(Sheet music - 8 pages including cover. 1938. From the mus...)
Sheet music - 8 pages including cover. 1938. From the musical comedy, "The Boys From Syracuse." Music by Richard Rodgers; lyrics by Lorenz Hart; cover illustration by Ben Jorj Harris. Cover, in shades of turquoise, black, and white, features a Greek key graphic frame, with a depiction of ancient Greeks. Cover suitable for framing and a terrific find for the "musical theater" sheet music collector!
(“A deeply sympathetic biography of Lorenz Hart, the talen...)
“A deeply sympathetic biography of Lorenz Hart, the talented, troubled lyricist of film and Broadway fame. Marmorstein has done an enormous service for fans of stage and movie musicals” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
“Blue Moon,” “Where or When,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”—these are just some of the unforgettable songs that lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart wrote together with composer Richard Rodgers. A Ship Without a Sail is the story of the exuberant yet troubled Hart, who wrote so knowingly about the love that eluded him in his own short life.
Despite their highly successful collaborations for Broadway and Hollywood, Rodgers and Hart were an odd couple. Rodgers was precise, handsome, heterosexual, and eager to be accepted by Society. Hart was barely five feet tall, alcoholic, homosexual, most at home in a bar or restaurant, and prone to unexplained disappearances. His lyrics spin with wit, brilliance, and sophistication, yet at their core is an unmistakable wistfulness and yearning; they are all the more remarkable considering that he never sustained a romantic relationship, living virtually his entire life with his mother until his death at age forty-eight.
Gary Marmorstein’s revelatory biography brings Hart and his colorful world vividly to life, and includes many of the lyrics that define Hart’s indelible legacy.
The Blue Room (From the musical comedy, "The Girl Friend")
(There is a glimpse into the history of popular American C...)
There is a glimpse into the history of popular American Culture and Americana of yesteryear, in every piece of vintage sheet music. Rodgers and Hart musical, a little harder to come by than Rodgers and Hammerstein ones....
Lorenz Milton Hart was an American lyricist. He worked with the composer Richard Rodgers to produce musicals, such as Babes in Arms and Pal Joey.
Background
Lorenz Milton Hart was born on May 2, 1895 in New York City. He was the elder of two sons of Max M. and Frieda (Isenberg) Hart. Of Jewish background, he traced his descent through his mother from the German poet Heinrich Heine. His father, a business promoter, was sufficiently prosperous.
Reared in a worldly, bibulous home, temperamentally alienated from a rather coarse-grained father, indifferent to academic studies outside literature and drama, Hart was perhaps even more than Cole Porter the expressive bard of the urban generation which matured during the interwar years 1919-1941.
Education
After preparation at two private schools, Hart spent two years (1914-1916) at the School of Journalism of Columbia University.
Career
With all his moody unreliability Hart found his destiny as lyricist to his more stable friend Richard Rodgers. Their lifetime collaboration began in 1918, when Hart was working for the Shuberts translating German plays and Rodgers was writing varsity shows at Columbia. The two contributed to the Broadway musical Poor Little Ritz Girl (1920), and by 1925 they had their own success on Broadway, The Garrick Gaieties, an intimate review sponsored by the Theater Guild in revolt against huge, flossy "girlie" productions. Rodgers and Hart believed that monotony was killing the musical, that songwriters must integrate libretto, lyrics, and music. "Sentimental Me, " a parody of mawkish popular songs, appealed to the hard core of their market - people who were either genuinely urban upper-middle class, or who embraced the sophisticated, innovative New York music and the New Yorker magazine in order to avoid being like the "little old lady from Dubuque. " The praise of Manhattan's "smart set" - Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott - enhanced the popularity of Rodgers and Hart's Peggy Ann (1926), a surrealistic Freudian study of an ambitious young career girl.
With personal growth, with changing times, Hart's range broadened and deepened. In the 1930s, while he developed his satirical vein, he was more sober, even somber, with an almost despairing melancholy. "I Hear, " the caustic wordplay evokes a depression-ridden urban world of unmarried adults in lonely, loveless rooms. Not all was harsh: an etherealized tenderness, an almost desperate romanticism typical of the 1930s suffused "Have You Met Miss Jones?" and the title song from I'd Rather Be Right, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. "
Syracuse, based on A Comedy of Errors, was the pioneer adaptation of Shakespeare for musical comedy. If these songs were delicately oblique enough to suit a post-Victorian generation still afraid to pursue hedonism too far or at least too openly, sentimentality still did not eliminate realism: Hart fused the two in a poignant tribute to a homely lover, "My Funny Valentine. " By 1940 Hart and Rodgers decided that more of the naturalism of contemporary literature and drama must come to musical comedy.
In collaborating with John O'Hara on an adaptation of his novel Pal Joey, they were somewhat in advance of a public reluctant to accept the possibility that nice-looking, lithe young white song-and-dance men could fornicate with and leech upon women. Joey did both. Most of the numbers were harshly witty. Received with mixed response, Joey was revived for enthusiastic audiences a decade later. Similar sarcasm pervaded By Jupiter (1942).
When wartime came, Hart was out of step with a patriotic public absorbed with traditional American values. The folksy Oklahoma! - that hearty slice of rural Americana conceived by Rodgers - held no interest for Hart, now immersed in cheap midtown Manhattan bars, and Rodgers turned for lyrics to Oscar Hammerstein II.
Hart returned to collaboration with Rodgers on a 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee. On opening night, acting strangely, he slipped away and vanished for two days. Found ill in a hotel room, he was rushed to a New York City hospital, where he died three days later of pneumonia. He was buried in Mount Zion Cemetery, Maspeth, Queens.
Achievements
Lorenz Milton Hart was a prominent lyricist best known for his long-lasting partnership with Richard Rodgers. A student of literature and an inveterate playgoer from childhood, Lorenz Hart contributed to musical comedies sharp, tasteful lyrics finely coordinated with rhythm and melody and with the plot, mood, and action of the play. Although lyrical fashions moved away from his pungent colloquialism with the banalities of the 1950s and the “hip” polemics of the 1960s, Hart brought into the mainstream of songwriting a conversational directness like Ernest Hemingway’s which eliminated strained poetic diction and bathos.
According to Thomas Hischak, Hart "had a remarkable talent for polysyllabic and internal rhymes, " and his lyrics have often been praised for their wit and technical sophistication.
Hart was a restless world traveler and, especially after his mother's death, an alcoholic who disappeared for weeks on end to escape a life periodically unbearable. He also suffered from depression throughout his life. His erratic behavior was often the cause of friction between him and Rodgers and led to a breakup of their partnership before his death.
Quotes from others about the person
The New York Times writer, Stephen Holden, noted that "In his lyrics, as in his life, Hart stands as a compellingly lonely figure. Although he wrote dozens of songs that are playful, funny and filled with clever wordplay, it is the rueful vulnerability beneath their surface that lends them a singular poignancy. "
Connections
Hart never married. He remained a bachelor and lived with his widowed mother, whom Hart once described as a "sweet, menacing old lady. "
