Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)

Unlike most of the giants of the musical theater, Alan Jay Lerner was brought up in conditions of wealth and privilege. Born in 1918 and raised in New York City, Lerner was the son of the founder of the Lerner Shops, a chain of women’s clothing stores. He received piano tuition at the Juilliard School, and was educated at Choate, Bedales school in England, and at Harvard, where he was a contemporary of Leonard Bernstein in the late thirties. As a student, he wrote sketches and lyrics for two Harvard Hasty Pudding shows, and developed a taste for writing and the theater. After graduating he chose not to go into the family business. Instead, he became a journalist, a radio scriptwriter, and a man-about-town. In 1942, at Lamb’s Club in Manhattan, he met Frederick Loewe (1904–1988).

Frederick ‘Fritz’ Loewe was the Viennese-born son of an operatic tenor, Edmund Loewe. A child prodigy on the piano, Loewe had played with some of the finest orchestras in Europe. At the age of eighteen, he had composed a popular song called "Katerina," which sold 3 million copies in Europe. At the age of 20, he accompanied his father to the United States, but his concert career stalled. He gave piano lessons, played in night clubs, went west to mine for gold, and even tried to become a boxer. His musical, Great Lady, reached Broadway in 1938, but ran for only 20 performances. His luck changed when he met Lerner.

Together, Lerner and Loewe adapted a farce called The Patsy into a musical called Life of the Party. It was a minor hit, running for nine weeks in 1942. The following year, they flopped with What’s Up?. In 1945, they collaborated again on the musical comedy The Day Before Spring, which contained the hit song, "I Remember It Well" (later to reappear in Gigi).

But it was in 1947 that the team of Lerner and Loewe really made their mark on Broadway. Brigadoon, the tale of two American hunters who discover a magical village, lost in time in the highlands of Scotland, touched a chord with post-war America, and ran for 581 performances. Paint Your Wagon followed in 1951, and in 1956 My Fair Lady began a record run of 2,717 performances. This musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with its combination of wit, romance, and powerful storytelling, was both an artistic and a financial triumph. The score is a string of pearls: “On the Street Where You Live,” “With a Little Bit of Luck”, “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and “Wouldn’t It be Loverly” have all become classics. The Arthurian musical Camelot (1960) was their last major collaboration. Loewe had suffered a heart attack in 1958 and retired from the theater after the success of Camelot.

Many Lerner and Loewe musicals became great films, and the pair collaborated too on original film scores—most notably Gigi, adapted from the novel by Colette. Lerner contributed the story, screenplay, and lyrics for Royal Wedding (1951) and received an Oscar the same year for the story and screenplay of An American in Paris. He also collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950) on the vaudevillian pastiche Love Life (1948), which was an artistic, if not a commercial success.

After Loewe’s retirement, Lerner collaborated with Burton Lane for On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965) and Carmelina (1979), with André Previn on Coco (1969), and with Leonard Bernstein on the presidential pageant, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976).