Lorenz Hart

Songwriter

• Born: May 2, 1895
• Birthplace: Harlem, New York
• Died: November 22, 1943
• Place of death: New York, New York

American composer

The first musical-comedy lyricist to receive equal billing with the composer, Hart was among a small group of early musical-comedy writers who led the way in combining diverse theatrical traditions of romance, spectacle, satire, and musical revue into a distinctly American art form.

Areas of achievement Music, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Lorenz Hart was born in the Lower East Side of New York City. His parents, Frieda Isenberg and Max Hertz, were Jewish German immigrants. Max, who changed the spelling of his name in the United States, was an outgoing, free-spending businessman with political links to Tammany Hall. Frieda was a frustrated actress. Besides Lorenz, or Larry, as he was called, the Harts had one other child, Theodore Van Wyck Hart, who as Teddy Hart became a well-known actor in theatrical comedy.

Sparked by Frieda’s love for the theater, the Harts began taking the boys to plays and shows when they were quite young, and the children responded by writing and acting comedy skits at home and in school. Hart attended Columbia Grammar and DeWitt Clinton schools and the summer camp-schools the Weingart Institute and Paradox Lake Camp. There, he was active in literary societies, as editor, literary reviewer, and humorous essayist for the school papers, and as actor and writer of school dramatics. One summer, Hart, a voracious reader, brought to camp a trunk full of books, including a fifteen-volume set of the works of William Shakespeare. He also loved music, listening eagerly to opera, light opera, and vaudeville, but especially to operettas by W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan and the new musical shows by Jerome Kern, P. G. Wodehouse, and Guy Bolton.

At the camps, Hart and his friends joked that the size and weight of his brain prevented his body from growing. He never grew taller than about five feet, and his head was somewhat too large for his body. Although he was not dwarfish in this disproportion, he was sensitive about his appearance, especially in regard to its effect on women. His face, however, was intelligent, lively, and animated, highlighted by intense, dark eyes. In photographs, he often gazed at the camera from under rather straight, dark eyebrows, as though totally absorbing whatever he perceived. In later years, his hairline receded, increasing the impact of the intelligent eyes and forehead. His other facial features were also regular and handsome. He moved quickly, laughed easily and heartily, and frequently rubbed his hands together in a characteristic nervous but gleeful gesture. He is most often described as dynamic, charismatic, restless, witty, and generous. With his charm and liveliness, he was usually the center of attention, and people often overlooked his small size completely.

When Hart was twenty-three and Richard Rodgers sixteen, a friend brought the two together to work on a fund-raising benefit. By this time, Hart had attended Columbia University, primarily to participate in the varsity shows program there. (At that time, the university varsity shows were somewhat like Off-Broadway shows later. They were publicly performed in hotel meeting rooms and little theaters and were reviewed by professional critics seeking new talent.) Hart had also written some comedy routines for minor vaudeville entertainers but was making little headway in his career. Within an hour of their meeting, Rodgers and Hart knew that they had compatible ideas about music and that they would work together as composers. Their fund-raiser was successful, and one of its songs, “Any Old Place with You,” was purchased by Lew Fields for inclusion in a Broadway musical, their first professional success.

When Rodgers enrolled at Columbia, he and Hart continued their collaboration in the varsity shows Fly with Me (1920) and You’ll Never Know (1921), both of which were moderately successful. In these amateur productions, the two were perfecting their theatrical skills and learning to complement each other’s talents. Altogether, they wrote about twenty-five amateur shows before the brilliant success of The Garrick Gaieties of 1925. This was a fund-raiser for the Theater Guild, intended for only two performances, but the cheers of the audience and the rave reviews by the critics prompted the guild to give it a regular run, and it became the hit of the 1925 theatrical season, continuing for 211 performances. From this revue came “Manhattan,” Rodgers and Hart’s first major hit song. On the strength of this success, they were able to get backing for the professional production of their musical comedy Dearest Enemy (1925). With Herbert Fields as librettist, they had written this show several years earlier but could not find a backer. The story was based on a Revolutionary War incident, and producers were afraid that the public would be cool toward a comedy by unknown writers and based on history. The production of Dearest Enemy was the professional debut of the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart.

