Thanks for your thoughts on Rodgers, on "Lover", and on Lee. My impression is that Rodgers took the lyrics of songs a little more seriously than many composers of song music - more seriously than did Romberg or Kern for example. After all, not only did he have sustained collaborations with two of the best lyricists (Hart, Hammerstein) but he wrote good lyrics himself: "I have confidence in me", "Something Good", "The Sweetest Sounds".
Thanks for introducing a new word into my vocabulary which I shall now attempt to slip in to every conversation I have whether appropriate or not ! Is "To be, or not to be ?" an epanalepsis ? (Thank heaven for copy and paste).
To be serious...I guess Rodgers wasn't too bothered about another fellow's contribution to his songs as long as his own part in it wasn't being mucked about with. I suppose if he conceived of the piece as a waltz it must have been disconcerting for him to hear it treated in quite another style; (another example springs to my mind ..Eydie Gorme's version of "I'll take Romance" originally written as a waltz (I can't remember the composer offhand) but treated as a finger-clicking up-tempo number with a duple beat to the rhythm).
In fact - or, rather, in my opinion - minor changes to lyrics aren't nearly as damaging to the original concept of a song as are major changes to the character of the music. I've mentioned elsewhere that a lyric such as, "She sits alone most every night, He doesn't phone or even write. She feels neglected and he's suspected of making whoopee" soon got changed to the anoydyne "He's washing dishes and baby clothes. He's so ambitious he even sows." But the music wasn't changed in any significant way. And of course there has been the adaptation of the libretti of Showboat, Porgy and Bess and any number of Stephen Foster's songs to remove lyrics now considered offensive. But in these cases, in any serious performances, the music usually remains as the composer wrote it although, even here, many of the more popular numbers often serve as the basis for treatment in the "Jazz" manner.
I think the analysis of the lyric of "Lover" and Peggy Lee's changes might better be understood if the first part of it paints the lover as "A devil" who seduces her against her will (rather like Bess's complaint in "I love you Porgy" that she's powerless to resist Crown when he takes hold of her "with his hot hand") and the second part of it as a plea for the lover to be more tender, less robust in his approaches and share the more romantic notion that she has of love; in the original the plea for tenderness seems to be so that she won't try to put up any resistance and can just give in to him because she's feeling more easy about things...it's almost as if she's offering a reward for doing things the way she wants!
Of course, all this may be utter nonsense and Peggy changed the last line because the pronoun "I" had already appeared a number of times in the lyric and the word "Please" made a more euphonious ending to the song.
Whatever the reason (or the version) it's a great song and Peggy Lee was a great singer.
An intriguing aspect of Rodgers complaint about Peggy Lee’s 1952 recording of “Lover” is that he does not mention her changes to the lyric. Here is the part of the original lyric relevant to her recording:
Lover, when I’m near you,
And I hear you speak my name,
Softly, in my ear you breathe a flame.
Lover, it’s immoral,
But why quarrel with our bliss
When two lips of coral want to kiss.
I say the devil is in you,
And to resist you I try.
But if you didn’t continue I would die.
Lover, please be tender,
When you’re tender fears depart,
Lover, I surrender to my heart.
Lee changes the last line to “Lover, please surrender to my heart”. This makes the lyric a little less coherent. For it pictures the speaker of the lyric as (for want of a better word) the seducer and the addressee as the seduced – a picture at odds with the earlier lines: “I say the devil is in you, / And to resist you try. / But if you didn’t continue I would die”. But the change enables Lee to end her performance with a glorious phrase, dripping with sensuality, in which the imperative verb “Surrender!” is twice repeated, then followed by the word “Lover!” I would certainly sacrifice coherence for an ending like this one!
Incidentally, Lee’s ending her performance with the word “Lover” turns the lyric into an epanalepsis. In the case of “Lover Come Back To Me”, Al Bowlly and Mel Torme both change the lyric in such a way that the song becomes an epanalepsis. In my essay “Tin Pan Alley Epanalepsis” – published by MusicWeb International in March – I had considered describing ways that singers have turned non-epanaleptic lyrics into epanaleptic lyrics. But the essay was already lengthy.
