IF you didn’t know better, had never been taught the proper technique, you
might approach a piano with your hands flat and fingers splayed, as if instead
of striking the keys you were going to dribble them. This may be why Irving
Berlin, who never studied music except with his ear, favored the ebonies
over the ivories when he first started playing. His melodies found their home
among the black keys, making excursions as necessary to the white, with the
result that the tunes all emerged in the absurd six-sharp thicket of F-sharp
major or its corresponding D-sharp minor.
The first song for which Berlin wrote both music and lyrics was copyrighted
in 1908, and the last ditties found among his papers are dated 1987, two years
before his death at 101. He didn’t last that long as an artist by being
inflexible. Realizing that his black-key proclivity limited his reach, he
purchased a series of rare instruments called transposing pianos. They featured
a mechanism that could shift the entire keyboard up or down, causing the hammers
to strike the “wrong” strings and thus play his tunes in any desired key. What
started in F sharp could now become the F of “Puttin’ On the Ritz” or the C of
“Cheek to Cheek” — a good thing for his publishing business, which depended on
amateurs buying sheet music to play at home on their spinets. But how did those
songs get to be what they were in the first place? Did his lack of training
somehow make his style universal?
Hoping to see if the magic was in his pianos, I recently tried one at the New
York City headquarters of Ascap (American Society of Composers, Authors and
Publishers), of which Berlin was a charter member in 1914. But the instrument,
temporarily stored under a tarp in a hallway, was decades out of tune, its
famous mechanism jammed. Music played on it was muddy and untransposable.
The mystery is why so much of Berlin’s catalog is not similarly stuck in the
past. Of his 1,250 known songs (some with only lyrics extant), perhaps a fifth
are top-drawer and an astonishing 100 still live in our ears. (Recent licenses
include “Anything You Can Do” for an N.F.L. promo and “They Say It’s Wonderful” for “Spider-Man 3.”) They are not the most
technically advanced of what we now think of as the Big Five’s standards;
Gershwin, Kern, Porter and Rodgers, all trained musicians, had more
sophisticated tools at their disposal. But the Berlin standards hold their own
with aficionados while surpassing all others in popular acceptance. Bing
Crosby’s version of “White Christmas,” first released in 1942, has sold more
than 125 million copies, making it the best-selling recording of all time.
Certainly the producers of “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” which opened
for a holiday run at the Marquis Theater on Nov. 23, are betting that even (or
especially) in an economic downturn, audiences will flock to what they already
love. Hoping to offer Broadway and regional theaters a seasonal alternative to
“A Christmas Carol” and the Grinch, they have packed the lavish stage musical
with goodies from the Berlin catalog. The show, directed by Walter
Bobbie, with a book by David
Ives and Paul Blake, includes the catchiest numbers from the 1954 Bing
Crosby-Danny
Kaye movie on which it’s based — including “Sisters,” “The Best Things
Happen While You’re Dancing” and of course the title song. But it also
interpolates Berlin standards like “How Deep Is the Ocean?” and “Blue Skies.” As
each tune starts, you feel the rush of reunion with something long thought
unrecoverable.
Still, as at reunions, you study the effects of time. To give the score a
unified feel, the musical team of “White Christmas” — the music supervisor Rob
Berman, the orchestrator Larry Blank and the vocal and dance arranger Bruce
Pomahac — has passed all the songs, which were written over a 40-year period
starting in 1915, through a mid-’50s strainer. This makes sense for the story,
which is welded to the Eisenhower years, but homogenizes the oddities and
variety of the raw material. Whether written in the style of ragtime, jazz, Tin
Pan Alley, big band, Hollywood or Broadway, the songs come out sounding not
unlike a Bing Crosby holiday special.
This cool suavity does no damage. After a while you realize that the show, or
any other iteration of Berlin tunes, is a mechanism, like his magic pianos, for
rendering them in the key of another time.
The originals, notated by musical secretaries because Berlin couldn’t do so
himself, tell a fuller story. He was never cool in the ’50s sense. The stance
his songs take toward the listener is plainspoken and even aggressive: an
outsider’s stance. They were written to be popular, not to illustrate specific
dramatic situations or entertain a coterie.
Others of the Big Five found their sound in the opera house, the dive, the
theater, the boîte; Berlin found his in the street. This is what Kern meant when
he said that Berlin had no place in American music: he was American music.
“There are composers who make you come to them, and there are composers who
ask you to meet them halfway,” Mr. Pomahac said. “Of the Big Five, Berlin is the
first one to race across the room and grab you by the lapels.”
This was often literally true. He liked to sing his songs in the face of his
listener, a trait perhaps picked up during his days as a busker, a music plugger
and a singing waiter. If he didn’t make an impression, he didn’t make a
dime.
But for all their swagger and humor, Berlin’s songs betray a not-so-secret
undertow of sadness. It’s no surprise that he would set lovesick ballads like
“How Deep Is the Ocean?” in a minor key, and we have come to recognize the
minor-key uptempo number (“Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ On the Ritz”) as a Berlin
trademark. But a tour of the catalog reveals a pervasive tropism toward
melancholy.
While swimming confidently toward their goal, his songs frequently pass
through invisible seams of sadness on the way. Think of how wistful even “White
Christmas” is. Underneath the last, sustained word of the climactic lyric “May
your days be merry and bright,” Berlin gives us an F-major chord that turns
suddenly, piercingly minor. The brightness is literally diminished, as the dream
of the past is diminished by time.
Berlin came by this sentiment honestly. His father, a cantor in whose temple
he first heard the way music can recapitulate loss in the flick of a note, died
when he was 13. His first wife died of typhoid fever contracted on their Cuban
honeymoon. Irving Berlin Jr., his son by his second wife, died on Christmas Eve
at three weeks.
These losses do not explain the drive that led an immigrant from abject
poverty at 5 to wealth and celebrity at 19 and has sustained him at the heart of
American culture ever since. Nor do they explain how he, nearly alone among his
generation of composers, became the kind of businessman who had the clout and
savvy to defend his property. As his own publisher, he kept an iron grip on his
copyrights and licenses, which will continue to serve his reputation at least
until the copyrights expire.
But his insistence, in melody if not always in words, that nothing lasts
forever turned out to be a trick for the ages. Even in “God Bless America,” an
anthem that sounds as if it were not composed but mined, the word “America”
descends into tonal ambiguity as its syllables play out. The man couldn’t help
it. As he wrote in another classic you can hear at the Marquis: “If my song can
start you crying, I’m
happy.”