Musical Dynamos: Four By Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart

With a song in my heart
I behold your adorable face.
Just a song at the start
but it soon is a hymn to your grace.
When the music swells
I'm touching you hand
It tells that your're standing near, and ..
At the sound of your voice
heaven opens his portals to me.
Can I help but rejoice
that a song such as ours came to be?
But I always knew
I would live life through
with a song in my heart for you.

(Rodgers and Hart, "With a Song in My Heart" from "Spring is Here")   

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Lorenz (Larry) Hart (1895-1943)  began their  collaboration  as Broadway and later Hollywood musical-comedy  composers in 1919, when they both met while enrolled at Columbia University in New York City.  After working on reviews and selling individual songs to stage shows, they finally broke through big time with a New York production of  "Garrick Gayities" in 1925.  Success nearly came too late for Rodgers, who almost left show business  to become a underwear salesman.  

   By the time their partnership ended with Hart's death (to a combination of double pneumonia exacerbated by alcoholism and acute depression) little over  two decades after their meeting, the duo had written 550 songs for  twenty six broadway shows and over a dozen Hollywood films. Many of the songs from these shows are still sung in cabaret shows, musical revivals and on CD by popular contemporary performers like Diana Krall and Rod Stewart. 

The American musical story form that pervaded Broadway in the 1920's was a pretty tame medium, with librettos almost entirely based on threadbare romantic boy-meets-girl plots with cardboard characters and predictable situations.  Rogers and Hart came to dominate this form and, when audiences were more receptive, transcended it with more sophisicated songs, culminating in the landmark 1941 production of "Pal Joey", based on a John O'Hara story that featured a main character who was a dislike able heel.

In 1927, one of their first major hit musicals was "The Girl Friend".  Here's the title tune by the Savoy Orpheans:

    

 

From Wikipedia:

"Time Magazine devoted a cover story to Rodgers and Hart (September 26,1938). They wrote that their success "rests on a commercial instinct that most of their rivals have apparently ignored". The article also noted the "spirit of adventure." "As Rodgers and Hart see it, what was killing musicomedy [sic] was its sameness, its tameness, its eternal rhyming of June with moon."

 "Hart's lyrics, facile, vernacular, dazzling, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholic, raised the standard for Broadway songwriting. "His ability to write cleverly and to come up with unexpected, polysyllabic rhymes was something of a trademark, but he also had the even rarer ability to write with utmost simplicity and deep emotion." Rodgers, as a creator of melodies, ranks with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin."

Here's an apex of early American musical films--"Isn't It Romantic", from "Love Me Tonight (1932),  performed by Jeanette MacDonald, Maurice Chevalier, an aging budding groom, a taxi-driver, some Hispanic extras playing gypsies, an effete songwriter, and  a lost patrol of French infantry men marching aimlessly  in the San Fernando Valley above Hollywood. If this isn't romantic, then nothing is!   

   

    

This next song is from the Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit, "On Your Toes".  Produced in 1936, it was the first Broadway show to combine jazz music with classical ballet, featuring an extended ballet sequence with the music to "Slaughter on 10th Avenue".  It was conceived originally as  a movie vehicle  for Fred Astaire, but he thought the ballet was "too highbrow" for his film fans, and he was equally reluctant to trade in his debonair image for the role of a meek professor.   

"Glad to be Unhappy" was recorded in February, 1955, for a Frank Sinatra album called "In the Wee Small Hours".  Some music critics have noted that his marital break-up with Ava Gardner helped bring a greater poignancy to his superb voice.      

 

Here is a 2002 recording of for a PBS Special saluting Richard Rodgers. "With a Song in My Heart" is performed by Ron Raines,  Rebecca Luker, Audra McDonald, Douglas Sills, Mary Testa, and Lillias White..

After Hart's death, Richard Rodgers collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein on a series of other major musicals like "The King and I", "The Sound of Music", et al.  But, in my opinion, this was his best and least pretentious  work was with with Lorenz Hart, a great lyricist not replaceable.