Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...
If you asked them, they could write some commentary...
And so, in the original album and the recent CD issue of 1956’s Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Song Book, some incisive quotes from Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and music critic William Simon were garnered from other sources to make up the liner notes. Up close and personal contributors like these can’t help but offer up first-hand and intimate perspectives on subjects such as the brilliant lyricist Lorenz Hart and how in later years “he seemed almost to substitute warmth for wit,” the work habits of Rodgers as “a planner and a builder,” and Ella Fitzgerald — though never actually having been instructed in vocal technique — as “a musician with ear, instinct and training” comparable to Heifetz.
The expertise Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Simon possessed is unsurpassed, complex, and hard won. Remarking upon the 24-year partnership with Hart, possibly the oldest in the history of the theater at the time, Richard Rodgers paints himself as the disciplinarian who was continuously “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” by his partner, but knows it was worth the alliterative ailment and affliction to coral the wildly spirited Hart, who hated work but loved it when it was done — that is, if he could be found, locked up in his room with hopes of suitably fired-up inspiration. At which point:
- His pencil would fly over the paper and soon the most difficult part of all would begin: the material had to be edited and he loathed changing any word once it was written down. When the immovable object of his unwillingness to change came up against the irresistible force of my drive for perfection, the noise could be heard all over the city. Our fights over words were furious, blasphemous, and frequent, but even in their hottest moments we both knew we were arguing academically and not personally. I think I am quite safe in saying that Larry and I never had a personal argument with each other.
Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodger’s new collaborator after the decline and 1943 death of the alcoholic Hart, understood how important words were to the “emotional eloquence” music attains and, by extension, what it evokes as — he might have paraphrased — it swells “With a Song in My Heart.” “We are made,” he does go on to say, “sad or happy, romantic, thoughtful, disturbed or peaceful by someone else’s singing heart.” Moreover, Hammerstein understands what his role is as the lyricist in the composition of music for plays which need to depict story and character: Rodgers “composes in order to make words fly higher or cut deeper than they would without the aid of his music.”
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