Loewe, Frederick

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Loewe, Frederick

Loewe, Frederick, German-born American composer and pianist; b. Berlin, June 10, 1901; d. Palm Springs, Calif., Feb. 14,1988. Loewe’s music, steeped in the tradition of Viennese operetta, proved surprisingly adaptable to the various settings of the stage and film musicals he wrote with lyricist/librettist Alan Jay Lerner, among them the enormously popular My Fair Lady, as well as Gigi, Camelot, and Brigadoon; the duo’s shows featured such song hits as “Almost Like Being in Love,” “On the Street Where You Live,” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Achieving success relatively late in life, Loewe also retired relatively early, but the Lerner-and-Loewe musicals ranked second only to those of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II as the most significant work for the musical theater in the 1940s and 1950s.

Loewe’s parents were Austrian. His father, Edmund Loewe, was an opera tenor; Rosa, his mother, was an actress. He showed an early interest in music and attended Stern’s Cons, in Berlin. He claimed to have studied piano with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugène d’Albert, and composition with Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek. At 13 he became the youngest piano soloist to appear with the Berlin Symphony Orch.; at 15 he wrote “Katrina,” which became a song hit in Europe.

Around 1924, Loewe moved with his parents to N.Y. He spent the rest of the 1920s and early 1930s at a variety of occupations primarily outside music. In 1931 he married Ernestine Zwerleine; they separated in 1947 and later divorced.

Loewe’s song “Love Tiptoed through My Heart” (lyrics by Irene Alexander) was used in the Broadway play Petticoat Fever in 1935. “A Waltz Was Born in Vienna” (lyrics by Earle Crooker) was in the revue The Illustrators’ Show (N.Y., Jan. 22, 1936). Loewe and Crooker wrote the songs for the musical Salute to Spring (St. Louis, July 12,1937), which was mounted by the St. Louis Municipal Opera but did not go to N.Y. Their next effort, the operetta Great Lady, did reach N.Y., though for only 20 performances, in late 1938.

In 1942, Loewe enlisted Alan Jay Lerner, whom he had met at the Lambs Club, to revise some of the lyrics to the songs from Salute to Spring for use in the musical Life of the Party.The show opened in Detroit on Oct. 8 but closed after this tryout. Lerner and Loewe’s first full score, What’s Up?, made it to Broadway the following year for 63 performances, and The Day Before Spring (1945) lasted 165 performances. But the team’s first hit came with the original romantic fantasy Brigadoon, which ran 581 performances, making it the biggest hit of the 1946–47 Broadway season. The original cast album, featuring “Almost Like Being in Love,” “Come to Me, Bend to Me,” and “The Heather on the Hill,” reached the Top Ten.

Notwithstanding this success, Lerner and Loewe broke up. They reunited for Paint Your Wagon (1951), set during the Calif. gold rush, which missed making a profit with a 289-performance run, although its cast album, featuring “They Call the Wind Maria,” was a Top Ten hit.

Lerner and Loewe were approached to create a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion in 1952 but initially were unable to find a way to adapt it and again separated. They resumed their partnership in 1954 and returned to work on it. Meanwhile, Brigadoon was released as a film in September 1954, and its soundtrack album reached the charts. The Shaw adaptation, titled My Fair Lady, finally opened in 1956, won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and became the longest-running musical in Broadway history up to that time, with 2,717 performances. The show made Julie Andrews a Broadway star, and the cast album hit #1 and stayed in the charts more than nine years, selling six million copies worldwide and becoming the best-selling cast album in history up to that time. Five songs were covered for hits: “On the Street Where You Live” reached the Top Ten for Vic Damone; Sylvia Sims took “I Could Have Danced All Night” into the Top 40; and there were chart entries of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (as “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face,” by Rosemary Clooney), “With a Little Bit of Luck” (by Percy Faith and His Orch.), and “Get Me to the Church on Time” (by Julius LaRosa).

Lerner and Loewe next turned to writing a movie musical, adapting Colette’s novel Gigi.The film was released in May 1958 and became one of the top box office hits of the year. It won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Song (“Gigi”). The soundtrack LP hit #1 and remained in the charts more than three years; it won the Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album.

Loewe suffered a massive heart attack in February 1959 but recovered and collaborated with Lerner on the 1960 musical Camelot,based on T. H. White’s novel about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, The Once and Future King.With a cast including Julie Andrews and newcomer Robert Goulet, the show was the biggest hit of the 1960–61 Broadway season, running 873 performances; its million-selling cast album hit #1 and stayed in the charts more than five years.

Loewe retired from full-time composing but collaborated with Lerner occasionally thereafter. October 1964 saw the release of a lavish two-hour-and- 50-minute film version of My Fair Lady that won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was one of the top-grossing films of the year but failed to break even because of its enormous production cost. The million-selling soundtrack album reached the Top Ten and stayed in the charts more than two years, while Andy Williams took a revival of “On the Street Where You Live” into the Top 40. Three years later, an equally sumptuous three-hour film version of Camelot was released, and like My Fair Lady it lost money despite being one of the highest grossing movie musicals of the decade. But the soundtrack album sold a million copies and stayed in the charts more than a year and a half. Paint Your Wagon finally came to the screen in October 1969, although it had been drastically altered from its stage version; the two-and-three-quarter-hour film had a newly written libretto by Lerner and five new songs cowritten by Lerner and André Previn while retaining seven of Loewe’s compositions from the original show. It also had a reported budget of $20 million, making it the most expensive movie musical yet. The result was a commercial disaster, but the soundtrack album spent more than a year in the charts and went gold.

Lerner and Loewe reunited for two projects in the 1970s. The first was a 1973 stage version of Gigi, for which they wrote five new songs. The show ran only 103 performances but won the Tony Award for Best Score. The second was a 1974 musical film adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s childrens’ story The Little Prince, which earned the songwriters Academy Award nominations for their score and the title song.

The major Lerner and Loewe musicals enjoyed frequent revivals for the rest of the century. Michael Johnson finally made “Almost Like Being in Love” a Top 40 hit in 1978. Loewe died of a heart attack in 1988 at 86.

Works

(only works for which Loewe was a primary, credited composer are listed): musicals/revues/plays (dates refer to N.Y. openings): Petticoat Fever (March 4, 1935); Great Lady (Dec. 1,1938); What’s Up? (Nov. 11,1943); The Day before Spring (Nov. 22, 1945); Brigadoon (March 13, 1947); Paint Your Wagon (Nov. 12,1951); My Fair Lady (March 15,1956); Camelot (Dec. 3,1960); Gigi (Nov. 13,1973). films:Brigadoon (1954); Gigi (1958); My Fair Lady (1964); Camelot (1967); Paint Your Wagon (1969); The Little Prince (1974).