Frederick Loewe

Composer

• Born: June 10, 1901
• Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
• Died: February 14, 1988
• Place of death: Palm Springs, California

German musical-theater composer

Loewe composed musicals that were closer to the traditions of the European operetta than to the jazz and pop styles popular in the United States.

The Life

Frederick Loewe (loh) was the son of a noted Austrian singer, Edmund Loewe, and his wife, Rosa, a Viennese actress. Loewe was born on June 10, 1901, in Berlin, where his father was performing. Loewe spent his early years in Germany, but the Austrian influences of his parents made him feel more Austrian than German.

Because his parents traveled widely to meet their professional commitments, Loewe lived from age five to age thirteen in a Prussian military academy that he hated. By age eight, when he began to show an affinity for music, playing by ear most of the musical numbers his father was rehearsing, he was enrolled in Stern’s Conservatory, where he was the youngest student. Although he was constantly teased by older students, he learned to defend himself, and he distinguished himself as a musician.

A gifted pianist, Loewe was a solo player with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra at age thirteen. By the time he was fifteen, he had written a song about the girl with the best legs in Berlin, “Katrina,” which was popular in Germany. The sheet music sold a remarkable two million copies, although his substantial royalties were quickly consumed by Germany’s runaway inflation.

Despite his remarkable achievements, Loewe felt like an unwanted child. He was forced to spend the Christmas holidays alone in his dormitory, an experience that made him resentful. During World War I, from 1914 until 1918, food was scarce, and in an interview Loewe said that he was hungry for those four years.

Loewe came to New York with his father, who was performing, in 1925, and he decided to stay. He supported himself as a prizefighter and a riding instructor until his musical skills enabled him to earn a living playing the piano and the organ. He played musical accompaniments for silent films, often composing on the spot pieces that he felt were appropriate to what was happening on the screen.

At one point, deciding he should see the West, he went to Montana, where he earned his living by delivering mail on horseback to remote places. By 1931 he was back in New York, married to Ernestine Zwerlein, and enjoying improved prospects. He was writing songs for Broadway musicals, including “Love Tiptoed Through My Heart,” which was featured in Petticoat Fever (1935).

At about that time, Loewe began to collaborate with lyricist Earle T. Crooker. They placed their song “A Waltz Was Born in Vienna” in The Illustrators’ Show (1936). In 1937 their Salute to Spring opened in St. Louis, but it failed to reach Broadway. Their next collaboration, Great Lady, opened on Broadway in 1938, but it was not well received, closing shortly after it opened. With the onset of World War II, Crooker enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and Loewe met Alan Jay Lerner.

Loewe, invited to rework some of the songs from Salute to Spring, asked Lerner, sixteen years his junior, to write new lyrics. The result was a musical, Life of the Party, that closed before it could reach Broadway, but the collaboration continued with another musical, What’s Up?, that made it to Broadway, running for sixty-three performances. In 1945 Lerner and Loewe brought The Day Before Spring to Broadway, where it played for 167 performances. Although the musical was not a notable success, and the production lost money, its run encouraged the collaborators.

From this humble beginning, the Lerner-Loewe collaboration was born, and it lasted for some three decades, during which the pair collaborated on such highly successful musicals as Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot. My Fair Lady, which ran for 2,717 performances, had the longest run of any Broadway show in its day.

Loewe suffered a heart attack in 1959, so after working on Camelot he decided to retire. He lived in retirement for a decade before being lured back into collaborating on a musical, Gigi, the film version of which received nine Academy Awards and a Tony Award for best score, but it was not a financial success.

The final Lerner-Loewe collaboration, The Little Prince, also failed financially, although it was an artistic success. Loewe retired again, living for nearly fifteen more years and dying on February 14, 1988, after suffering a heart attack at his home in Palm Springs, California.

The Music

Brigadoon.Lerner and Loewe’s early success came in 1947 with Brigadoon, a musical with such memorable songs as “The Heather on the Hill,” “Come to Me, Bend to Me,” and “Almost Like Being in Love.” Brigadoon is a fantasy set in a Scottish hamlet that comes to life for just one day every century. The dreamlike quality of its music delighted audiences. The play had a run of 581 well-attended performances. In 1954, it was made into a film starring Gene Kelly.

Paint Your Wagon.Following Brigadoon, Lerner collaborated with other musicians, but in 1951, he and Loewe resumed their collaboration with Paint Your Wagon, a musical about the California Gold Rush. It lasted for a disappointing 289 performances on Broadway, but one song from it, “They Call the Wind Maria,” was a hit, bringing them a great deal of money in royalties. In 1969 the musical was made into a film starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. The film version, which cost twenty million dollars to produce, underwent considerable revision by Lerner, and it included five new songs written by André Previn. Despite brisk sales of the film’s sound track, the film was not a financial success.

