Otto Harbach, songwriter: Reference Sources

Overview and Commentary Otto Harbach (This section remains in preparation)

In their book "Reading Lyrics" Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball note that as late as 1963, the year that Otto Harbach died, Variety's Obituary for him called Harbach "The dean of U.S. librettists."

That the name Otto Harbach is most often associated with the operetta period of American musical theater, a period tied to a waning European form of the musical, is both correct and unfair at the same time. Two of the composers Harbach often collaborated with, Rudolph Friml (The Firefly and Rose-Marie) and Sigmund Romberg (The Desert Song) are squarely in the tradition of shows that featured soaring melodies in the service of sentimental themes. On the other hand, his collaborators Jerome Kern (Roberta and The Cat and the Fiddle) and Vincent Youmans (Wildflower and No No Nanette) represent much more of a transition from the sentimentality of operetta to a more modern point-of-view. By the time Kern and Harbach (and Oscar Hammerstein II) wrote Roberta in 1933, the bridge to the future was well under way in Songs such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Yesterdays." And it didn't hurt that they were brought to the attention of the American public at large in the movie version of Roberta (1934), which in itself sharply contrasted the pre-World War I sensibility in the operetta flavored scenes featuring Irene Dunne (playing a displaced Russian Princess in Paris) with a much hipper milieu in those numbers handled by Astaire and Rodgers (playing American nightclub entertainers).

Harbach may have had a foot and a half in that older world but the half of a foot he planted in modern musical entertainment with songs like "She Didn't Say 'Yes'," (from the 1931 show The Cat and the Fiddle" and "I Won't Dance" (even before Dorothy Fields was called in to jazz it up a little) revealed that the jazz age was not completely lost on Harbach. Still, that many of his lyrics for songs from Roberta written by him and Oscar Hammerstein II had to be revised by the younger Fields in order to satisfy the au courant movie makers reflect Harbach's (and even Hammerstein's) transitional place between old and new.

Cafe Songbook Music-Video Cabinet: Otto Harbach

• The Desert Song
• She Didn't Say "Yes"
• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
• The Touch of Your Hand
• Yesterdays

Research Resources: Otto Harbach

• All Music.com (brief biography -- overview and credits)
• Amazon (publications by and about, recordings, videos, sheet music, etc.)
• DBOPM (Database Of Popular Music: song list; awards; hit songs; co-writers)
• Discogs.com (songwriting and arranging credits)
• Internet Broadway Database (Broadway productions and song credits)
• Internet Movie Database (brief biography, filmography, movie song credits)
• Indiana University Sheet Music Collection: Otto Harbach
• New York Public Library (catalog entries for books, personal papers, recordings, scores, etc.)
• The New York Times (articles about or related to the songwriter)
• Songwriters Hall of Fame (biography and song list)
• Wikipedia (Otto Harbach article)
• ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, New York: American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Cattell/Bowker, Fourth edition, 1980 (dates, collaborators, shows/movies, songs, etc., entry pp. 212-213)
• Michael Freedland, Jerome Kern: A Biography, New York: Stein and Day, 1978 -- multiple references to Harbach in this biography of one of his writing partners.
• Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern His Life and Music, New York: Oxford University Press (1980) -- multiple references to Harbach in this biography of one ohis writing partners.
• David Ewen. American Songwriters, An H. W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary. New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1987 (includes 146 bios of composers and lyricists). -- a wide selection of used copies is available at abebooks.com (entry pp. 206-208).
• Thomas S. Hischak. Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim. New York: Praeger, 1991 (pp. 19-24 and others).
• Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (Eds.), Reading Lyrics, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000 (biographical note plus lyrics for five Harbach songs).
• Ken Bloom. The American Songbook, The Singers, The Songwriters and the Songs. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2005 (entry--pp. ).
• Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern, (Yale Broadway Masters Series), New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006 -- multiple references to Harbach in this biography of one of his writing partners.
• Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (entry--p 324.).
• The Mounties: BingandNelsonFan
• "She Didn't Say Yes": stjn00

• Otto Harbach photo portrait: Wikipedia Commons / public domain

Notes

• Reading Lyrics , Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.
• "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" From Roberta [sheet music]
• "She Didn't Say 'Yes'" from The Cat and The Fiddle [Sheet Music]

Cite this page: Otto Harbach, songwriter: Reference Sources, Cafe Songbook, https://greatamericansongbook.net/pages/songwriters/h_i_sws/harbach_otto.html