Frederick Loewe was born in Vienna, Austria, on June 10, 1904. A musical
prodigy, he began to study the piano when he was five; started
composition at seven; at thirteen made a successful appearance as
pianist with the Berlin Symphony; and at fifteen was the composer of a
hit song, “Katrina,” that sold over a million copies of sheet music in
Europe. He received a thorough musical training from Busoni, Eugène
d’Albert, and Emil Nikolaus Rezniček, winning the Hollander Medal for
piano playing in 1923. One year after that he came to the United States.
Unable to make any progress in his musical career, he spent the next
decade traveling around the country and filling all sorts of odd jobs.
He punched cattle, mined gold, served as a riding instructor, and even
boxed professionally. Eventually he came back to New York where he found
a job in a Greenwich Village café playing the piano. In 1938 four of his
songs were heard in a Broadway musical, _Great Lady_, a failure. A
meeting with Alan Jay Lerner, a young lyricist and librettist, brought
him a gifted collaborator. They wrote a musical comedy that was produced
by a stock company in Detroit, and another called _What’s Up_ that was
seen on Broadway. Their first major success came with the Broadway
musical, _Brigadoon_, in 1947. _My Fair Lady_, in 1956, was one of the
greatest successes of the Broadway theater. They also helped make
entertainment history further by writing songs for the motion picture
musical, _Gigi_, the first to win nine Academy Awards, including one for
Lerner and Loewe for the title song. In 1960, Lerner and Loewe wrote the
Broadway musical _Camelot_ based on King Arthur and the Knights of the
Round Table.
_Brigadoon_ was a whimsical Scottish fantasy which came to Broadway on
March 13, 1947, book and lyrics by Lerner. Brigadoon is a mythical town
in Scotland which comes to life for a single day once every hundred
years. Two American tourists happen to come to Brigadoon during its one
day of existence. They become a part of its quaint life, and one of them
falls in love with a Scottish lass. The musical highlights include a
song that became a hit in 1947, “Almost Like Being In Love,” and several
that have a charming Scottish flavor, including “Come to Me, Bend to
Me,” “The Heather on the Hill,” and “I’ll Come Home With Bonnie Jean.”
_My Fair Lady_, produced on March 15, 1956, was Lerner’s adaptation for
the popular musical theater of Bernard Shaw’s _Pygmalion_. Eliza
Doolittle, an ignorant flower girl and daughter of a cockney, is
transformed by the phonetician, Professor Henry Higgins, into a
cultivated lady who is successfully palmed off upon high English society
as a duchess. Higgins falls in love with her and, though a long
confirmed bachelor, finds he can no longer live without her. _My Fair
Lady_ became one of the most highly acclaimed musical productions of
recent memory; Brooks Atkinson called it “one of the best musicals of
the century.” It achieved a fabulous Broadway run and was brought by
many touring countries to all parts of the civilized world, including
the Soviet Union. It captured one third of the honors annually conferred
on the theater by the Antoinette Perry Awards. The original-cast
recording sold over three million discs. The principal numbers from
Loewe’s captivating score include three romantic songs, two of the Hit
Parade variety (“I Could Have Danced All Night” and “On the Street Where
You Live”) and the third, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”; two
atmospheric numbers that evoke musically the place and setting of the
play, “The Ascot Gavotte” and “The Embassy Waltz”; and the two cockney
ditties of Eliza’s father, “Get Me to the Church On Time” and “With a
Little Bit of Luck.”