My Funny Valentine
The only reference the author makes to one of his best known and most performed and recorded melodies is as follows: So you turn to Will Friedwald's offering, Stardust Memories: And, amidst all the fine insights into the merits of Miles Davis' '58 reading with John Coltrane versus his '64 performance with Herbie Hancock, it's easy to overlook Mr Friedwald's account of the actual creation of the music and lyric: At some point during the writing of the Broadway version, Rodgers and Hart came up with the song 'My Funny Valentine'.
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That's all there is. First they sat down. Then they wrote a song. And we'll never know the process by which Lorenz Hart decided he could use a six-syllable word in a romantic ballad and make it sound utterly natural: Only vampires are unphotographable. But, if we don't know a lot about how the song was born, we do know something about the show.
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And they started musing on what kids might do if they suddenly needed to come up with some money, and it occurred to them that one thing they might attempt is to put on their own show. This is it, folks: Larry Hart liked the idea of doing a musical full of fresh talent, and Dick Rodgers, already well advanced on his evolution into businessman-composer, thought there might be some commercial advantage in mounting a production not dependent on any star names.
So they signed a company of young unknowns, including Alfred Drake and Dan Dailey, and the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers. The oldest member of the cast was Ray Heatherton, at 25, and the youngest was Harold Nicholas, then In the midst of a plot about youngsters putting on a show in order to avoid being sent to a work farm, and attendant sub-plots about French aviators on transatlantic flights, and a dream ballet about the kids going to Hollywood and meeting their favorite stars, in the midst of all that, Miss Green sang to Ray Middleton: Behold the way our fine-feathered friend His virtue doth parade Thou knowest not, my dim-witted friend The picture thou hast made Thy vacant brow and thy tousled hair Conceal thy good intent Thou noble, upright, truthful, sincere And slightly dopey gent You're….
That's the verse, and it's lovely. Alec Wilder, noting that the published sheet music is printed without any piano accompaniment, called it "an air for a shepherd's pipe", its pastoral purity enhanced by all the archaisms - the "thous" and "thys" and "doths" and "hasts" - which Larry Hart neatly brings down to earth in that "slightly dopey" final line. In the context of the show, it's wonderful. But I never quite understood why almost every female vocalist from Ella Fitzgerald to Linda Ronstadt to Cristina Aguilera feels obliged to sing it on pop albums far removed from the plot of Babes In Arms.
And then I realized, of course, that it's their way of reminding us that, notwithstanding the phenomenal popularity of the Sinatra recording, it's not a guy's song. Did the first-night crowd at the Shubert know that they were getting the first rendition of what would become one of the towering standard songs?
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You couldn't blame them if they'd missed it. They were all brand new, none ever heard before. You can't fault the audience if some of the take-home tunes got lost in the sheer avalanche. Yet you can understand why "My Funny Valentine" might not have landed with quite the oomph of the others. For one thing, it doesn't sound like a song for a year old. It's rueful and bittersweet and a lot of other adjectives we don't associate with first love.
Rodgers usually wrote the tune first and then Hart set the words to it in Rodgers' later partnership with Oscar Hammerstein, it was the other way around. But it seems possible there was a bit more give-and-take on this occasion: The tune is so responsive to the words, written in the minor key to match the wistfulness of the lyric but then ending up in the major just as the text becomes bold and declarative.
The music tells us that, notwithstanding the playful mockery of the words, this love is for real. We'll never know how Richard Rodgers hit upon climbing an octave higher for the dramatic climax of the lyric yet avoided the usual big-note bombast and instead captured all the ache and yearning of the words: A love song is a very fragile thing, and the false tinkle of the wrong word on the wrong note can tip the thing into absurdity.
Perhaps that fine line is something you can only understand instinctively. Larry Hart certainly did. I mentioned earlier the skilful deployment of that six-syllable word: But that's more than just songwriting professionalism. To promote the show, the writers gave the usual round of interviews, and a lady from Popular Songs magazine inquired after Hart's own love life.
In , Rodgers and Hart were at the top of their game. Hart was one of the most successful men on Broadway, so how come nobody would want him? Yet nobody did, or so Larry was convinced.
"My Funny Valentine"
He was a misproportioned four-foot-ten, and sensitive to the fact that Rodgers was the normal guy - the one with a wife and kids and the family life he'd never know. The evidence for Hart's sexuality is inconclusive, and any man of 4' 10" winds up making do, regardless of inclination. Even then, he doesn't seem to have found that much relief.
He lived with his mother and various passing aunts, and it was left to his friend, the infamous Doc Bender, to procure for Hart what brief companionship he enjoyed. According to one alleged lover, he was deeply closeted, literally: Mabel Mercer famously called him the saddest man she ever knew. You can hear it in the songs: But Hart, who never in his life had a girlfriend or boyfriend, could also skewer precisely the assumptions of intimacy.
You have what I lack myself Now I even have to scratch my back myself. I thought, yeah, I've always had this little place on my back that I can't quite reach, and I thought about the times I've asked a lover to scratch it for me. Brilliant, but conjured strictly from Hart's imagination: By , he'd written a hundred love songs for everyone else, and "Funny Valentine" was one for himself, the one he'd like to have had someone sing to him: Is your figure less than Greek?
My Funny Valentine: Sinatra Song of the Century #9 :: SteynOnline
Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak Are you smart? But don't change a hair for me To listen to the score of Babes In Arms is to hear Rodgers and Hart at their very best, yet the show marked the gradual acceleration of the team's diverging paths: Rodgers, disciplined and ambitious, was now the dominant partner and en route to the heights he would achieve as composer-publisher-producer with Oscar Hammerstein; Hart, mercurial and indifferent, was on the beginning of a slippery slide into the abyss.
He would have made a funny valentine for all kinds of women - like Vivienne Segal, the actress he adored - but none would have him. Barbara Hall created by , Matt Ward. Wait, Is Mary Poppins a Witch? TV Shows i currently Watch. Share this Rating Title: My Funny Valentine 01 Apr 7.
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