Background

Berlin was born Israel Beilin in Tolochin, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire (now Vitebsk, Belarus), on May 11, 1888. The family of nine fled the persecutions of Jews in Russia in 1893 and settled in New York City, where, like so many other immigrants of that time, they lived on the Lower East Side. The family's first years in America were very difficult. His father's early death forced him successively into the occupations of newsboy, saloon minstrel, and singing waiter.

Education

Israel, the youngest child, was first exposed to music in the synagogue in which his father occasionally sang as cantor; he also received singing lessons from his father. When the boy left home at 14, he made money by singing in saloons on New York's Bowery. He attended school for two years but had no formal musical education; he never learned to read or notate music.

Career

Berlin’s life began in poverty. The older members of the family took jobs where they could find them, but money was still too scarce. He would roam from brothel to bar, singing for the coins the generous would toss. In 1905 he secured a full-time job as a singing waiter at Mike Salter’s Pelham Cafe in New York City’s Chinatown. In 1907 he published his first song, “Marie From Sunny Italy.” Berlin was the name he chose to appear on the sheet music when the song was published shortly after, in 1907. Subsequently, he began to gain recognition as a clever lyricist. He provided words for "Queenie, My Own, " "Dorando," and "Sadie Salome, Go Home." The last was something of a success, and he was hired by a Tin Pan Alley publisher to write words for new songs. Within a year, despite his continuing difficulty in writing English, Berlin was established as a rising talent in the popular-music business. Somewhat belatedly music publishers became interested in exploiting ragtime, the highly original creation of African-American musicians in the South and Midwest during the 1886 and 1896.

Berlin contributed lyrics (and a few tunes) to several mild ragtime songs. In 1911 he wrote the words and music for "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which started toward worldwide popularity when sung by Emma Carus in Chicago that year. It is ironic that one of the most famous of all "ragtime" songs employs a few conventional syncopations but no real ragtime at all. Berlin's fame soared.

Since he had no formal musical training, he could only play the piano in one key. He just had to push a lever and the piano would start playing in another key while he still played the same notes on the keyboard. Berlin also could not read music. This method of working was not uncommon for songwriters of his generation, and others used both the transposing keyboard and a musical secretary. It is said that Berlin succeeded in part because he followed a strict work ethic.

He wrote his first complete musical score in 1914, Watch Your Step, followed by Stop, Look, Listen. When World War I broke out, Berlin decided it was time to become an American in fact as well as in spirit. After several years of paperwork and delays, he took his oath on February 6, 1918, and became a citizen of the United States. Several months later he was drafted into the army. In the Army he wrote a successful soldier show entitled Yip, Yip, Yaphank (1919), which contained "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning."

In 1919 he founded his own music publishing company, Irving Berlin, Inc. 1929 was a year of both success and setback for Berlin. But that year, sound came to moving pictures, and Berlin began to write film scores. His first two films, Puttin’ on the Ritz (1929) and Coconuts (1929), were adaptations of Broadway shows.

When the Second World War broke out in Europe, Berlin needed to make a musical statement. When Kate Smith sang Berlin’s “God Bless America” on November 11, 1938, the country gained a new - if unofficial - national anthem. Feeling uncomfortable about capitalizing on such sentiments, Berlin donated the copyright and royalties to the Girl Scouts of America and the Boy Scouts of America.

When the United States entered World War II, Berlin took it as a personal call to action. He offered his services to the army, and created This Is the Army. Even more important to the country and composer than the money was the moral support it drew for the war effort. Once the war was over Berlin returned to working for himself. He continued to turn out the hits. Annie Get Your Gun (1946) contained more hit songs than any other musical on Broadway and was his most successful show ever. Movie moguls in Hollywood also demanded his songs.

The almost universal popularity of his music insured their appeal for years. White Christmas (1954) not only included the title song, which was written for an earlier movie, but also used “Mandy” and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” both of which were written in 1918 for Yip! Yip! Yaphank!

In the 1950 Berlin’s creativity began to slow down. While his old hits played well, he wrote fewer new songs, and they were less successful. Financially secure, he did not need to work, for his royalties exceeded the income of any other songwriter ever. In 1954 he earned $101,000 in royalties, and in 1956 he earned $102,000. Resigning from songwriting, Berlin also withdrew from public life. He made no public appearances, but the public did not forget him.

