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The American musical—more technically known as light musical theater—has been one of the most beloved aspects of American culture. Many of the characters, scenes, and situations from the musical shows created during the genre’s golden age (roughly, the mid-20th century) are fixed in our consciousness, thanks to stage productions, movie versions of the shows, and cast albums of the songs. Some observers have gone so far as to say that the musical is America’s single greatest contribution to the arts. Two classic American musicals created during the golden period exemplify timeless aspects of the American spirit. They are what I would like to call American operettas, winning combinations of warmhearted story, humor, and song, with archetypal American settings and themes.

Meredith Willson (1902–1984), composer, conductor, and humorist, had for years traded on anecdotes of his small-town Iowa background. So much so that his friend, the noted Broadway composer and lyricist Frank Loesser (1910–1969), encouraged him to work his Iowa memories into a musical comedy. Willson resisted at first, but over the next several years a play that eventually became The Music Man took shape. Today it is one of the most beloved of all American musicals, revived countless times every year on stages and enjoyed in movie and soundtrack form as well. As every schoolchild should know, it’s the tale of spellbinding con man Harold Hill and his plot to swindle an Iowa town by selling instruments for a band that he does not know how to conduct. A master of cooking up trouble, Hill convinces the townsfolk that a boys’ band will be just the thing to combat the supposed moral depravity brought upon by the local pool hall. Hill’s crooked ways are put straight when he falls for a good woman in town: the piano teacher/librarian, Marian.

During those same years in the mid-1950s, Loesser too was working on a new musical, an ambitious one. The Most Happy Fella (with orchestrations by Don Walker) debuted a year and a half before The Music Man, and it too has entered into Broadway history. Although not as widely known as Willson’s show, it is a rich and rewarding piece of work, a true American light opera with a touching story and music that achieves a beautiful synthesis of classical and vernacular elements. The Most Happy Fella is the love story of Tony, an Italian immigrant winegrower, and Amy, a much younger woman to whom Tony proposes marriage by mail. Often presented in opera houses (and requiring an opera-caliber baritone for the role of Tony), The Most Happy Fella is every bit as good as the old Italian comic operas which inspired Loesser. For in a departure from the usual musical-comedy structure, the Most Happy score is no mere set of songs adorning a spoken play. It is a real “music drama” with an integrated flow of arias, duets, ensembles, choruses, arioso or semi-song, and occasional spoken dialogue with musical underscoring. And yes, there are good old-fashioned musical-comedy and song-and-dance numbers to lighten and enliven the show. Altogether it is a feast of music surrounding a simple and moving story.

And how does Loesser know when his characters should speak and when they should sing? By the same principle underlying the traditional musical: while the emotional temperature is low, the characters express themselves in speech, and when it reaches a boiling point, they sing. When speech fails, music takes over. The transitions between the various modes of expression are seamless and psychologically true.

Loesser was born in New York City to a cultured German Jewish family, his father a pianist and his half-brother a respected music critic. Frank, although he rebelled against his family’s classical culture at first, eventually re-embraced it after a lucrative career as a Hollywood songwriter. His Broadway scores show a keen sense of craft and musical skill, and The Most Happy Fella comes as close to opera as an American musical ever has. We speak of classical music (or art music) and popular music, but the American musical has always occupied a sort of middle ground between the two. Loesser’s Most Happy occupies, in turn, a middle ground between musical and opera.

From the beginning, American artists sought to distinguish their work from European art, yet at the same time make it worthy to be compared with the best of the Old World. The American musical itself developed from the operettas (light operas) of Middle Europe—typically romantic, comic, or sentimental pieces telling stories of princes and aristocrats in exotic settings. American musicals retained the light, comic, and romantic accents but opened up the operetta to portray ordinary people and American scenes, with music that assimilated the syncopations of American pop as well as European romantic lyricism. The best of the Broadway lyricists wrote verse that was filled with witty wordplay as well as surprising poignance.

One way for American artists to be taken seriously as creators was through mastery of craft. In The Music Man, Meredith Willson constantly weaves sophisticated musical devices into the fabric of the music, devices which comment on the story and characters in inspired ways. In contrast to Loesser, Willson never rebelled against the classical-music tradition or had to return to it; for him, alternating classical and pop was natural from the start. Raised in Mason City, Iowa (the model for the musical’s River City), he owned the first flute in the town and eventually went East to play marches under John Philip Sousa and symphonies under Arturo Toscanini.

