Irving Berlin: His Music, His Life Essay

America has become a home to diverse kinds of music. It epitomizes the diversity of people and culture that live in it. One great American composer that we consider to have a gargantuan contribution to its development as what it is now is Irving Berlin. Although he was born in Russia, he managed to share his melodies and lyrics to people in an era fraught by war, cultural alienation and economic instability. The son of an impoverished Jewish cantor, he was taken to America at the age of five. His father died when he was 13, and a year later he ran away from home, rather than be a burden to his mother. He sang for pennies outside cabarets, became a chorus boy, a stooge in vaudeville, a song plugger and a singing waiter. Berlin had no formal musical training, but taught himself to play the piano, if only in one key, F . He began churning out songs, usually serving as his own lyricist, and finally caught America’s ear with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ in 1911 (Bordmann, 2001). According to New Grove Dictionary, Berlin’s first complete stage work, â€Å"Watch Your Step† (1914), purported to be the first musical written entirely in ragtime. However, his supporters would argue that that was not strictly so, but cannot dispute that Berlin played a major role in making ragtime popular, just as the real genre was fading away. The show’s hit was ‘Simple melody’. Between â€Å"Watch Your Step† and â€Å"Mr President† (1962) Berlin wrote all or most of the songs for 19 other Broadway shows. As a Jewish, Berlin maintained his ties to his own community. Berlin was very much a part of New York City’s radically multicultural milieu, which encompassed, in addition to his own group, Jews who had been in the United States for several generations; other recent immigrants to the New World from such places as Italy, Sicily, Portugal, and Turkey; Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians who had come over a generation or two ago; Americans of British heritage who had a much longer history in the United States and who had largely shaped the nation’s political, educational, and cultural life; and some blacks, who were still very much on the fringes of American society. Like David Quixando in Zangwill’s play, Berlin had personal and professional association with many people outside his own ethnic group: Chuck Connors, a friend and protector during his early days in Chinatown; his first collaborator, Mike Nicholson; Edgar Leslie, born in Stamford, Connecticut, and a graduate of the Cooper Union; the Irish-American George M. Cohan and the Dublin-born Victor Herbert, who became mentors and friends. He associated as freely as was possible at the time with such black musicians as Eubie Blake (Hamm, 1997, p.ix). Hamm (1997) cited that some of Berlin’s biographers have singled out â€Å"When I Lost You† as his first mature, fully successful ballad. They have related the content of the lyric to the fact that in early 1912 Berlin married Dorothy Goetz, the sister of his friend and collaborator E. Ray Goetz, and that the bride died five months after their wedding of typhoid or pneumonia probably contracted during the couple’s honeymoon in Havana. â€Å"When I Lost You†, published several months after her death, has a lyric lamenting the loss of a loved one. I lost the sunshine and roses, I lost the heavens of blue, I lost the beautiful rainbow, I lost the morning dew; I lost the angel who gave me Summer, the whole winter through, I lost the gladness that turned into sadness, When I lost you. It’s not true that the song is â€Å"unlike any song Berlin had previously written† in being â€Å"an exceedingly simple and stately waltz employing a bittersweet† (p. 162). In 1925, Berlin met and fell in love, for the second time, with Ellin Mackay, the daughter and heiress of Clarence H. Mackay, head of Postal Telegraph. As a devout Irish-American Catholic and a member of an elite New York society, Clarence Mackay recruited his immense power and resources in an attempt to prevent their marriage and, when all other strategy failed, he sent his daughter off to Europe for several months. During her absence, Berlin wrote several of his most poignant love ballads, including â€Å"Always† and â€Å"Remember†. When she returned to New York they were married secretly at City Hall on January 4, 1926, embarking immediately afterwards on a European honeymoon. When news of the marriage leaked out to the press, the newspapers gave much publicity to the romance which had so dramatically broken down social and religious barriers. The event even found its way into music in â€Å"When a Kid Who Came from the East Side Found a Sweet Society Rose† (lyrics by Al Dubin and music by Jimmy McHugh). Although Clarence H. Mackay disinherited his daughter and refused to communicate with her, even after the Berlins’ first child was born, he later allowed a reconciliation to take place, and he remained sympathetic to his son-in-law (Ewen & Ewen, 1962, p. 24-25). Irving and Ellin had three daughters—Mary Ellin, Linda, and Elizabeth, all of whom were raised Protestant—and a son, Irving Berlin, Jr. , who died before his first birthday, on Christmas Day in 1928. As a father, Berlin was absent too much to be a doting father. During World War II, he traveled with his show, This Is the Army. When he wasn’t on the road he worked at night, going to bed at 4 or 5 AM and sleeping until noon. There were three faiths in the house – Ellin was Catholic, Irving was Jewish and the three girls were raised Protestant, largely because Ellin was in favor of religious tolerance (People Weekly, 9 October 1989). Popular songs in the first half of the twentieth century had been touted with the domination of Jewish Americans. More important, their cultural and musical heritage colored their products, giving them a flavor quite different from that of earlier popular songs and bringing yet another ethnic strain to the already diverse style of American song. If a single songwriter were to be chosen to epitomize the era, it would certainly be Irving Berlin. He wrote songs from the very beginning of the period through to