The Jazz Age revisited: lyricist MURRAY HORWITZ tells of the joys and challenges of writing new popular songs of the 1920s for the world premiere of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby.
The comedian Shelley Berman used to appear in concert, accompanied by a Kingston Tril-style singing group called The Travelers Three. "Aren't they terrific?" Berman would ask the audience. "They write folk songs. It's like making antiques." It was around 1960 that i heard Shelley Berman tell that joke in concert. Who knew that it would have such profound resonance for me forty years later, when my song lyrics are being sung at the Metropolitan Opera in john harbison's The Great Gatsby? John and I, in the 1990s were making antiques. We had to write - not folk songs - but brand - new Amercian popular songs from the 1920s.

Cugat's final painting
( gouache on paper ) for The Great Gatsby dust jacket ( Courtesy of Charles Scribner Evolution of a classic : Francis Cugat's preliminary sketch was of a face over Long Island sound ( Arlyn Bruccoli Collection )

Francis Cugat's painting for F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby used on the cover of this program is the most celebrated and widely disseminated jacket art in twentieth century American literature.

The haunting eyes of Francis Cugat's illustration on the dust jacket of the 1926 Engoish printing of The Great Gatsby and from his final sketch for the Gatsby dust jacket - in this version, the face hovers over the New York skyline ( Arlyn Bruccoli collection )
Little is know about
the artist francis Cugat. He was born in spain in 1893 and raised in Cuba. He was brother of orchestra leader Xavier Cuagt and, at one point worked in Hollywood as a designer for Douglas Fairbanks.

F.Scott fitzgerald's great Amercian novel uses a lot of popular songs. Some of them were real ("Ain't We Got fum," "The Sheik Of Araby," "Beale Street Blues" ), but others existed only in Fitzgerald's imagination. So we had to write them. John of fashioning a libretto from Fitzgerald's writing, but he felt he needed a lyricist for the songs."They have to sound like 'found objuets' from the 1920s," he told me. But it was clear that simply making antiques wouldn't be enough.
Lyric writing is always a kind of double or even triple crostic : a lyricist is concerned simultaneously with being correct musically, satisfying a rhyme scheme, and saying what needs to be said. On the musical stage there are even more variables : character, plot, dance, the individual performer. The Great Gatsby wongs had to account for all of these, but there were other requirements, as well. First, the songs had to sound like things that could have been around in the 1920s. Second, they certainly had to have something to do with the themes and characters of the opera And, third, we wanted them to have some contemporary resonance for audiences in the 1990s.
For the first, there were certainly models - but which ones should we use? Gatsby is set in 1924 (the year of Rhapsody In Blue) - when the Golden Age of american popular songwriting was well underway, with an astonishing variety of master composers and lyricists on the scene or soon to arrive : George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, Andy Razaf, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Gus Kahn, Irving Caesar, harry Warren, Duke Ellington, Walter Donaldson, Otto Harbach...........I think I'll stop now.
What all of these men (and not a few women) were responding to was the new music of jazz. By 1924, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong had arrived: Bessie smith, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and Ethel Waters had become stars by singing the new syncopations, phrasing more naturally and starting to swing. The salutary rhythmic revolution was over, and we had all won. The words they were singing were differdnt, too, filled with the wit and realism of the blues, and the cadences and slangof everyday speech. Professional song performances now came right into your home via the phonograph and the radio. the Great War was over, women were voting, and liquor was prohibited. New music and new mores demanded a new kind of lyric. whem you're reading The Great Gatsby, fitzgerald clearly tells you that the songs contained a lot of what was up.
That's how a song cycle came to be - The Great Songs - 13 numbers, all from the music in the opera, and all somehow related to the characters, settings and events of Fitzgerald's novel. During summer, fall, and winter of 1998-99, I wrote every day- new lyrics tko those eight songs, and additional lyrics to the ones I'd already written. i now modestly lay claim to being one of very few living 1920s songwriters. Idon't pose any immediate threat to cole Porter or Irving Berlin, but i bet i had as stormy and satisfying a time writing songs as they did.
I'm thinking of designing art-deco furniture next.