Frederick Loewe

Frederick Loewe was a Broadway composer born in Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany, to Viennese parents Edmund and Rosa Loewe. His father, Edmund, was a Jewish operetta star who performed across Europe and in North and South America, most notably in the role of Count Danilo in the 1906 Berlin production of The Merry Widow. Loewe spent his childhood in Berlin, attending a Prussian cadet school between the ages of five and thirteen. He began playing piano by ear at an early age, assisting his father in rehearsals, and started composing songs at seven. His formal training took place at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, where he studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d'Albert, one year behind fellow student Claudio Arrau. The conservatory awarded him the Hollander Medal, and he performed as a concert pianist while still in Germany. At thirteen, he became the youngest piano soloist ever to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic.

In 1924, Loewe accompanied his father to New York City, where Edmund had received an offer to perform, and he arrived determined to write for Broadway. The transition proved difficult. He supported himself playing piano in German clubs in Yorkville and accompanying silent films in movie theaters. He became a regular at the Lambs Club, a gathering place for theater performers, producers, managers, and directors, which he credited with sustaining him during lean years. He later left a portion of his Brigadoon royalties to the Lambs Foundation. It was at the Lambs Club in 1942 that he met lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, the collaborator with whom he would build his most significant body of work. In 1931, Loewe had married Ernestine Zerline; the couple had no children and divorced in 1957.

Loewe and Lerner's first collaboration was a musical adaptation of Barry Connor's farce The Patsy, retitled Life of the Party, produced for a Detroit stock company, where it ran for nine weeks. That success led them to partner with Arthur Pierson on What's Up?, which opened on Broadway in 1943 and ran for 63 performances. Their next Broadway production, The Day Before Spring, ran from November 1945 to April 1946. Their breakthrough came with Brigadoon, a romantic fantasy set in a mystical Scottish village, directed by Robert Lewis with choreography by Agnes de Mille. The musical ran on Broadway from March 1947 to July 1948, won the 1947 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical, and produced the standards "Almost Like Being in Love" and "The Heather on the Hill." In 1951, the pair followed Brigadoon with Paint Your Wagon, a Gold Rush story that received a lukewarm critical reception but yielded several songs that gained lasting popularity, among them "Wand'rin' Star" and "They Call the Wind Maria."

My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, opened on Broadway in 1956 with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in the roles of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. The production was a major success both on Broadway and in London, and it won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1957. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer subsequently commissioned the pair to write the original film musical Gigi, released in 1958, which won nine Academy Awards including Best Picture. Their next Broadway musical, Camelot, opened in 1960 starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and Robert Goulet. The production generated an advance sale of three and a half million dollars, driven in part by a preview on The Ed Sullivan Show featuring Burton and Andrews, and ran for 873 performances.

Following Camelot, Loewe retired to Palm Springs, California, where he had purchased a home in 1960. He remained largely inactive as a composer until Lerner approached him to write additional songs for a 1973 stage adaptation of the Gigi film score. That project earned Loewe the Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1974. Also in 1974, Loewe and Lerner collaborated on a musical film adaptation of The Little Prince, based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's children's tale. The film was a critical failure, though its soundtrack and the film itself remained available on CD and DVD. Loewe and Lerner received nominations for the 1974 Academy Award for Best Song and Best Adapted or Original Song Score, the latter shared with Angela Morley and Douglas Gamley. The concert event Lerner and Loewe: A Very Special Evening also stands among his Broadway credits, alongside the play Great Lady.

Loewe was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 and into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979. He remained in Palm Springs until his death at the age of 86 from cardiac arrest. He was buried at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California, and was posthumously honored with a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in 1995.