Willson was a bona fide “serious” composer with two fine symphonies under his belt by the time he wrote his Broadway show. The Music Man may seem “cornpone” on the surface, but this is deceptive. It is in fact as ingenious a piece of work as ever presented on Broadway—and created by a man who had never written a musical before. Willson uses his expert knowledge of counterpoint to combine songs in unexpected harmony. When the barbershop quartet joins their song to the gossiping River City ladies, the effect is brilliant. And it’s a known secret that the melody of Prof. Hill’s “Seventy-Six Trombones” is a faster version of Miss Marian’s romantic “Goodnight, My Someone,” the transformation acting as a comment on their character and destiny.

Willson worked on his script and songs for years to get everything to hang together just right, and the painstaking efforts paid off in a show that is still popular and beloved. The Music Man has true artistic cohesion because it comes from a place deep within Willson’s personal experience. It was Willson’s great life’s work, the story he was born to tell, and he never again achieved a comparable success.

The score is a cornucopia of popular American musical genres, evoking the 1912 of the play’s setting and (not coincidentally) of Willson’s own childhood. There are barbershop harmonies, parlor love ballads, Sousa marches, and revival-meeting harangues delivered in a rhythmic speech-song invented by Willson himself. In The Music Man the speech becomes music and the music speech. Willson could hear music in the shop talk of a group of men on a train, in salesman’s patter, in a group of gossiping town matriarchs. Harold, despite having no musical knowledge at all, succeeds in transforming the bickering town councilmen into a harmonious barbershop quartet. The musical styles evoke a vanished world of pre-World War I America, of ice cream parlors, front porch serenades, and Fourth of July picnics.

The picture is not all idyllic, though: the town is marred by petty suspicions and prejudices, grouchiness and bickering. And as the traveling salesman complain in the opening scene, technological progress and national chain stores are undermining the Midwest’s traditional rural ways of life. Willson illustrates mechanization by having his salesmen assimilate their shop talk to the accelerating clatter of the train they are riding. (Are we men or machines?)

The eclecticism in Willson’s musical expresses a sense of the power of music itself, the real underlying theme of the show. Music in The Music Man functions as a metaphor for a platonic harmony among things and people. Even though “Professor” Harold Hill does not know a note of music, his inspiration to the townspeople to live joyfully and harmoniously with one another constitutes its own kind of music. Marian, the only one in the town to be able to see through the phony “Professor,” is also the first one to see the reality of what he has actually accomplished. The show’s ending gives us a dynamic illustration of “the kingdom of heaven is in your midst.”

Along with the yearning for pastoral life, there is in America the yearning for culture, something The Music Man captures very well. Marian’s wonderful song (aria, if you like) “My White Knight” conveys her dream of her ideal man as someone who “is not ashamed of a few nice things”:

“My white knight, not a Lancelot, nor an angel with wings,

Just someone to love me, who is not ashamed of a few nice things.

And if occasionally he’d ponder

What makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great,

Him I could love ’til I die.”

Marian, librarian and music teacher, is an outsider in the rough-cultured town of River City. Harold is also an outsider, and these two misunderstood people are bound to be drawn together. Among the perennial outsiders in American society have been the immigrants, such as Tony in The Most Happy Fella. Yet despite his outsider status and foreign accent, Tony has fostered a vibrant community on his ranch, hosting Italian festivals in which the whole town eats, drinks, and celebrates. As in The Music Man, the spirit of communal festivity fills Most Happy, overflowing in joyous choruses. The massive choral “Sposalizio” expresses the jubilation of an Italian wedding banquet:

“I like a great big Italian sposalizio.

Set it up and I’ll be there!

With the lanterns glowing

(Look at ’em over your head!)

And the vino flowing

(Malaga, Malaga red!)

And the good strong smell of

Mozzarella in the air.

I’m the kind of fella

Likes a tarantella

To the fine, fine music

Of a mellow mandolin.

With all the neighbors, and all the

Neighbors’ neighbors,

All the friends, and of their friends,

And the ‘Mangia, mangia, manga’

Never ends!

In classic American fashion Tony, the immigrant, enriches his community, not only through his business but by the sheer joie de vivre he spreads.

The Most Happy Fella revels in a similar American eclecticism to The Music Man. For this story of romance in a pastoral American setting, Frank Loesser combined influences from opera, operetta, vaudeville, and western folk song and dance. The piece has an overflowing abundance, an outpouring of invention, that is wholly American. Yet the Italian operatic flavor of many of the songs gives the show a deep connection to European art and, like Willson, Loesser too used his skill in counterpoint to depict the conflicting emotions and purposes of his characters. Take the wonderful number “How Beautiful the Days,” in which Tony and Amy sing of their love center-stage while Tony’s sister and foreman vent their frustrations on the side. Loesser had always been good at composing contrapuntal dialogues in song (“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a famous example), but rarely if ever had musicals attempted anything so Mozartian as this quartet.

