Lerner and Loewe

Lerner and Loewe, songwriting team. Lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner (1918–86) was born into a wealthy New York family and educated at selective private schools and at Harvard, where he collaborated on two Hasty Pudding musicals. He worked as a radio script writer before he teamed up with the German‐born composer Frederick Loewe (1901–88), the son of a popular leading man in operetta. Loewe studied with such notable figures as Ferruccio Busoni and Eugène d'Albert before coming to America in 1924. For a decade he could not make a living with his music, so took numerous odd, unrelated jobs. Some of his songs were interpolated into Petticoat Fever and The Illustrators' Show, then his full score was heard in the short‐lived Great Lady (1938). The new team of Lerner and Loewe scored the unsuccessful Broadway musicals What's Up (1943) and The Day Before Spring (1945) before finding success with the Scottish‐set musical Brigadoon (1947). The gold‐rush musical Paint Your Wagon (1951) enjoyed a modest run, but their masterpiece, My Fair Lady (1956), broke all records and remains a triumph of the Broadway stage. The final Lerner and Loewe collaboration was Camelot (1960), though the team did supply a few new songs for the 1973 Broadway version of their hit film musical Gigi. Lerner wrote the innovative but failed musical Love Life (1948) with music by Kurt Weill, then years later, after Loewe's retirement, he wrote two musicals with Burton Lane, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965) and Carmelina (1979). Other Lerner credits without Loewe include Coco (1969), 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976), and Dance a Little Closer (1983). While Lerner's librettos offered excellent dialogue, they sometimes betrayed an inability at proper construction and a lack of theatrical tension. On the other hand, as a writer of elegantly literate and witty lyrics, Lerner had no peer among his contemporaries. Loewe was a traditionalist whose music followed long‐established patterns, but it was marked by his uncommon gift for fresh melody and his ability to capture the essence of a far‐off time or place. Autobiography (Lerner): The Street Where I Live, 1978; biographies: Inventing Champagne: The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, Gene Lees, 1990; Alan Jay Lerner, Edward Jablonski, 1996.