Although they would not come to know each other until they had achieved professional success, “Yip” Harburg and Lorenz Hart were born within a year of each other to Jewish immigrant families in New York. Both attended New York City public schools and went to college in New York as well (Hart at Columbia, Harburg at CCNY). They would go on to become two of the most successful lyricists of the golden era of the American popular song, Hart collaborating exclusively with the brilliant Richard Rodgers, Harburg with Harold Arlen, Burton Lane, and others.
Despite their overlapping backgrounds, Harburg and Hart could hardly have been more different. Hart was, of tragic necessity, intensely private, and his personal life remains a closed book. As a gay man in the pre-Stonewall era, much of his life was lived in hushed shadows, and he died long before it became fashionable for ex-lovers and other confidants to rush tell-all memoirs into print. His lyrics, which are smart in the fullest sense of the word – clever, allusive, and highly polished – are at their sophisticated best when celebrating the pain of romantic love, requited and otherwise.
Harburg, on the other hand, was very much a public man, politically engaged and apparently eager to talk about himself and his work at the drop of a hat. His lyrics tend to be simpler than Hart’s, and he had a marked predilection for treating serious questions of social justice in his shows. Harburg’s liberal views led to his being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, almost ten years after Hart had died from complications of alcohol addiction.
Since few, if any, primary materials survive that would provide deeper insights into the private Hart, Gary Marmorstein largely confines himself to chronicling the where’s and when’s of his life – where he lived, what he wrote where and for whom (and how much). Perhaps wisely, Marmorstein refrains from speculating about the fraught personal relationship between the erratic Hart and the diligent Rodgers. Hart routinely referred to Rodgers as “the principal”; twenty years on, Rodgers looked back on his deceased partner as “that little cigarette.” But the love-hate relationship between the two was critical to their success as a team. The songs Rodgers produced with Hart had far more edge and depth than those he would go on to write with Oscar Hammerstein II, whose personality was much more Rodgers’s cup of tea.
Harriet Hyman Alonso’s biography of Harburg is drawn almost exclusively from a number of interviews and talks that Harburg gave throughout his life. Most of it is told in Harburg’s own words, and the resulting portrait of his professional output is somewhat jarring. Although he wrote the words for some of our greatest popular songs, much of his work – juxtaposing such serious issues as women’s rights, nuclear arms, and racism with the antics of young lovers and leprechauns – is marked by a peculiar tone that Harburg himself saw as a virtue but that clearly puzzled audiences.
Few of Harburg’s Broadway shows met with commercial success; his biggest hit, Finian’s Rainbow, is generally considered in the second rank of classic musicals, and his other shows have largely been forgotten. Harburg himself attributed this to a combination of factors – the incompetence of producers and directors; the malice and stupidity of critics; his own being ahead of his time. More objective perspectives on his oeuvre would have been welcome.
But any study of either of these lyricists must stand or fall by its treatment of their subject’s lyrics themselves. Harburg’s discussions of the craft of the lyricist, using his own songs as case studies, are invaluable. For example, he initially approached “Over the Rainbow” as a forthright statement of intention by the young Dorothy: “I’ll go / Over the rainbow .…” Only after many drafts did he hit upon the apt mode for the song as a wistful expression of disappointment at not being able to live out a fantasy: “Birds fly over the rainbow, / Why, oh why can’t I?” Marmorstein never approaches this level of analysis in dealing with Hart’s lyrics, but having them in front of our eyes to contemplate is a distinct pleasure.
Nonfiction
Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist
- Review
By
– March 12, 2013
Bill Brennan is an independent scholar and entertainer based in Las Vegas. Brennan has taught literature and the humanities at Princeton and The University of Chicago. He holds degrees from Yale, Princeton, and Northwestern.
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