HART ACHES

Lorenz Hart was the greatest tragedian of America's Golden Age of Popular Music

Mar 24, 2026

I watched Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” for a second time last week and was moved even more than I was the first time. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart deserved the Oscar, but then I thought the movie itself deserved to be chosen as Best Picture of the Year. It got short shrift at this year’s Academy Awards. Ah, well . . .

I won’t indulge in synopsis except to say the movie takes place on the opening night of “Oklahoma.” Hart has attended the premiere with his mother, who is insensitively rapturous about the first show Rodgers has ever written without her son. This unintended “insult” prompts the lyricist to flee the theater and take rapid refuge in Sardi’s, a famous theater district restaurant. The place is empty of diners except for the presence of famed New Yorker magazine essayist E.B. White, with whom Hart shares drinks and conversation before premiere attendees mob the eatery. Hart, who clearly despises the show, tries to hide his feelings by engage in witty repartee, giving hypocritical praise. However, he cannpt help but but occasionally leak his disdain to the bar tender, patrons and, finally, his former writing partner.

So much for plot summaries. In much more concise reality, the movie is an elegy to a period of American music in which giants truly trod the earth—or, at least, the streets of Manhattan and Hollywood.

When Richard Rodgers left Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, there was a seismic shift in Broadway musical theater. The difference between “Pal Joey” and “Oklahoma” is so profound that it is like a tectonic collision of continents. Rodgers and Hammerstein gave us masterpieces like “South Pacific” and “The King and I.” So there’s no disputing the lasting legacy of the new songwriting team.

But Hammerstein was a librettist more than a lyricist and Rodgers sacrificed the debonair and urbane qualities that are the mark of the music he wrote with Hart for something far less caustic and cosmopolitan.

Don’t get me wrong. Rodgers wrote beautiful music with Hammerstein. I love songs like “People Will Say We’re In Love,” “Hello, Young Lovers,” “We Kiss in a Shadow” and “I Have Dreamed.” Their artful sincerity is laudable.

But once paired with Hammerstein, Rodgers was never as cynical, indiscreet, saucy and shocking again. No song would be of a banned-in-Boston nature. Hammerstein took control of the relationship by writing lyrics first and Rodgers then giving them melodic containment. With Hart, Rodgers took the lead, writing melodies first and trusting his partner to give them full heart with his lyrics. This heart was very vulnerable but equally world-wise. As a result, lyrics reflected the ambiguities of living with far deeper understanding than Hammerstein’s. The later’s lyrics were very literal, straightforward and unambiguous. While Hart wasn’t afraid to be equivocal, Hammerstein wouldn’t allow himself enigma and uncertainty. No matter what the message of the song, the lyrics were always clear, direct and discreet. They had to be, given the plot-driven shows they were written for where songs served the story line and were not meant to stand aloof or alone.

Hart was just the opposite. They were ends not means. Hence he wanted songs to be filled with subtle word play and spicy double meanings. At their best, they were meant to stop shows, not move them along. They invited personal interpretation. Hart wrote lyrics designed for an afterlife of nightclub and cabaret performances. And it is in that afterlife they have thrived in every popular musical medium imaginable.

I find this constant exposure and heightened sensitivity much more admirable and interesting than Hammerstein’s sober minded, stage-anchored approach to lyrics. I like to be teased not just pleased. Hart is more challenging. Hart wants performers to dig beneath the surface of his lyrics. And that’s just what they’ve been doing ever since his death from pneumonia in December 1943.

For these reasons, I believe Hart was far more ahead of his time than Hammerstein. He anticipated modern song stylists and styling in a way Hammerstein didn’t. Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn find so much more in terms of nuance and meaning in Hart’s words and Rodgers’ melodies. There is genuine loss in “It Never Entered My Mind” and a dizzying emotion in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Deja vu has never been captured better than it is in “Where or When.” Life has never been crueler than it is in “This Funny World.” Alienation gets fully delineated in “My Friend, The Night.” Regret is truly tragic in “He Was Too Good to Me.” Who hasn’t suffered the masochism of one-sided love the way it is put in “Glad To Be Unhappy”?

In sort, there doesn’t seem to be one often heartbreaking human situation that Rodgers and Hart didn’t tackle unforgettably. That range of subject matter, refinement and nuance is astonishing. Hart was both jester and tragedian in equal measure. This medley pays homage to the spectrum of sensitivity in their music.

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