Life’s Work

The year 1926 was busy for the new team. Dearest Enemy was followed by three more highly popular and profitable shows, which established Rodgers and Hart as commercially successful writers well worth the investment of major Broadway producers such as Billy Rose, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Charles Dillingham. The three shows were The Girl Friend, with its hit song “The Blue Room,” The Garrick Gaieties of 1926, featuring “Mountain Greenery,” and Peggy-Ann. The striking fact about these four shows was their diversity. Rodgers and Hart wanted to avoid becoming stereotyped in a particular form of comedy, and they actively sought out stories and shows that offered fresh opportunities. These four shows of 1926 were a light operatic period piece, a bright, contemporary romantic comedy, a satirical revue, and a somewhat surrealistic fantasy based on Freudian dream theories and violating most of the traditions of staging, lighting, and use of chorus. Peggy-Ann received high praise from critics for its originality. Also produced in 1926 were three other, less successful, shows, two in London. From the 1926 shows came the songs “The Blue Room,” “Mountain Greenery,” and “My Lucky Star.”

A Connecticut Yankee (1927) confirmed Hart’s preeminence as a lyricist. In his youthful, exuberant shows, he delighted in unexpected and unconventional rhymes, especially feminine, approximate, and run-on rhymes, as in “We could find no cleaner re-/ Treat from life’s machinery/ Than our mountain greenery/ Home.” Although most critics and audiences welcomed this sophisticated and witty departure from the moon/June clichés, others considered such cleverness too facile or too heavy-handed and forced. Some complained, too, that Hart’s satirical tendency was too brittle, too pervasive, that he could write nothing else. In A Connecticut Yankee, Hart proved that he was not simply a facile rhymer. He showed his linguistic deftness and his ear for dialect in songs such as “Thou Swell” which mixed Shakespearean words with New York slang and New England cadences. The result was delightful. He also proved his ability to handle simple rhymes and tender sentiment in the graceful love ballad “My Heart Stood Still.”

Following A Connecticut Yankee came an unhappy period. Some good songs came out of 1928 and 1929: “My Lucky Star,” “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Spring Is Here,” “With a Song in My Heart,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” “Dancing on the Ceiling”; nevertheless, the next seven shows ranged from average to failure. Hart’s father died in 1928. The stock market crash in 1929 substantially halted Broadway musical production for several years. During the Great Depression of the early 1930’s, Rodgers and Hart spent five years in Hollywood, writing first for Warner Bros. and then for Paramount, United Artists, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films. Although they were unhappy working under the unaccustomed filming conditions and studio contract restrictions, some of their memorable songs were introduced in motion pictures, most notably those written for Maurice Chevalier: “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Mimi,” “Maxim’s,” and “Girls, Girls, Girls.” Also “Lover,” “You Are Too Beautiful,” and “Blue Moon” came from the Hollywood period, as did Hart’s lyrics to Franz Lehar’s music for the film The Merry Widow (1934), “Vilia” and “The Merry Widow Waltz.” Writing music for films taught Rodgers and Hart some new techniques for background music, integration of songs with action, and rhythmic dialogue leading into songs.

As the Depression began to ease, Rodgers and Hart returned to Broadway to write the songs for Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1935), including “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” “Little Girl Blue,” and “My Romance.” It was after the success of this venture that the pair wrote the books, as well as the songs, to four of their productions: On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), I Married an Angel (1938), and By Jupiter (1942). These years of 1936 through 1942 were the prime years of Rodgers and Hart’s creative genius, as it seemed that everything they did turned to gold. Although the books they wrote were fairly trivial entertainments, both these shows and others for which they wrote only the lyrics were so innovative that they helped change the whole course of Broadway musicals. On Your Toes, for example, introduced George Balanchine and serious ballet to the musical comedy with “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Although Babes in Arms was a traditional revue, its varied and wonderful music represented songwriters at the peak of their creative powers. “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “Johnny One-Note,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Where or When,” and “I Wish I Were in Love Again” all came from that one show. I’d Rather Be Right (1937) took the unprecedented step of satirizing an American president still in office. I Married an Angel adapted a drama with serious social satire and psychological insight into the Broadway production techniques of lavish scenery and costuming, setting a pattern for the semiserious musical theater of the next three decades. The Boys from Syracuse (1938) adapted Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (1592-1594) to the musical tradition, establishing a new standard of literacy for musical comedy and paving the way for later great classical adaptations such as Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Man of La Mancha (1965), and Candide (1956). Besides the songs already mentioned, other great songs from this period include “There’s a Small Hotel,” “Spring Is Here,” “Falling in Love with Love,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” and “Ev’rything I’ve Got [Belongs to You].”

