The life story of George Gershwin usually runs something like this: an incredible string of successes is cut short by Gershwin's tragically early death.

On today's date in 1922, George Gershwin suffered one of his rare flops when his one-act opera "Blue Monday" opened and closed on the same day. For five years, beginning in 1920, Gershwin had provided the music for an annual Broadway review entitled "The George White Scandals." The impresario Mr. White provided the money and the leggy showgirls, Mr. Gershwin the catchy tunes and light-hearted dances.

But in 1922, Gershwin was eager to try something different: a modern, jazz-age version of an Italian verismo opera. The plot was simple: he does her wrong, and then she shoots him. Since it was a jazz opera, the characters were supposedly all blacks, but for the 1922 premiere, the cast was all white, made up in blackface. The reviews were devastatingly bad—one critic suggesting the soprano with the pistol should have shot all the rest of the cast before ANYONE had a chance to sing.

Mr. White read the reviews the next day, and pulled "Blue Monday" from his revue before it could have a second performance. A concert revival by the Paul Whiteman band at Carnegie Hall in 1925, and a 1953 CBS-TV production with an all-black cast didn't fare all that much better, and "Blue Monday" is rarely mounted today.