Stories of Standards: “Lover”

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Jeanette MacDonald  introduced the song “Lover” (1932) by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in the 1932 film “Love Me Tonight”. She played a princess who fell in love with a tailor (Maurice Chevalier). The film also introduced “Isn’t It Romantic” and “Mimi”, Chevalier’s signature song in later years. In this film Rodgers and Hart originated a method they called “rhythm dialogue”, in which dialogue was spoken with a musical background. Rodgers later explained that while interpretive innovations were all right once a song was established, he was concerned that some excessive stylization might obscure both the melody and lyrics when a song was new and not yet established.

Richard Charles Rodgers (1902-1979) began composing when nine years old and continued until shortly before his death. He met Lorenz (Larry) Hart when 16 years old and later said “I left Hart’s house, having acquired in one afternoon a career, a partner, a best friend and a source of permanent irritation.” When on the verge of taking a job as a traveling salesman he was asked to write the score for “The Garrick Gaieties”; he did and the song “Manhattan” set him on the road to lifelong professional status. He wrote 30 musicals with Lorenz Hart, 13 with Oscar Hammerstein II and 7 more with other lyricists, won Pulitzers, Tonys, Oscars, Grammys and Emmys and wrote more than 900 published songs and forty Broadway musicals.

Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) was writing musicals for Columbia University when he met Richard Rodgers; they worked together until Hart’s untimely death from pneumonia in 1943. Often characterized as a “poet of Broadway”, Hart’s friend Gary Marmorstein said “Larry in particular was primarily a showman. If you can manage to examine his songs technically, and for the moment elude their spell, you will see that they are all meant to be acted, that they are part of a play. Larry was a playwright.”