- Person
- Lorenz Hart
- Lived
- 1895–1943
- Field
- Broadway lyricist
- From
- American
The story
When Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers began writing for Broadway in the early 1920s, most musicals were revue-like entertainments and popular songs leaned on worn-out formulas. Time magazine, in a 1938 cover story on the pair, reported that they believed what was killing musical comedy was its sameness, its tameness and its eternal rhyming of June with moon. Hart, a voracious reader who had grown up on Gilbert and Sullivan, set out to do something different.
His lyrics stood out from the clichés of Tin Pan Alley. The theatre historian Thomas Hischak wrote that Hart had a remarkable talent for polysyllabic and internal rhymes, and EBSCO's biography notes his delight in unexpected feminine, approximate and run-on rhymes, which split words across lines in a way audiences had rarely heard. Some critics at the time thought such cleverness too facile, but in songs like 'Thou Swell' he showed he could also bend language and dialect to character.
The novelist and critic Anthony Burgess singled Hart out as among the first to use polysyllabic rhyme not merely to be funny but as a source of wit and insight. Burgess also saw him as an early practitioner of a more colloquial style of lyric writing, in which a song sounds like natural speech that happens to rhyme. PBS's Broadway history adds that Hart brought into the mainstream of songwriting a conversational directness comparable to Ernest Hemingway's prose, stripping away strained poetic diction.
Critics such as Stephen Holden have also praised the vulnerability beneath Hart's wordplay, which gives his ballads a singular poignancy. Hart himself was sensitive about his appearance and often unhappy, and songs such as 'Little Girl Blue' and 'Spring Is Here' carry a melancholy that PBS links to the lonely city life of the Depression years. His friend Henry Myers stressed that Hart was above all a man of the theatre, whose lyrics were written to be acted as part of a play.
EBSCO argues that it would be hard to imagine the later successes of Comden and Green, Lerner and Loewe, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein without the precedent of lyrical literacy and excellence that Hart set in the 1920s and 1930s.
Why it matters
Hart's conversational, witty style influenced generations of lyricists, from Comden and Green to Sondheim, and helped define the sound of the American songbook.
About Lorenz Hart
Lyricist of Rodgers and Hart, whose witty, rueful words for “Blue Moon” “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp” helped make the Broadway song an art form.
More about Lorenz Hart
- One Hart show gave the world 'My Funny Valentine'Babes in Arms (1937) alone gave the world 'My Funny Valentine', 'The Lady Is a Tramp', 'Where or When' and 'Johnny One-Note'.
- Lorenz Hart helped bring Shakespeare to musical comedyRodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse (1938), based on The Comedy of Errors, was a pioneering Shakespeare adaptation for musical comedy.
- Lorenz Hart turned Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee into songRodgers and Hart's A Connecticut Yankee (1927), based on Mark Twain's novel, confirmed Hart as a leading lyricist; he revised it as his final work.
- Lorenz Hart wrote 'Isn't It Romantic?' for the moviesIn Hollywood in the early 1930s, Lorenz Hart wrote film songs including 'Isn't It Romantic?' for Maurice Chevalier, as well as 'Lover' and 'Blue Moon'.
- Hart's I'd Rather Be Right satirised a sitting presidentRodgers and Hart's 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right took the unprecedented step of satirising an American president still in office.
- Lorenz Hart's Pal Joey triumphed when revived in 1952Pal Joey (1940), the first musical with unromanticised realism, won the New York Drama Critics Award when revived in 1952.
- Lorenz Hart wrote lyrics for 28 Rodgers and Hart musicalsLyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers wrote 28 stage musicals and more than 500 songs together, including 'Blue Moon', many now classics of the American songbook.
Sources
- Lorenz Hart Wikipedia
- Lorenz Hart PBS, Broadway: The American Musical
- Lorenz Hart EBSCO Research Starters
- Rodgers and Hart Wikipedia
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