After two mediocre productions, Too Many Girls (1939) and Higher and Higher (1940), Rodgers and Hart wrote the songs for the musical drama that is now considered their masterwork and a turning point in the musical theater Pal Joey (1940). This was the first musical to feature unromanticized, gritty realism in its plot and characters. The story concerned the moral and intellectual fiber of the small-time entertainment world. Its two big hits were “I Could Write a Book” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” These became popular as conventional love songs, but in the play the first was an ironic line of seduction and the second so explicitly sexy that the lyrics were revised for popular broadcasting. The play and songs received mixed critical reaction, from derision of the low-life characters and disgust at the explicit sexuality to raves for the satiric bite and uncompromising characterization. Pal Joey’s first run was not as highly applauded as other Rodgers and Hart musicals from this brilliant period in their careers, but when it was revived twelve years later, it received universal praise. The world was ready for it in 1952, and it received the New York Drama Critics Award for best musical and eleven out of sixteen Donaldson Awards.

Hart never married. He did propose to several women, but none accepted him. This hurt him deeply, and he became increasingly morose. He probably considered himself physically unattractive to women, but that was never the reason those women gave for refusing his proposals. To the contrary, most women found his small size and disproportion insignificant compared to his enormous wit, warmth, and generosity, and he had numerous female friends and several serious relationships. His genius, however, was intimidating and his nervous energy overwhelming. His work was his obsession. He was a compulsive spender and socializer, and he had a major problem with alcoholism. Women no doubt recognized him to be a poor marriage risk. On meeting Hart in his early twenties, Rodgers’s mother had predicted that he would be dead within a few years. Rodgers himself considered Hart self-destructive.

By the 1940’s, Hart’s drinking was seriously interfering with his work. His behavior became more and more erratic. He was late to appointments, or never showed up, and had to be tracked down and made to finish his lyrics. He began to experience blackouts. World War II depressed him greatly; he tried to enlist but was rejected. Most of his friends had married and settled down, and he felt cut off from his former society. He became a worry to his family and a problem to his friends. He was hospitalized several times for his alcoholism but never stayed confined long enough to complete treatment or restore his health. Although his writing was still brilliantly creative in the book and lyrics for By Jupiter and in new songs for the 1943 revival of A Connecticut Yankee, he had become so unreliable that Rodgers had already found a new partner in Oscar Hammerstein II, anticipating Hart’s incapacity or death. On the opening night of the revival of A Connecticut Yankee, Hart caught pneumonia and died in New York City, on November 22, 1943.

Significance

Hart’s impact on the development of American musical theater is almost immeasurable. He and a handful of other musical and literary geniuses made it what it is: a blend of the bawdy and satirical comedy of burlesque, the singable songs of folk music and Tin Pan Alley, the spectacle and dance of musical revue, the wit and wordplay of Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, combined with the story tradition of European opera. The earliest truly American musical comedies were the work of the brilliant team of Jerome Kern, Guy Bolton, and P. G. Wodehouse. Their shows were a revelation to a generation of writers and composers, including Rodgers and Hart among the first, as well as George and Ira Gershwin, Herb and Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Arthur Schwartz, and Howard Dietz.

