Gershwin probably wrote this string quartet movement as an exercise in composition and instrumentation during his studies with Edward Kilenyi, the Hungarian composer and violinist with the Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra. It includes an informative preface from the pen of George’s brother Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) that supplies the few essential facts about the composition of the Lullaby and remains available in an unaltered reprint edition of all the performing material by the Alfred Publishing Company of Van Nuys (California).
It was not until April 1968 that the first printed edition of the piece, a study score, finally appeared, published in New York by the New World Music Corporation. Gershwin himself did not bother to publish the little Lullaby during his lifetime. A few piano works were still to be written and a single chamber work, the string quartet movement Lullaby ( HN 1224). He had just 12 years left to write some of the most important orchestral and operatic works in American music history. But with Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 the 26-year-old had only begun his journey into the spheres of Carnegie Hall. On Broadway he had already achieved everything to be wished for. George Gershwin was tragically snatched from life in 1937, far too early at age 38, leaving us merely to guess what masterpieces for the classical music world, not to mention his many musicals, he would have left behind had he lived on into old age.
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