THE story is told that the composers Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg were partners at bridge, and Kern found himself holding a singleton trump. By way of signalling this to his colleague, he began to lilt the tune of "One Alone" from The Desert Song. Romberg paid no attention and the contract was lost. "Are you deaf?" Kern said afterwards. "I kept humming it at you . . . One Alone. For God's sake, you wrote it, it's from your show!"
"So what do I know from lyrics?" Romberg said.
Words have always come second to music. In the days when errand boys existed, they were popularly supposed to go about whistling the latest tune. No one has been admitted to hearing one of the breed dispensing with the music and using sprechstimme to inform all suburbia that Bali Ha'i was calling or that the surrounding community was as high as an elephant's eye.
In The Wordsmiths, Stephen Citron straight ,away makes the point that the lyric librettist writes two thirds of a musical and yet is regarded as the lesser talent and gets the blame if the show fails. He tells another Jerome Kern story, and in this the composer's wife is complimented at a dinner party on the success of "Ol' Man River". The wife of Oscar Hammerstein 2nd was present, and she cut in with "Jerry Kern didn't write Ol' Man River. My husband did. What Kern wrote was dum dum deedum!"
Mr Citron sets out to redress this injustice with a double biography, of Hammerstein and Alan Jay Lerner. The pairing seems arbitrary; the two men never worked together as lyricists both, they would hardly have done so - and one wonders if perhaps the reason is that either man, on his own, would have made less than a full sized book. One comes away thinking that two lives' are either one too many or not nearly enough.
Hammerstein and Lerner were born 23 years apart. What they had in common is that they are Jewish, and, in the almost mandatory tradition of "making good", their paternal grandfathers had come as poor immigrants from Europe - Germany and the Ukraine, respectively. Oscar Hammerstein, (the 1st) built opera houses, and Charles Lerner's son, Samuel, founded The Lerner Shops, retailing women's shirtwaists, or blouses, as they became known.
The young Oscar's career was more wide ranging than the young Lerners. It probably helped that he made do with only two wives, whereas his colleagues seemed to change them with every new musical, chalking up an impressive and time consuming total of eight. As a songwriter, Hammerstein could turn his hand to all styles; his early collaborators included Vincent Youmans, Herbert Stothart, George Gershwin, Sigmund Romberg and, most illustriously, Jerome Kern. Show Boat was the great watershed of his career; it had spectacle, drama (it was the first "musical play"), a through the years love story, and a splash of social awareness - Julie La Verne is black passing for white. Years later, in South Pacific, he was still writing "You've got to be taught to be afraid/Of people whose eyes are oddly made/And people whose skin is a different shade".
If, artistically, there was a home port, he found it with Richard Rodgers. Rodgers had been the partner of Lorenz Hart, a brilliant lyricist, who was five feet tall, homosexual, manic depressive and habitually drunk - which if any, of these conditions begat is impossible to say. Rogers wanted to turn Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical, but after 25 stage shows in as many years he could no longer cope with Hart's drinking. They split up, and the partnership with Hammerstein began. Green Grow the Lilacs, became Oklahoma!
The usual practice in song writing is for the music to be written first and the lyrics afterwards. Rodgers and Hammerstein reversed this. For weeks, Hammerstein would painfully hammer out the lyric of a particular song, and his sense of rhythm was so flawless that often Rodgers would simply fit a tune to it in a matter of minutes. Mr Citron quotes many lyrics, and he perhaps does his subject a disservice; take away the music and the context, and unless; you happen to be Stephen Sondheim - the words on their own seem trite and banal.
It might be argued that the R and H musicals are banal. They are wholesome and corn fed. Anna Leonowens in The King and I may be an Englishwoman, but her emotions are American Midwest, she is teaching not democracy but folksiness to the barbarian monarch. When the new king, Chululongkorn, issues a decree against crawling and crouching, it never occurs to Hammerstein that bowing and curtseying were still an integral part of Anna's English world.
Similarly, in South Pacific there is much attitudising about racism, but by killing off Lieutenant. Cable, the authors avoided facing up his relationship with the native girl, Liat. One should not, however, expect too much from the market place; and Rodgers and Hammerstein had, after all, taken the musical a step further on away from such pleasant dinosaurs as Sunny, Rose Marie and The Student Prince. One can forgive Oscar Hammerstein 2nd that the last lyric he wrote was Edelweiss for The Sound of Music. He was an amiable man, who combined the acquisitive flair, of Rockefeller with a tremendous musical talent, in Carousel, for example, there is not a lyric or a tune that belongs out of sight of the sea.
It has been said that, without the music of Frederick Loewe known as Fritz Alan Jay Lerner was virtually non existent. He may have been New York Jewish, but his style had the hard, cynical edge of a European. When he asked Maurice Chevalier why, aged 72, he was still performing, the reply was: "I'm too old for women, too old for that extra glass of wine, too old for sports. All I have left is the audience. Lerner was inspired to write "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Any More", turning a piece of fatalism, into a wry and kitty celebration.
He and Loewe, a worldy wise, hedonistic Viennese, did not get on. Not only did Lerner's marriages keep getting in the way, but he was a schemer and an habitual liar. And he rarely took good advice. His most disastrous marital pairing was with Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo, who was the youngest avocat ever to be called to the French bar; after Lerner had introduced her to Loewe, Fritz's advice was "Alan, my boy, never fuck lawyers."
Lerner and Loewe wrote Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot and this reviewer's favourite score for the film, Gigi. It is a tragedy that the last named failed as a stage play because it was snobbishly perceived as a "rehash" of a mere film. There was even less love lost between Lerner and Loewe than Gilbert and Sullivan, but what they achieved was a consummate and perhaps final reflowering of the operetta.
Mr Citron's book is peppered with small lemons. An illustration from Show Boat identifies Billy House as Alan Campbell. Walter Huston's name is misspelt as "Houston" in the text and, consistently, in the index. "Shoo in" is spelt as "show in" and one cringes at the cack handedness, of "the size of the theatre made a lot of the intimacy lost" and - "With his usual of paranoia".
Against this, Mr Citron is no mean analyst of the words that go with music. The devil, so the saying goes has the best tunes, one would not quite so describe Alan Jay Lerner vis a vis Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, but it is arguable that he had the best lyrics.