A key theme in American culture has been the yearning for a pastoral Eden or the rootedness of small-town life. These feelings grew strong in world-weary mid-century audiences, who from Oklahoma! onward delighted in musical shows that depicted an America that once was. Loesser, who in the hit Guys and Dolls had written songs about New York gamblers and gangsters, followed it up with a pastoral romance set in California’s Napa Valley. In fact, the story traces the classic comic pattern of an escape from the corrupt, confining influence of the city (here, San Francisco, where Amy endures the drudgery and indignities of being a waitress at a diner) into the idyllic paradise of Napa. The transformation reflected in the show’s leisurely pacing, with plenty of time to savor musical delights like a fine bottle of wine once we arrive in the country. The show creates a sense of space as expansive as America itself.

Then as now, American entertainment was dominated by the two coastal hubs New York City and Hollywood. Hence the surprise when the Midwesterner Meredith Willson, a Broadway novice, stepped up to compete with established theater composers. Superficially, Loesser and Willson seemed complete opposites: the tough-talking New Yorker and the wholesome Iowan. In reality, they were good friends and complementary talents. The urbanite Loesser had interest in other parts of the country and other ways of life, and in the idea of Americana in general. Loesser and Willson were both artists for whom the classical and the popular coexisted in harmony. And here we have another American theme, also related to eclecticism: the interplay between the “high” and the “vernacular” in art. Few would have thought at the time of The Most Happy Fella’s premiere that the Broadway musical could be the vehicle of such elevated sentiments as proceed from the mouths of Tony and Amy.

The operatic passion of Most Happy reaches its peak when Amy announces to her new husband, Tony (who is in a wheelchair recovering from an injury) that she is pregnant with a baby that is not his. During their epistolary courtship, Tony, self-conscious about his age and looks, had sent Amy a picture of his handsome ranch foreman, Joe, pretending it was his. And so, Amy fell in love with one man’s face and another man’s soul, a fascinating predicament, and arriving at Napa she fell into the arms of Joe.

Loesser turns the tables on the conventional “boy meets girl” love story, which tends to be more romantic than real. Instead of a fairy tale, Tony’s and Amy’s initial meeting is a screaming disaster, with Tony injuring himself in a car accident on his way to pick Amy up from the train station. Throughout the second act, we watch these two people gradually fall in love—Amy with Tony’s generous and loving soul—and seek to undo their past mistakes.

At the show’s end, Tony decides to forgive and embrace both his wife and her new unborn child, realizing his own errors and deceptions. And thus, this ostensible “light” opera touches on some pretty heavy and serious themes: sin and forgiveness, responsibility and waywardness, anger and compassion.

Loesser’s music is glorious and accomplished, but its very variety has raised eyebrows. Some critics claim that the various styles in the show never quite come together. But what is seldom pointed out is that Loesser has carefully matched the various musical styles to the characters who sing them. The musical’s stylistic diversity grows naturally out of the story. It makes perfect sense that Tony would express himself in the style of grand opera, and that Herman (the ranch hand who forms one half of the secondary romantic couple, with Amy’s friend and fellow waitress Cleo) would sing comic vaudeville songs like “Standing on the Corner (Watching All the Girls Go By).” These styles coexist just as they do in real life. The eclecticism serves the ideal of storytelling and expresses the pluralism of America herself.

The unity is provided by Loesser’s distinctive turn of musical phrase, his humanity and moral imagination. Never content to repeat himself from show to show or coast on success, Loesser was an artist always stretching himself and expanding, and Most Happy represents the highest he ever reached.

Frank Loesser and Meredith Willson were both versatile artists, capable of writing music, lyrics, and libretto with aplomb. In fact, The Music Man and The Most Happy Fella are among the few one-man productions in the history of the musical, and they hang together with a rare unity. Life-affirming and characteristically American, these pieces show the artistic maturity of the musical theater at its best. On a deep level they are both about the longing for community—for home, roots, family, and true love. And they express these American and universal themes through the transcendent power of music and song, speaking to us directly in our language and crafted with a master’s hand.

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If you want to hear The Music Man, I suggest bypassing the usual Broadway and Hollywood options and heading straight for a 1991 concert performance with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and conductor Erich Kunzel. You haven’t heard The Music Man until you’ve heard this meticulously performed version.

For The Most Happy Fella, the original Broadway cast album, which includes every note and word of the show, will do splendidly. Sadly, no movie of this masterpiece of musicals was ever made.

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The top image is the 1957 poster for The Music Man, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The featured image, uploaded by Meetmeatthemuny, is a photograph of the cast of The Muny’s Music Man, July 5, 2016. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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