From THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK: "Rodgers created intricate, sophisticated melodies, while Hart found opportunities for rhyming all along the line."
|
 |
   
Hart, Lorenz Milton (May 2, 1895 - Nov. 22, 1943), musical comedy lyricist, was born in New York City, 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 to enable Lorenz, after preparation at two private schools, to spend two years (1914-16) at the School of Journalism of Columbia University.
|
Hart was perhaps even more than Cole Porter the expressive bard of the urban generation.
|
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 1919-41. Much of his work -- slick, breezy, and yet mordant, even morbid -- reflects their tart disillusion. A bachelor living with his widowed mother, whom he once described as a "sweet, menacing old lady," he 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. But with all his moody unreliability he 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" ("Garrick Gaieties"), 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 [Supp. 3], Alexander Woollcott [Supp. 3] -- enhanced the popularity of Rodgers and Hart's Peggy Ann (1926), a surrealistic Freudian study of an ambitious young career girl.
|
