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(JTA) – The second when Sheldon Harnick realized that his new musical may be one thing particular got here when he sang the lyrics he had simply composed for a brand new track: “Dawn, Sundown.”
He was sitting within the basement studio of his good friend and collaborator, the composer Jerry Bock, in New Rochelle, New York. It was 1961, they usually had been within the throes of writing “Fiddler on the Roof.” Bock had initially meant for the melody for use for one of many flirtations between Tevye’s three older daughters and their male pursuits, in keeping with “Marvel of Wonders,” a ebook about “Fiddler” by Alisa Solomon.
Harnick went a special path — writing lyrics concerning the agony of unleashing a baby into maturity that might ultimately be sung within the musical’s pivotal wedding ceremony scene. When he was completed singing, Bock’s spouse Patty was weeping.
“We hoped optimistically that it would run a yr,” Harnick mentioned in 1981 on “The Songwriters,” a PBS showcase collection. “We had been completely unprepared for the affect the present would have actually world wide.”
Harnick — whose paeans to Jewish custom have develop into internationally appreciated as a mirrored image of cultural loss — died Friday at his house in Manhattan. He was 99, and was the final surviving creator of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Harnick was born in Chicago in 1924, and was in his teenagers when he first encountered the tales of Sholem Aleichem, which later shaped the premise for the musical. However on the time, he “wrote them off,” Solomon quotes him as saying.
Twenty or so years later, a good friend gave him Sholem Aleichem’s novel, “Wandering Stars,” a few decades-long present enterprise romance, and Harnick was enchanted. As an grownup, Harnick discovered that Sholom Aleichem’s writing was “splendidly human and transferring and humorous,” Solomon quotes him as saying. He had began working with Bock within the late Nineteen Fifties, and informed him and one other accomplice — Joe Stein, who wrote books for musicals — that it could possibly be good materials to adapt for the stage.
Stein mentioned “Wandering Stars” was too huge and sophisticated to adapt. However what about Sholom Aleichem’s quick tales, which Stein’s father would learn to him as a baby, in Yiddish? The trio searched Manhattan for an extant English copy of the tales, and located a second-hand copy at a bookshop on Park Avenue South.
Years later, Harnick informed Solomon that what appealed to them about Sholom Aleichem’s quick tales was the common eager for a less complicated previous, rooted in a single’s traditions. “Over and above the great thing about the tales themselves, there was one more reason why we had been all drawn to this materials, which might maybe be greatest illustrated by a title which Mr. Stein steered: ‘The place Poppa Got here From,’” he mentioned.
That they had the primary formal assembly in 1961 to plan the musical, and it opened three years later starring Yiddish theater veteran Zero Mostel. “Fiddler” ran for greater than 3,200 performances, which stood as a Broadway document for a decade, and received a number of awards. It has had numerous revivals in numerous languages, together with Yiddish, and made stars of individuals as numerous as Bea Arthur, who performed Yente the matchmaker; Bette Midler, as Tzeitel, the eldest daughter; and Topol, the Israeli actor whose earthy efficiency as Tevye within the 1971 movie basic obscured Mostel’s extra Yiddishist take.
In 1964, simply weeks after “Fiddler” opened — and never but conscious of its large affect — Harnick and Bock gave a televised grasp class on what the musical’s composition concerned. They mentioned they began writing a track a few household after which realized it was extra a few group. A track concerning the hurried preparations for Shabbat — wherein the daughters reassure their mom, Golde, that they are going to be prepared in time for the day of relaxation — as a substitute turned an iconic one about preserving custom, which opens the present. They consulted books on Jewish custom to write down it.
“What we’d do is do a gap quantity that attempted to compress plenty of conventional issues into the opening,” Harncik mentioned. “And as [director] Jerome Robbins mentioned, the present would play towards this opening quantity as if we had a tapestry. From the minute you heard the opening, you’d know what this present is about: custom.”
Bock interjected to elucidate that it wasn’t as simple as Harnick was making out.
“What Sheldon did was condense one thousand pages… right into a seven minute track,” Bock mentioned. “So in impact, the opening of our present now, I feel, helped us get on the street to different individuals exterior of the Jewish individuals having the ability to recognize what our story was.”
In a 2011 documentary, “The Legacy Mission,” Bock described the elation he felt when Harnick efficiently set phrases to one in every of his melodies. He referred to as them “moments of reality.”
“And so they come when a lyric is completed and Sheldon sings the track for the primary time,” he mentioned within the documentary, launched after his dying in 2010. “There’s nothing like that second.”
Harnick and Bock had already written a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical infused with Jewish themes about Fiorello LaGuardia, New York’s first Jewish mayor, referred to as “Fiorello!” They might go on to different successes collectively and aside, and stopped working collectively years after “Fiddler” as a consequence of a dispute over a musical concerning the Rothschild household, in keeping with an obituary in The New York Occasions. .
However the lyricist by no means received over “Fiddler’s” success and world attraction. In a 2019 documentary on the present, he recalled attending an early Tokyo efficiency and being requested: “Do they perceive it in America? It’s so Japanese.”
Not lengthy after the present debuted, Harnick recalled in 1981, he realized it had an emotional depth he had not anticipated. He was on the theater watching Mostel and Maria Karnolova as Golde carry out “Do You Love Me?”, a track about how even lengthy married {couples} don’t really know each other, and he burst into tears.
“I left the theater so I wouldn’t disturb anybody and I requested myself why I used to be crying,” he mentioned. “Then I noticed with out figuring out it I had put into the lyric deep emotions about my very own mother and father — about what they’d and had not been to one another. Generally it appears we solely suppose we all know why we write like we write.”
Harnick was married for a time to the Jewish director and comedian author Elaine Could, who survives him, and is survived by his second spouse, Margery Grey, their son and daughter, and 4 grandchildren.
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