My Fair Lady.Finally, in 1956, Lerner and Loewe enjoyed their greatest success with My Fair Lady, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1916), the story of a linguist convinced that he can, in a short time, teach a poor flower girl to replace her Cockney accent with cultivated English and become a refined lady. The basic idea for the musical came to the collaborators in 1952, but they could not figure out how to adapt it, so they separated for two years before coming up with an idea for making the adaptation succeed artistically.

My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, was a rousing success. The critical appraisals of the play following its opening on March 15, 1956, were universally enthusiastic. The play won a Tony Award for best musical. It contained some of the most memorable songs of the twentieth century, including “Get Me to the Church on Time,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” “With a Little Bit of Luck,” and “On the Street Where She Lives.” Eight years after its Broadway opening, My Fair Lady was made into a popular film starring Harrison in his Broadway role and Audrey Hepburn (with her songs sung by Marni Nixon and dubbed in) playing Eliza Doolittle. The film, which ran just short of three hours, garnered eight Academy Awards, but its high production costs made it a financial failure.

Camelot.The next Lerner-Loewe collaboration, Camelot, a musical about King Arthur and the Round Table based on T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King (1958), had a strange trajectory. The initial reviews of it were scathing, but some of the cast, along with Lerner and Loewe, were scheduled to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, with the cast members singing a few numbers from the play.

The results were astounding: The morning after the Sullivan show was aired, people flocked to the box office to buy tickets, and the show became an immediate success, largely through that brilliant marketing strategy. As a musical it was technically strong, but the Sullivan show gave it the exposure required to make it a resounding popular success.

The Little Prince.The final Lerner and Loewe collaboration was on The Little Prince, a musical version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s heartwarming 1943 novel that had completely captivated Loewe. Lerner and Loewe’s score, simple and direct, captured the spirit of the original story, but the musical production, once it was out of its composers’ hands, was overdone, becoming an artistic disaster. The Little Prince, through no fault of their own, was Lerner and Loewe’s most significant failure.

Musical Legacy

Loewe wrote some of the most beguiling music ever to be heard in American theater. In a departure from most of the composers writing for theater from the late 1930’s until the 1970’s, Loewe was not greatly influenced by jazz or the music of the black community, with its strong overtone of spirituals.

Unlike many composers who came to the United States from Europe, Loewe—twenty-four when he arrived in New York—was fairly well set in his musical ways. His heritage was more closely related to the light operettas of his native Germany and Austria than they were to American music. In his musical scores, Loewe built on the traditions with which he had grown up. His work was more comparable to the operettas of Sigmund Romberg than to the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Principal Works

musical theater (music; lyrics and libretto by Alan Jay Lerner unless otherwise stated): Saint Louis, 1937; Salute to Spring, 1937 (lyrics and libretto by Earle T. Crooker); Great Lady, 1938 (lyrics and libretto by Crooker and Lowell Brentano); Life of the Party, 1942; What’s Up?, 1943 (libretto by Alan Jay Lerner and Arthur Pierson); The Day Before Spring, 1945; Brigadoon, 1947; Paint Your Wagon, 1951; My Fair Lady, 1956 (based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion); Camelot, 1960 (based on the legend of King Arthur); Gigi, 1973; The Little Prince, 1974.

Bibliography

Brantley, Ben, ed. The New York Times Book of Broadway: On the Aisle for the Unforgettable Plays of the Last Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. An interesting overview of the best twentieth century Broadway plays. Worthwhile comments on the musicals of Lerner and Loewe.

Everett, William A., and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Most relevant are chapters seven and eight, which focus on the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein but relate Lerner and Loewe to the development of the modern Broadway musical.

Garebian, Keith. The Making of “My Fair Lady.” Buffalo, N.Y.: Mosaic Press, 1998. A clear and useful analysis of how Lerner and Loewe turned Shaw’s Pygmalion into a musical that became their most celebrated collaboration.

Lees, Gene. Inventing Champagne: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. The authoritative study of the musicals of Lerner and Loewe, meticulously researched and clearly presented.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Musical Worlds of Lerner and Loewe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. An updated version of Lee’s Inventing Champagne, offering useful additional insights into the collaboration.

Lerner, Alan Jay. The Musical Theater: A Celebration. New York: McGraw Hill, 1986. A comprehensive study of musical theater in the United States that at times is not wholly accurate in the small details.

McLamore, Alyson. Musical Theater: An Appreciation. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2004. Considerable analysis of the musicals of Lerner and Loewe and of their contributions to musical theater.

Shapiro, Doris. We Danced All Night: My Life Behind the Scenes with Alan Jay Lerner. New York: William Morrow, 1990. An insider’s view of the Lerner and Loewe collaboration by the woman who was Lerner’s secretary and assistant for a decade and a half.