Gary Perlman wrote from Tokyo to clarify that business in Tuesday's SteynPosts about whether or not Sinatra ever sang "A Beautiful Friendship" (he didn't; Gary was thinking of Keely Smith with the Basie band), but he adds a PS:
I hope Theodore Bikel's passing will prompt a replay of your long-ago column on 'Edelweiss', one of the best musical essays I've ever read.
Theodore Bikel died on Tuesday at the age of 91. He began his career in Mandatory Palestine in the play Tevye the Milkman and then, between 1969 and 2010, played Tevye in the musical Fiddler On The Roof in over 2,000 performances, more than any other actor. He worked steadily in theatre, TV and movies for three-quarters of a century, and was also a folk singer, and songwriter, and guitarist. Back in the Nineties, he and I took part in a big BBC TV Century of Cinema documentary about The Sound Of Music, a show about which he had had somewhat mixed feelings back in 1959 - because he felt the role of Baron von Trapp didn't make the most of his talents. It was Mary Martin's star turn, so she got all the numbers. And then, at almost the very last minute, during the Boston try-out, a few days before they went to Broadway, Rodgers & Hammerstein decided Theodore Bikel needed a solo after all. So they wrote him a brand new song that sounded as if it had been around forever. The column Mr Perlman refers to can be found here, but this is the section about Mr Bikel's part in the last lyric Oscar Hammerstein II ever wrote:
After watching the show in Boston and with only a week and a half till they moved on to Broadway, Rodgers and Hammerstein felt there was something lacking in the score. The plot of The Sound Of Music is often mocked - captain meets nun in Nazi Austria - but it works if you get the underlying emotions right. Baron von Trapp, whose family has lived on this land for generations, is facing a terrible decision: The Anschluss is transforming his country, and he has no choice but to leave it. But for that to have any impact on an audience you have to understand that this man loves his native land, and that fleeing it will exact a toll. How to express that? A song obviously. But what kind of song? Theodore Bikel, the actor and folk singer, had been cast in the role, and could certainly relate to the von Trapp experience, because he had lived his own version of it: An Austrian Jew, he had been born in Vienna but his family had escaped to British Palestine after the Anschluss. More to the point, he could also strum the guitar. So Dick and Oscar figured they should write a number Baron von Trapp could play live on stage - an "old" Austrian folk song, to be performed in Act Two as part of the Trapp family's singing act at the Kaltzberg Festival.
So fifty years ago, in a room at the Ritz-Carlton furnished with a piano, the last ever Rodgers & Hammerstein song was written. As always in this partnership, the words came first:
Edelweiss
Edelweiss
Every morning you greet me
Small and white
Clean and bright
You look happy to meet me...
It's such a simple idea. But the von Trapps have already decided to flee Austria, and, even if the "audience" at the Kaltzberg Festival and the various bigshot Nazis don't know that, we - the audience at the play - most certainly do... Hammerstein was a sure enough dramatist to know that, when the captain starts singing about a simple white flower, everyone in the audience would understand how much he loves his country. Edelweiss grows up high, in rocky terrain north of 6,000 feet or so, and it's long been a symbolic bloom in the Alps. In 1907, Franz Josef made it the official emblem of the Habsburg Empire's mountain troops, and it remains their insignia in the Austrian army to this day. On the other hand, the Wehrmacht and the SS also made it the official emblem for their mountain troops. Nonetheless, it took a couple of New Yorkers in a Boston hotel room to wring the full symbolic juice out of the flower. Earlier in the show, Gretl presents a small bouquet of edelweiss to Elsa Schraeder upon her visit to the von Trapp home, and so the authors decided to extend its metaphorical power: Edelweiss is the Austria that will endure and, when the winter of tyranny melts, will flower anew. As always, Hammerstein's deft, memorable imagery is hopeful: "Blossom of snow/May you bloom and grow..." It's a small song for a big moment, and Rodgers set it to a wistful waltz tune, simple and folk-like but very affecting.
It went into the show in Boston, and was an instant success. In a production otherwise dominated by its female star, Mary Martin, and a score tailored to her needs, it was Theodore Bikel's only solo, and audiences loved it. In the film, for Christopher Plummer, who doesn't play the guitar or indeed sing (he was dubbed by Bill Lee), the arrangement loses something of its simplicity. But Ernest Lehmann's screenplay gives even more weight to the song, and makes it a symbol of renewal not just for a nation but in a personal sense, too. In the show, it's heard once - in that Second Act scene of the Trapp family's performance at the festival. In the film, it's sung twice - first at the family home by Baron von Trapp and his children in a scene intended to show that Sister Maria's presence has not only rekindled his love for music but reconnected him to his family; and then secondly at what in the film is now the Salzburg Festival. In its reprise, the song is a show of defiance, not just by the von Trapps but by other patriots in the festival crowd. It's similar to the moment in Casablanca when everyone at Rick's starts bellowing out the Marseillaise to the fury of the Germans. And, at the Salzburg Festival, because "Edelweiss" is a beloved Austrian folk song, everyone knows the words:
Blossom of snow
May you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow forever
Edelweiss
Edelweiss
Bless my homeland forever.
Not long after R&H wrote the song, Theodore Bikel was leaving the theatre when he found a fan and fellow immigrant waiting at the stage door for his autograph: "I love that 'Edelweiss'," said the theatregoer. "Of course, I have known it a long time, but only in German."
Not for the first time, Hammerstein had done too good a job. Just as his "Ol' Man River" for Show Boat is assumed by many to be an authentic Negro spiritual, so "Edelweiss" is assumed to be an authentic Austrian folk song. Not so. In both cases, a great craftsman manufactured them to solve a structural problem with the storytelling. But he did it so well that they have become for real what they were only intended to simulate. Some years ago "Edelweiss" was played at the White House, at a state dinner for Austria's President Kirschschlager, and everyone but the Austrians stood up for the national anthem. Actually, no. The current Austrian anthem is "Land der Berge, Land am Strome", but in a curious example of how the lines between reality and showbusiness blur, among the guests at that White House banquet was the elderly Maria von Trapp - not Julie Andrews, not Mary Martin, but the real Baroness von Trapp.
A few months later, when Hammerstein died, Theodore Bikel was on stage every night on Broadway still singing "Edelweiss", and he noticed something about the song. "This dying man writing the very last lyric of his career," he said, "the very last word he wrote was 'forever'":
Blossom of snow
May you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow forever
Edelweiss
Edelweiss
Bless my homeland forever.
The song has bloomed and grown in the 56 years since, but Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote it because they had a folk singer in the cast who could play a guitar and figured they should give him a folk song. He did a great job. Theodore Bikel, rest in peace.