"Isn't It Romantic?"

Sometimes a Song

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When the Word of the Week is “romance,” Sometimes a Song can be difficult to choose. I mean, my main source of material for this column is The Great American Songbook. And from that collection it’s far easier to count how many songs don’t have to do with love than how many do. I guess that romance was popular once upon a time, so popular that everyone wanted to sing about it. And who better to compose our song of romance than the wonderful team of composers Rodgers and Hart? I’ve written about their work before, seven times, and about the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein three times. But there’s always more to say, and each song has a little story of its own.

Those of you who have followed Word & Song for awhile will recall that I mentioned how Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein utterly changed the complexion of musical theater in America by fully integrating the music and lyrics into the stage play. Before that in musical theater the libretto was typically a loose story written as a showcase for a string of songs. Working with the wistful and witty Lorenz Hart in the 1920’s, Rodgers wrote a string of hit shows that helped musical theater rise above its Vaudeville roots. After the sudden death of Hart, Richard Rodgers began working with Oscar Hammerstein, and with “Carousel” the team took the American musical to a level of art which had until then been considered the purview only of “serious” playwrights. The curtain opened and the great musicals of the mid-century took the stage (and later, the screen).

But what is the back story of today’s song? It almost certainly would not have been written except for a slight kerfuffle called The Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression in the US and Europe. All of a sudden, money was short, and investors lost interest in backing such uncertain investments as Broadway shows. Theaters closed, work was hard to find, and the Broadway talent made tracks for Hollywood, where the film business was not only recovering from but realizing big benefits from the economic disaster across the land. Audiences who could not afford to buy a ticket to see a play on Broadway could scrape together a little change for a weekly movie .. and for a much-needed escape from the care-worn world. How fortunate for Warner Brothers, to be able to hire the great Richard Rodgers to compose for his studio, as well as work-starved veteran Broadway actors, such as Edward G. Robinson and many others to act in the moving pictures. Mass media was in the fortunate position to create a demand for its own services by manufacturing a product that people could afford to buy, not just for one ticket, but indefinitely.

And so it came about that Rodgers and Hart. in need of work, signed a contract to compose music for three films with Warner Brothers in the early 1930’s. The first of these, “The Hot Heiress,” was such a bomb that Jack Warner bought out the team’s contract to get rid of them. His loss was Paramount’s gain, and Rogers and Hart made their second Hollywood film at that studio, a comic vehicle called “Love Me Tonight,” a reworking of a French play ,“The Tailor at the Chateau.” This pre-Code film is an early screwball comedy, and rather tame by modern standards. But it was innovative in a number of ways such as you will see in the clip I have attached below, which shows a “new” cinema technique of letting the camera lead the story along — or in this case letting it lead the song itself along — with no break between scenes. The film has fallen largely into obscurity now, but it gave us three entries for the American Songbook: “Lover,” “Mimi,” and our song for this week.

Some music scholars consider “Isn’t it Romantic” to be “a perfect song.” But fortunately you don’t have to be a music scholar to recognize a great composition for being just that. Larry Hart’s lyrics, written specifically for the goofy movie, did not work for a listening audience apart from the visual context of the film, so he revised the words to make the song suitable for singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, who had a big hit with it as a slow and dreamy love song. It says everything about Richard Rodgers’ musical composition, however, that the tune was independently recorded as an instrumental again and again and again. I am including below the segment from the film with the song sung by Maurice Chevalier (first), by many others (next), and finished operatically by Jeanette MacDonald. But I am also including an instrumental version to allow you to focus on the song apart from the comic lyric and setting to see if you can say of it, “That is a perfect song.” Fortunately for them and for us all, Rodgers and Hart made their way back to Broadway by the middle of the 1930’s to resume their work for the stage and then returned to Hollywood to turn their own hit plays into hit movies for us all.

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“Isn’t it Romantic,” by Sam Donahue and His Orchestra, featuring Les Brown on the Clarinet.