Irving Berlin

Irving Berlin: America's Untrained Composer

He could not read sheet music. He was a limited pianist who could only play in the key of F-sharp, and used a custom piano fitted with a transposing lever to reach the others. He dictated his songs to a musical secretary. Over sixty years this man wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, twenty Broadway shows and fifteen Hollywood films, put twenty-five songs at number one, and produced both "God Bless America" and "White Christmas" — the latter the best-selling single of all time, with more than fifty million records sold.

Cherry Street

He was born Israel Isidore Beilin on 11 May 1888 in Tyumen, Siberia, in the Russian Empire; the family came from the Jewish village of Tolochin and fled the pogroms, sailing from Antwerp aboard the SS Rhynland and arriving at Ellis Island on 14 September 1893, when he was five. His father Moses, a cantor, found work in a kosher meat market and died when Berlin was thirteen; his mother Lena later worked as a midwife. He was one of eight children, and the family settled on Cherry Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He was a newspaper boy at eight, left school at about thirteen, and made his living as a singing waiter and song plugger in Bowery saloons. He never took a piano lesson. He returned to those streets all his life, and said, "Every man should have a Lower East Side in his life."

Alexander's Ragtime Band

His first published song, "Marie from Sunny Italy," appeared in 1907 and earned him thirty-three cents. In 1911 "Alexander's Ragtime Band" became the musical sensation of the decade, popularising the vogue for ragtime and establishing him as a major composer at twenty-three. It also brought his first controversy: one contemporary critic called the song a "public menace," declaring that "hysteria is the form of insanity that an abnormal love for ragtime seems to produce." *Watch Your Step* in 1914 gave him his first complete score. In 1912 he married Dorothy Goetz, who died that July of typhoid contracted in Havana; his first ballad, "When I Lost You," came out of that grief. Drafted into the Army in 1917, he wrote *Yip Yip Yaphank* at Camp Upton. In 1921 he co-founded the Music Box Theatre with Sam Harris at 239 West 45th Street.

The Standards

In 1925 he married the heiress Ellin Mackay after a courtship her father opposed; "Always" was written for her, and became a wedding standard. "Blue Skies" in 1926 celebrated their first daughter's birth. "Puttin' On the Ritz" arrived in 1928 an instant standard, its chorus intricately syncopated. "God Bless America" had been written twenty years earlier and filed away before he pulled it out in 1938; it became, after the Second World War, a second national anthem. "White Christmas" (1942) won the Academy Award. "Easter Parade," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "Cheek to Cheek," "Heat Wave" and "Supper Time" belong to the same run. *Annie Get Your Gun* (1946) was his most successful score and his biggest box office hit; his last Broadway musical, *Mr. President*, came in 1962, and "An Old-Fashioned Wedding," written for a 1966 revival, was among his final compositions.

The Discipline

His publishing manager Saul Bornstein described a routine: it was "a ritual for Berlin to write a complete song, words and music, every day." Berlin himself did not believe in inspiration; he said his songs were the result of work. He started after dinner and wrote until four or five in the morning, attended rehearsals during the day, and brought the new material back at night. His daughter said he usually "sweated blood" over songs, which made the burst that produced several *Annie Get Your Gun* numbers in a single weekend an anomaly rather than a method. His theory of the craft was characteristically plain: "it's the lyrics that makes a song a hit, although the tune... is what makes it last." And on his audience: "My ambition is to reach the heart of the average American... My public is the real people."

The Patriot

Berlin donated the profits of *This Is the Army*, the 1942–43 stage show and film, to Army Emergency Relief, touring military bases worldwide for three and a half years without salary. The show featured the first integrated division army unit in the United States. He gave the royalties from "Any Bonds Today?" and "I Paid My Income Tax Today" away too, and assigned all "God Bless America" royalties to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, generating over ten million dollars. He rejected tax shelter advice: "I want to pay taxes. I love this country." Of the song itself he said, "To me, 'God Bless America' was not just a song but an expression of my feeling toward the country to which I owe what I have and what I am." He was honoured in 1944 by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for advancing its aims of eliminating religious and racial conflict, and named in 1949 one of twelve most outstanding Americans of Jewish faith by the Young Men's Hebrew Association — though he was ethnically and culturally Jewish and religiously agnostic. His civil rights sympathies made him a target of continuous FBI investigation under J. Edgar Hoover. He voted for both parties and wrote "I Like Ike" for Eisenhower.

Why Irving Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on craft, not intellect, and the craft is worth specifying because his technical limitations were extreme. Unable to read or notate music and able to play in only one key, Berlin composed by ear and dictation, which meant every melody had to survive purely as something remembered and sung. What he possessed was an almost infallible instinct for the shape a phrase must take to lodge permanently in a listener's memory, combined with lyric writing of such transparency that the words seem not to have been written at all. Ronald Reagan called it a "musical genius" that "delighted and stirred millions." Jerome Kern put the case at its highest: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music — he is American music. Emotionally, he honestly absorbs the vibrations emanating from the people, manners and life of his time." George Gershwin called him "the greatest songwriter that has ever lived" and credited him with being the first to free American song from what he called nauseating sentimentality.

The honest counter-case is that this is a genius of popular reach rather than of musical complexity. Berlin wrote no symphonies, developed no harmonic language, and by his own account did not believe in inspiration at all — he described his output as work, produced on a nightly schedule, and his daughter's phrase was "sweated blood." His songs are simple by construction, since simplicity was the point; the composer Douglas Moore's tribute is that he "caught and immortalized in his songs what we say, what we think about, and what we believe," which is a claim about representation, not innovation. A federal appeals court, ruling against him in his losing copyright suit against *Mad* magazine between 1961 and 1964, noted pointedly that "even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin" could not own a poetic meter. Volume plus instinct plus relentless discipline is the honest formula.

Legacy

Berlin died in his sleep in Manhattan on 22 September 1989, aged 101, at the Beekman Place house he had lived in since 1947; Broadway dimmed its marquees. Ellin, his wife of sixty-three years, had died in July 1988. His honours included the Medal for Merit from Truman in 1945, a Tony for *Call Me Madam* in 1951, the Congressional Gold Medal from Eisenhower in 1954, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1968, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gerald Ford in 1977. His daughters gave 750,000 items to the Library of Congress. After 11 September 2001, senators stood on the Capitol steps and sang his song.