His 100th birthday in 1988 spawned many public tributes, including a televised celebration at Carnegie Hall, complete with old and new stars and even Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts marching on stage singing “God Bless America.” The National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., had a six-month exhibit of Berlin memorabilia, including his transposing piano. He also received many private tributes as well. For almost 20 years, a small group of people met on Christmas Eve outside his home in New York City and sang to him their favorite carol, “White Christmas.”

When Berlin died in New York on September 22, 1989 he was remembered as a symbol of the nation.

Achievements

• Although Berlin never had a professional musical education, his compositions became a landmark in the history of American music. He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which made him a legend before he turned thirty. Following the traditions of ragtime and swing, he created integrated and stylistically complex compositions, which became the symbol of the whole epoch. His songs were nominated eight times for Academy Awards; many of them became popular themes and anthems.
  
  Berlin was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Jewish-American Hall of Fame in 1988.
  
  He was also awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 1, 1994.

Works

More photos

• music

  • Watch Your Step 1914
  • Yip Yip Yaphank 1918
  • Face the Music: Century of Irving Berlin 1932
  • Louisiana Purchase 1940
  • Annie Get Your Gun 1946
  • Miss Liberty 1949
  • Call Me Madam 1950
  • Mr. President 1962

Views

Quotations: Irving Berlin, to his daughter: "I gave up trying to get your mother to economize. It was easier just to make more money. "

Membership

Herbert later became a moving force behind the creation of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In 1914, Berlin joined him as a charter member of the organization that has protected the royalties of composers and writers ever since.

In 1920, Irving Berlin became a member of SACEM, the French Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Commenting on the composer who produced more popular hits than any other of his generation, Harold Clurman wrote in 1949, "Irving Berlin's genius consists not so much in his adaptability to every historical and theatrical contingency, but rather in his capacity to discover the root need and sentiment of all our American lives."
  
  As fellow songwriter Jerome Kern was quoted in Alexander Woolcott's biography of Berlin: "Irving Berlin has no place in American Music. He is American Music."
  
  Berlin, however, did not follow that method. Instead, says music critic Stephen Holden, Berlin's songs were always simple, "exquisitely crafted street songs whose diction feels so natural that one scarcely notices the craft. .. .they seem to flow straight out of the rhythms and inflections of everyday speech."
  
  Composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) also tried to describe the importance of Berlin's compositions: "I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived. .. . His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert. But apart from his genuine talent for song-writing, Irving Berlin has had a greater influence upon American music than any other one man. It was Irving Berlin who was the very first to have created a real, inherent American music. .. . Irving Berlin was the first to free the American song from the nauseating sentimentality which had previously characterized it, and by introducing and perfecting ragtime he had actually given us the first germ of an American musical idiom; he had sown the first seeds of an American music."

Connections

In 1912, Berlin married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of the songwriter E. Ray Goetz. She died six months later of typhoid fever, which she contracted during their honeymoon in Havana. Years later in the 1920s, he fell in love with a young heiress, Ellin Mackay, the daughter of Clarence Mackay, the socially prominent head of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, and an author in her own right. As a result, they decided to elope and were married in a simple civil ceremony at the Municipal Building away from media attention. Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until she died in July 1988 at the age of 85. They had four children during their 63 years of marriage: Irving, who died in infancy on Christmas Day 1928; Mary Ellin Barrett and Elizabeth Irving Peters of New York, and Linda Louise Emmet, who lives in Paris.

Father:

Moses Beilin

Mother:

Lena Lipkin Beilin

1st wife:

Dorothy Goetz

2nd wife:

Ellin Mackay

Daughter:

Mary Ellin Barrett

Daughter:

Linda Louise Emmet

Daughter:

Elizabeth Irving Peters

References

• Biography - Irving Berlin: An American Song
• Irving Berlin
• What'll I Do
• The Irving Berlin Reader (Readers on American Musicians)
• Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater (Broadway Legacies) by Jeffrey Magee (2012-04-06)
• Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook, Vol. 1
• The Story of Irving Berlin
• Irving Berlin Waltz Medley