the end (and even into the next era); his songs represent all of the various types that characterized these years; and dozens of his songs were among the most popular products of the Tin Pan Alley years. Furthermore, his career and his music point up the strong links between the first and second generations of Tin Pan Alley, and the emergence of a somewhat different song style in the 1920s and ’30s (Hamm, 1979, p. 329). To gain a better perspective on this issue, one must understand the Tin Pan Alley aesthetic. New songs were judged by audience acceptance or rejection, not by abstract analysis of their musical and lyrical components. As Wilder put it, for Berlin and his peers â€Å"a good song and a hit song [were] synonymous (p. 92). † To ensure that their songs would be immediately accessible to their audiences, composers drew on already familiar musical styles, including the most popular songs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widely disseminated pieces of the classical repertory, and social dances of the present and immediate past. Berlin himself wrote in the Green Book Magazine for April 1916, â€Å"There’s no such thing as a new melody. Our work is to connect the old phrases in a new way, so that they will sound like a new tune. † During World War I, Berlin served first as a private, then as a sergeant at Camp Upton, a temporary station for troops embarking for Europe. Convinced of the need for entertainment for these troops–and encouraged by the commanding general of the camp, who needed $35,000 for a new service center–Berlin prepared an all-soldier show, Yip, Yip, Yaphank, for which he wrote book, lyrics, and music. This musical, which opened at the Century Theatre in New York City on July 26, 1918, presented various aspects of a rookie’s life at camp in song, comedy, sentiment, dance, and production numbers. Berlin’s best songs were â€Å"Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning† and â€Å"Mandy. † Yip, Yip, Yaphank eventually netted over $150,000 for the Camp Upton Service Center. However, it is indubitable that â€Å"Annie Get Your Gun† (1946) Berlin’s most successful musical. Based very freely on the life of Annie Oakley, the show was originally to have had music by Kern; he died while working on it, and Berlin replaced him. At the first performance, Ethel Merman sang the title role and Ray Middleton played Frank. Annie has entered the repertory of opera companies in the USA, and the Vienna Volksoper. Upon his return to civilian life, Berlin began to expand his activities beyond songwriting. He formed his own publishing house, Irving Berlin, Inc. –an occasion that inspired an â€Å"Irving Berlin Week,† celebrated throughout the country with performances of his songs in theatres and night clubs. He also embarked on a career as a vaudeville headliner, appearing in performances of his song hits in leading theatres. In 1927, Berlin wrote a ballad, â€Å"The Song Is Ended,† almost as if he had a prophetic glimpse of what awaited him: the uncreative years between 1929 and 1932. During this time he wrote little and seemed incapable of producing anything that either satisfied him or could win public approval. This period of sterility was made even more difficult by the depletion of his fortune during the economic crisis. The hit of his last success, Call Me Madam (1950), was â€Å"You’re Just in Love†. Berlin also created the music for many films. Berlin’s music was always catchy as it kept abreast of the latest in musical fashions and constantly composed memorable, musically inventive songs in the idiom of the moment (Bordman, 2001). Berlin’s rise from poverty to fame is quite inspiring. Starting with nothing on the Lower East Side, sleeping in flophouses on the Bowery, he earned a vast fortune by the time he was thirty and married Ellin McKay, the daughter of one of the richest men in America. Although he never lost his East Side accent, he assumed the privileges of wealth as one to the manner born; his daughter describes a life of quiet, tasteful luxury marred only by her father’s long bouts of depression, during which he would become even more invisible than usual, shutting himself off even from his family (Schiff, 1996). Through his great life we learn that music has great role in our lives and it is difficult to fathom why. Flutes have been found in France dating â€Å"as far back as 30,000 years† (Jensen, 2001, p. 15). This and other evidence implies that music has been used throughout human history. Music has been used by every culture to inspire, tell stories, pass on history, glorify achievements, amuse, relax, and educate. Music is used to express love, anger, despair, and hope. Some admit that music is indeed a universal language. In the United States, we have become culturally diverse in our musical tastes and embrace every genre and style from folk to classical, jazz, blues, rock and roll to rap. Berlin was a prominent figure in a time where jazz tunes reigned supreme. Thus, to share the wondrous life of a musician like Irving Berlin, people could celebrate the unique music of cultures and ethnic groups and we could show younger generations that diversity is something to be respected and treasured Works Cited Bordman, G. â€Å"Berlin, Irving†, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001). Ewen, David H. , and David H. Ewen, eds. Popular American Composers from Revolutionary Times to the Present: A Biographical and Critical Guide. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1962. Hamm, Charles. Irving Berlin: Songs from the Melting Pot: The Formative Years, 1907-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hamm, Charles. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Jensen, E. Arts with the Brain in Mind. (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001) People Weekly. Irving Berlin: Music and Myth, 32. 15 (9 October 1989):3. Schiff, David. â€Å"For Everyman, by Everyman: In Creating Himself According to the Nation’s Enthusiasm for His Songs, Irving Berlin Helped Create a National Identity. † The Atlantic Monthly Mar. 1996: 108+. Wilder, Alex. American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).