Hart’s particular contributions were his witty and imaginative rhymes, his poetic ability to use the rhythm and melodic phrases of music as punctuation for the lyrical line, and his youthfully buoyant sense of humor, which appealed to the people of the United States when they most felt, and later most needed to feel, youthfully buoyant themselves. Besides these lyrical talents, he had a restless innovative spirit that led him into breaking the molds of whatever came before, including his own successes. He and Rodgers seldom did the same sort of musical twice; they were always experimenting with new subjects, such as historical events, Freudian theory, plucky and independent heroines, adult love, political satire, or classical literature. Hart was the first lyricist whose work was so integral to the success of the music that his name appeared on theater marquees with equal status to that of the composer.

Hart’s contributions were not limited, however, to the lyrics of songs. He had an unerring sense of the theater, and he and Rodgers were involved in all aspects of theatrical production: the inclusion and exclusion of stage business, the timing of action, the rewriting of dialogue, the introduction of new techniques such as rhythmic dialogue lead-ins to songs, the integration of music to plot and character, the selection of performers. No records are kept of the individual working contributions of members of a theatrical production team, so the extent of Hart’s influence can only be inferred from the comments of his colleagues. One after another, they praised the value of his quick and instinctive decisions about what would be right, what would work well on stage.

Hart also brought to the musical comedy his extensive knowledge of literature and classical music. Perhaps more than any other single figure in early musical comedy, he contributed to raising the artistic standards of musical shows to those of musical drama. To his lyrics, he brought knowledge of and sensitivity to poetic theory and dialect; to his books, an awareness of plot structure, character delineation, and natural dialogue; and to the music and dance, a natural aesthetic taste enriched through years of attending opera and ballet. He continually supported artistic innovations to appeal to a viewing public that he believed had been underestimated. It was this faith in the intelligence and taste of the American theatergoer that motivated Hart in shaping a uniquely American art form. Even though the shows for which he wrote are mostly passé and unrevivable for today’s audiences, the songs and the tradition survive. Rodgers-Hart songs are still performed all over the world, and it would be difficult to imagine the successes of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Jule Styne, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Abe Burrows, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, and Kurt Weill without the precedent of lyrical literacy and excellence set in the 1920’s and 1930’s by Hart.

Bibliography

Ewen, David. Men of Popular Music. Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1944. A brief critical assessment of Rodgers and Hart’s importance to the development of popular music in the United States.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Rodgers and Hart.” In The Complete Book of the American Musical Theater. New York: Henry Holt, 1959. Brief biographies with production and critical notes on thirteen of the team’s major theatrical productions.

Green, Stanley. “Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.” In The World of Musical Comedy. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1960. A concise, professional biography with brief comments on the plots and the critical reception of twenty-six of Rodgers and Hart’s forty-one stage and film productions. An objective account of the twenty-five-year partnership of the composers.

Haran, Mary Cleere. “Hart’s Heart and Rodgers’s Glorious Soul.” The New York York Times, June 23, 2002. Discusses Hart’s partnership with Richard Rodgers during the 1930’s.

Hart, Dorothy, ed. Thou Swell, Thou Witty: The Life and Lyrics of Lorenz Hart. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. The primary source of biographical information about Hart, this book-length biography contains intimate memoirs, sketches, and tributes by twenty-one people who lived and worked with him. It also contains photographs of Hart at all ages, pictures from most of the plays and films, production notes and lyrics from most of the productions, reproductions of several letters and reviews, and a complete list of the musical comedies and songs in which he collaborated as lyricist or librettist.

Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages. New York: Random House, 1975. Although primarily an autobiography, the sections on the years 1918-1943 contain much on the personality of Hart, the nature of the collaboration, and the personal contributions of each member of the partnership. Anecdotes about sources of inspiration, periods of stalemate, and difficulties in production give considerable insight into the nature of the musical-comedy theater.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Rodgers and Hart Song Book. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951. Admiring assessment of the artistry of Hart’s lyrics, with comments on his phonetic and rhythmic intentions and skills.

Smith, Cecil. Musical Comedy in America. New York: Theater Arts Books, 1950. This history of the musical comedy explains the contributions of each of the major artists in the field. In Hart’s case, it emphasizes his wit and satire, his leadership in sophisticated rhyme and rhythms, and the relationship between his work and the social history of the 1920’s, the Depression, and the war years.

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