The Arrival of a New Kid on the Block

On October 28, 1912, Victor Herbert’s Cinderella tale, The Lady of the Slipper, opened on Broadway and had a very respectful run of 232 performances.

However, the more remarkable show called The Red Petticoat opened November 13, 1912. The centerpiece of the show was the first full score composed by a young man named Jerome Kern.

Jerome Kern was born in Manhattan on January 27, 1885 to middle class parents, Fannie and Henry Kern.  It is probable that Kern learned about music and the piano from his mother, a skilled pianist.  He recalled that, at an early age, he joined his mother and two brothers in playing 8-handed piano concerts for his father.

At the age of eleven, his family moved to Newark, New Jersey.  When he was a junior at Newark High School, he was asked by the senior class to write the spring musical (March 1901). Following that, he was commissioned by the Newark Yacht Club to write the score for a musical satire (January 1902).

Leaving high school in 1902, he pursued further musical education outside Heidelberg for several months.  Returning to the United States, he was employed by music publisher, Edward B. Marks, at his firm Lyceum; the firm published his first song, “At The Casino,” in September 1902. Before his second song, “In A Shady Bungalow”, was published in May 1903, Kern had enrolled in the New York College of Music, where he studied counterpoint with Austin Pierce, piano with Albert von Doenhoff and harmony and composition with Alexander Lambert and concert pianist, Paolo Gallico.

On the advice of composer Ernest Ball, Kern sought work at the music publishing firm T.B. Harms in 1903, at the time headed by Max Dreyfus. Dreyfus was said to have been “blessed with an exceptional ear for up-and-coming talents” and would go on to sponsor many young composers such as George Gershwin (1917), Vincent Youmans (1921) and Richard Rodgers (1925) well before they became famous.

In 1904, Dreyfus placed two of Kern’s songs into a British musical import, An English Daisy (1904).  Eleven Kern songs added to Mr. Wix Of Wickham (1904), drew the attention of Alan Dale of the American: “…its music, by Jerome D. Kern, towers in such an Eiffel way, above the average…that criticism is disarmed….”

Kern songs were interpolated into over twenty musicals, operetta imports, and revues between 1904 and 1912, before The Red Petticoat opened.

Like Victor Herbert before him, Kern never wrote a bad score. All of his music was pleasant to the ear and original. He was grounded in Herbert’s melodic and harmonic legacy, which was considerable; but he became his own man and built on Herbert’s shoulders to such an extent that by 1915, he strongly influenced both Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin.

In his autobiography, Rodgers looked back and recalled his early impressions. He saw his first musical, Victor Herbert’s Little Nemo (1908), at the age of six, but his great love was reserved for the music of Jerome Kern.  At the age of fourteen he saw Very Good, Eddie (1915) at the Princess Theater and never forgot the moment:

“The sound of a Jerome Kern tune was not ragtime; nor did it have any of the Middle European inflections of Victor Herbert.  It was all his own—the first truly American theatre music—and it pointed the way I wanted to be led .  .  . The influence of the hero on such a hero-worshipper is not easy to calculate, but it was a deep and lasting one.  His less successful musical comedies were no less important to a listener of thirteen or fourteen.  I know that for a large part of one winter [1917] most of my allowance was spent for a seat in the balcony of the Maxine Elliott Theatre listening to Love O’ Mike.”

In due course, we will get to Kern’s miracle year of 1917, as we study his work with Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse; a year in which he brought to Broadway four full scores on his own and one review with Victor Herbert. Not only was that output prodigious, but his first show in 1918 came on February 1, 1918. During these years he composed musicals that are characterized today as “intimate musicals,” intended for a small theatre in New York, called The Princess Theatre. These shows were orchestrated by Frank Sadler, who helped to create the correct orchestral sound for a small venue.

Kern went through a period of adjustment after Sadler’s death until he found his footing once again, this time with an orchestrator he would work with the rest of his life, Robert Russell Bennett. This partnership reached its zenith with the 1927 production of Show Boat and ended with the 1939 production of Very Warm for May.

Kern’s last major success on Broadway was Roberta in 1933, after which Kern’s influence on Broadway was negligible. In 1934, Cole Porter came forward with his glorious score for the production of Anything Goes; and in 1935, Gershwin stunned the musical world with his magnificent opera, Porgy and Bess. In the years that followed, Richard Rodgers took the spotlight on Broadway.

But let us not mourn the sad death of King Kern; rather let us luxuriate in the musical legacy that he left us. We have much to cover over the course of this year, and we really should enjoy all of it.

In the meantime, here is the 1993 John McGlinn recording of “The Ragtime Restaurant” from The Red Petticoat.