Very interesting link. I read of the trait that Rodgers had of demanding fidelity to his scores in a biography which I still have but is currently packed away so I can't remember the title, the author or the exact details it contains. The gist of the matter in question, however, is that during the rehearsals of a new Rodgers show the conductor had decided to swap the harmonies of two bars in one of the songs (I-V instead of V-I for example); Rodgers who was in attendance ran down the aisle of the theatre demanding that the conductor stick to his score as he wrote it. It seems that Rodgers was usually unwavering in his demands for respecting his intentions.
In the thread on "The Man I Love" it was discussed how the manner of interpretation of a "Standard" song often changed , in time, from the way the original author(s) had conceived it. I suppose, in many ways, the practice goes right back to Elizabethan times and the variations on popular tunes by the composers of that era. I wonder if Gretry would have dashed onto a stage where Beethoven was playing his set of variations on one of his popular opera tunes demanding that he didn't distort his ideas !
An interesting account of Richard Rodgers’ attitudes on this matter can be found here:
https://peggyleediscography.com/p/LeeResearchLover.php
You will need to scroll down to Section X.
"The sky is blue,
The night is cold,
The moon is new,
But love is old,
And while this heart of mine is singing:
“Lover, come back to me!”
I can't see how this version of the lyric fits Romberg's melody. If the penultimate line had read "And all the while this heart of mine is singing:" It would seem to make more musical and grammatical sense.
I don't know what Hammerstein would have thought of this re-writing of his lyrics but one of his later collaborators, Richard Rodgers, wouldn't tolerate unauthorised changes to his scores.
As an aside , George Gershwin apparently said that a Sigmund Romberg premiere was the only time you went into the theatre whistling the tunes you were about to hear. Meow !
Referring to the performance of Romberg’s “Lover Come Back To Me” – sung by Amel Brahim-Djelloul - on the CD Atlantic Crossings , Mike Parr draws attention to how midway through the song a “jazz improvisation” is inserted. The recording is untraditional in other ways. After singing approximately two thirds of the lyric, the singer appears to repeat the song from the beginning. It is quite common for singers of the American Songbook to repeat a song’s lyric from the beginning, but they do this only after singing the whole lyric. Also, if a singer has already sung the verse (which is the case here), then if they repeat the song from “the beginning”, they will typically repeat it from the beginning of the refrain. But here the repetition is from the beginning of the verse, a kind of repetition I don’t think I’ve encountered before. And when, in the repetition, Brahim-Djelloul moves from the verse to the refrain, she sings not the beginning of the refrain but a version of the final stanza of the refrain – the part of the song that she has so far left out.
In Oscar Hammerstein II’s original, the verse to refrain transition looks like this:
You went away, I let you,
We broke the ties that bind;
I wanted to forget you
And leave the past behind.
Still, the magic of the night I met you
Seems to stay forever in my mind.
The sky was blue,
And high above
The moon was new,
And so was love.
This eager heart of mine was singing:
“Lover, where can you be?”
This is what Amel Brahim-Djelloul sings at first. But in repeating the beginning of the song she sings:
You went away, I let you,
We broke the ties that bind;
I wanted to forget you
And leave the past behind.
Still, the magic of the night I met you
Seems to stay forever in my mind.
The sky is blue,
The night is cold,
The moon is new,
But love is old,
And while this heart of mine is singing:
“Lover, come back to me!”
I call this a version of Stanza 4 because Hammerstein’s original Stanza 4 ends differently - in a way that is grammatical:
And while I’m waiting here
This heart of mine is singing:
“Lover, come back to me!”
I think it is possible that a lot of thought went into this recording's surprising departures from traditional practice – certainly the performance sounds carefully thought through. Presumably the artists were seeking a way of disrupting the smooth linearity of the original, one that accords with the musical disruption of the jazz intervention. Even so I am inclined to think that in this case the loss of lyrical coherence – no matter how carefully the departure from the original may have been thought out – is unfortunate.
Message Thread
« Back to index | View thread »
Thank you for taking part in the MusicWeb International Forum.
Len Mullenger - Founder of MusicWeb