To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick by Philip Lambert (review)

Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick wrote seven musicals in the course of their fourteen-year long partnership. One, Fiddler on the Roof, broke all records for length of run on Broadway up to that time (3,242 performances) and is today considered to be one of the ten most significant musicals of the twentieth century. Several of their other shows, among them Fiorello! (1959), She Loves Me (1963), The Apple Tree (1966), and The Rothschilds (1970), won critical acclaim, Tony Awards, and had profitable runs. Indeed, with the exception of two early works, The Body Beautiful (1958) and Tenderloin (1960), no Bock and Harnick musical had a Broadway run of less than 300 performances. Nevertheless, after The Rothschilds, Bock and Harnick, both in their forties, ceased to write with one another, pursuing other activities for forty more years.

Philip Lambert’s new volume makes an important contribution to Oxford University Press’s Broadway Legacies series. In the first chapter, Lambert points out that Bock and Harnick started their careers with much in common. They were close in age—Bock was born in 1928 and Harnick in 1924. They were both college educated—Bock went to University of Wisconsin and Harnick to Northwestern University. Most interestingly, they were both adept at writing both words and music. Indeed, Harnick’s early musical training was more extensive than Bock’s; as a teenager, Harnick had thought of a career as a concert violinist while Bock had considered one in advertising. When they began to work together, however, they pigeon-holed one another. Bock was the composer, Harnick the lyricist—a traditional model, but of course not the only one. (Both Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, for example, are mutually credited for the music, lyrics, and original concept of the show Avenue Q.)

For most of the book Lambert concentrates on the works rather than the lives of Harnick and Bock. For example, he notes only that “when he arrived in New York in the summer of 1950 Sheldon Harnick was newly married” (16), but we do not learn the name of Harnick’s wife, or where and when they met and married. Similarly, he notes, “in the early 1960s Jerry Bock became devoted to music for children, no doubt drawing inspiration from his own parenthood” (103). If readers want specific information regarding Bock’s own children, they will have to seek it elsewhere.

The meat of the book consists of Lambert’s thorough investigations of Bock and Harnick’s musicals. Somewhat schematically, he examines the genesis of each show, the plot, the music, and the critical reception; the lyrics are discussed as well. But Lambert’s main focus is the music, which he treats with a full analytic arsenal. Noting an “affection for counterpoint” as one of Bock’s “stylistic fingerprints,” Lambert gives an enthusiastic account of examples of many melodic lines coming together in Fiorello! and Fiddler on the Roof. Another fingerprint he points to in Bock’s melodies is an attraction to the sharped fourth and flatted seventh degrees of the scale. Lambert also demonstrates the organic continuity and thematic unity underlying the music of each show, speaking of “intrashow musical cross-references” and an “element of consistency in the musical language, even among songs in diverse style” (77). Perhaps with a nod to the fair and balanced, he reveals as well that “Bock confesses to no grand plan for creating musical continuity” (80) and that Bock claims “no conscious effort to connect leitmotifs or parallel chromatics or search for commonalities in writing other than the composer’s natural musical instincts” (199–200).

Lambert’s writing is usually clear and serviceable; but if there is a secret to the perennial problem of writing musical analysis gracefully, he has not yet found it. Sentences such as “Later, at the end of ‘The Diary of Adam and Eve,’ the trend continues, first with the...