Music
Vagabond king
Benny Green
The death of Rudolf Friml severs the last tie of the modern world with that indeterminate and totally spurious principality where the oscillations of the hero's adam's apple and the sight of the heroine's tonsils were considered no impediment to the expression of high tragedy. Friml was one of a fascinating group of cunning musical foxes who belonged to a very different culture from the one they came to dominate so completely. This group, which included Victor Herbert, Franz Lehar and Sigmund Romberg, was of course exclusively European, and its invasion of the New World more completely successful than any before or since. Today we tend to forget that at the beginning of the century, musically speaking, when young men like Friml were beginning to look around in search of a career, the United States, whatever status it might have enjoyed in the larger councils of the world, was a hopelessly backward country, its musical theatre being in the acutely embarrassing situation of trying to cater for an urban audience without itself possessing any musical tradition. With the possible exception of George M. Cohan's patriotic blarney, by the time Friml's generation came looking for the fleshpots, there was virtually no American musical theatre at all.
From the moment The Merry Widow reached New York in 1907, warbling princelings from unpronounceable principalities burst across Broadway like a tidal wave of Habsburgian treacle, becoming so dominant that according to P. G. Wodehouse, Jerome Kern had to masquerade as an European before the American impresario Charles Frohman would look at him. (It was Wodehouse who, when once told that a certain operetta had been a big hit in Vienna, replied gloomily, " What wouldn't be?") All of these musical conquerors were cosmopolitan as only insular central Europeans can be. Lehar was one of Franz Josef's bandmasters; Romberg was born in Hungary, educated in Vienna; Herbert was Dublin-born, Londonraised, German-educated. Friml himself was born in Prague, and like the others, was trained to be what used to be known as a classical musician. He graduated at Prague Conservatoire, studied composition under Dvorak, went on to the American concert circuit, composed the inevitable piano concerto, and only drifted into the moonshine of operetta by accident.
Today Friml is fondly remembered as a kind of lesser Lehar, a successful writer who slayed them with The Firefly in 1912, gave them the old one-two with Rose Marie (1924), followed up a year later with The Vagabond King, and just when they were saying he was all washed up, proved he really was all washed up by writing ' The Donkey Serenade' as late as 1937, although in fact the tune was an adaptation of one of his 1924 piano pieces called Chanson.' But by the 1930s Friml was very nearly as dead professionally as if already buried. His last success was The Three Musketeers in 1928, which Alexander Woollcott demolished with the rubber hammer of his sarcasm by saying, "I did greatly enjoy the first few years of Act One."
What happened of course, was that the natives started to fight back. Led by Kern, who, after starting out as a kind of honorary Ruritanian, somehow managed to escape to the America of ' All the Things You Are and 'Yesterdays,' the new generation of American-born composers, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, and of course the very-nearly-Atnerican-born Irving Berlin, began producing a more astringent type of musical theatre, and the days of the European hegemony were over. Friml explained his own eclipse by saying, "I like books with charm to them — and charm suggests the old things — the finest things that were done dong ago. I like romantic passions. Today, there is no romance, no glamour, no heroes." In fact Friml was quite wrong. There was not a scrap of romance in any of his musicals; there can • never be romance without passion, and in shows like The Firefly and The Vagabond King there is less authentic passion than you can find on any fishmonger's slab. What Friml mistook for romance was in fact Fancy, which is a rather different thing.
And yet Friml was no fool. On the contrary, he was an extremely sophisticated man who cushioned the long years of retirement with brilliant financial astuteness, and who left us several comic insights into the cavortings of his friends. Not long before his death he told a stupefying tale involving Romberg in a game of bridge. Romberg's partner, having drawn one heart, tried to tip Romberg the wink by whisting the melody of the great Romberg hit 'One Alone.' But Romberg ignored the hint and the game ended disastrously. Later the partner asked him why he had not taken the hint. " What hint?" asked Romberg. "I whistled your song, 'One Alone '." To which Romberg actually replied, "Ach, who knows from lyrics?"
If Friml could distance himself like this from the fractured English and looney logic of his group, how could he still defend the old, style operettas? Where did he acquire such outlandish ideas about the way humanity behaves? Let us construct an archetypal Friml libretto, one full of ' romance,' and see where it takes us. There is an eminent composer who writes a smash show for a lady star. After this hit the two of them have an argument so bitter that each refuses ever again to communicate with the other. The composer swears he will never write another note for her; she swears she will never let another note of his pass her lips. Their producer is frantic. He is committed to a new show, and here he is with no score and no star. End of Act One. He then finds a new composer, someone untried and unknown in operetta. They all tell the producer he is crazy, the kid will never make it, the show will never get off the ground, everyone will be ruined. But the producer puts his discovery to work and keeps his fingers crossed. End of Act Two. The last act opens with the new work actually taking place before our very eyes. It is a triumph. The young composer is hailed as a master, the new show becomes an even bigger success than the old one, and all live happily ever after.
How many times have we all endured such garbage? The embarrassing thing is that my plot is a literal transcription of Friml's own life. The composer and star who would not talk to each other were Victor Herbert and Emma Trentini; their hit was Naughty Marietta, the distraught producer Arthur Hammerstein, the untried discovery Friml himself, his great hit written against the clock, The Firefly. There remains absolutely nothing to say, except perhaps that it might not be coincidence that Friml's christian name was the same as the hero's in The Prisoner of Zenda. When I'm calling yew-hoo-hoohoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. .
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