Damrosch offered a famously affectionate tribute, remarking that while many composers are born in the wrong place, Gershwin seemed born in the wrong century, a jazzman whose gift would have been lionized in the Vienna of an earlier age. Critical response was mixed but largely enthusiastic; some traditionalists dismissed the piece as lightweight, yet audiences embraced it, and it rapidly entered the standard orchestral repertoire. Gershwin himself participated in an early recording in 1929, and the work has since been recorded by virtually every major American conductor, including Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Arthur Fiedler, John Williams, and Michael Tilson Thomas.

Musical Structure and Style

Lasting roughly seventeen to twenty minutes in performance, An American in Paris is a free-standing tone poem built from five principal themes. It opens with jaunty, striding "walking" melodies suggestive of a strolling tourist; the four tuned taxi horns purchased in Paris punctuate the bustling urban texture. A wistful trumpet solo introduces a blues-inflected episode representing the visitor's homesickness—Gershwin reportedly drew this theme from material originally intended for an opera—before the music gathers energy toward a Charleston-flavored episode and an exuberant, jazz-charged finale in which the American's spirits, and his foot, are once again carried away by Paris. The score calls for a large orchestra augmented by three saxophones, an expanded percussion section, and the tuned automobile horns, making it one of the earliest concert works to domesticate jazz idioms and urban noise within a symphonic framework.

The 1951 MGM Musical Film

Production

The film An American in Paris (1951) was produced by Arthur Freed at MGM's famed Freed Unit, with a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and direction by Vincente Minnelli. Its score was assembled from the Gershwin catalog, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music supervision by Saul Chaplin, orchestrations by Conrad Salinger, and conducting by Johnny Green. Gene Kelly starred as Jerry Mulligan, an ex-GI and struggling painter living in Montmartre, opposite Leslie Caron, a ballerina of the Ballets des Champs-Élysées whom Kelly discovered and championed for her film debut. The supporting cast included Oscar Levant as Jerry's pianist friend Adam Cook, the French singer Georges Guétary as the entertainer Henri Baurel, and Nina Foch as Milo Roberts, a wealthy American patroness. The film opened at Radio City Music Hall in October 1951 and became one of the highest-grossing releases of the year.

Plot and Musical Numbers

The story follows Jerry Mulligan, who paints on the streets of Paris and falls in love with Lise Bouvier (Caron), a young French shopgirl secretly engaged to Henri Baurel, the older performer who helped launch his career. The narrative is a vehicle for an array of Gershwin songs, including "I Got Rhythm," performed by Kelly with a chorus of French schoolchildren; "By Strauss"; "'S Wonderful"; "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise"; the comic duet "Tra-La-La (This Time It's Really Love)"; and the tender ballad "Love Is Here to Stay," treated in the film as "Our Love Is Here to Stay" and serving as the lovers' theme. In one celebrated sequence, Oscar Levant's character daydreams that he single-handedly performs every role—soloist and orchestra alike—in Gershwin's Concerto in F.

The Final Ballet

The film's climax is an approximately seventeen-minute dream ballet set to Gershwin's tone poem, in which Jerry fantasizes about Lise through a succession of settings designed in the styles of French painters, including Raoul Dufy, Henri Rousseau, Vincent van Gogh, Maurice Utrillo, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Choreographed by Kelly and danced by Kelly and Caron, the sequence was photographed by John Alton against stylized backdrops and costumes conceived by the art department under Cedric Gibbons and Preston Ames. It remains one of the most influential extended dance sequences in American film, demonstrating that a plot-integrated ballet could anchor a mainstream movie musical.

Reception and Awards

The film won six Academy Awards at the 1952 ceremony, including Best Picture, Best Story and Screenplay (Lerner), Best Art Direction (Color), Best Cinematography (Color), Best Costume Design (Color, Orry-Kelly), and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture (Johnny Green and Saul Chaplin), from eight nominations that also included Best Director and Best Actor. Kelly received an honorary Oscar that same year for his versatility as a dancer, choreographer, and film artist. The film was included in the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 greatest American movies, ranked ninth among the ten greatest film musicals in AFI's 2008 survey, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1993.

The 2015 Stage Musical

A third work to carry the title premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in December 2014 before transferring to Broadway's Palace Theatre, opening in April 2015. Directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, the celebrated ballet choreographer, with a book by Craig Lucas, the production starred New York City Ballet principal Robert Fairchild and Royal Ballet dancer Leanne Cope as the Jerry and Lise figures. It integrated Gershwin songs with newly staged ballet sequences built around the tone poem, and it earned twelve Tony Award nominations, winning four, including Best Choreography for Wheeldon. The musical closed on Broadway in October 2016 after more than 700 performances and was subsequently seen on tour across North America.

Legacy and Significance

Gershwin's tone poem endures as one of the most frequently performed American orchestral works of the twentieth century, prized as a bridge between the jazz idiom and the European concert tradition. The 1951 film is routinely ranked among the greatest of all Hollywood musicals, and its fusion of the Freed Unit's production polish, Minnelli's visual sophistication, and Kelly's athletic choreography set a benchmark for the genre, influencing later screen musicals from Singin' in the Rain to the dance-driven films of subsequent decades. Together, the works helped fix in the global imagination an enduring image of Paris as seen through American eyes—simultaneously a city of light, a stage for romance, and a mirror in which the American visitor discovers both French charm and his own homesick heart.