In “Marry Me,” a 2022 romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson, a mega pop star has a relationship with a random fan who holds up a “Marry Me” sign at one of her concerts. The movie was promoted as a vehicle for Lopez’s songs and those of Maluma, a Colombian pop star who appears in the film as her erstwhile superstar fiancé, Bastian.
At a critical point in the plot, Charlie Gilbert (Wilson’s character) confesses that he likes musicals (he’s a “nerd,” so of course) and that his favorite song is from “Camelot”: “If Ever I Would Leave You,” with a lyric in which the singer proclaims he could never leave his love in any season—springtime, summer, winter, or fall.
He plays the song for Katarina “Kat” Valdez (played by Lopez), and for the first time in the film—and, one assumes, the first time in her life—Kat is transported by a deep feeling of romantic love, something her own songs and those of Bastian don’t even begin to touch. It isn’t just the words. Indeed, it is primarily the music.
If “Marry Me” was intended to put its stars’ pop songs in people’s heads, it should never have included “If Ever I Would Leave You.” I dare anyone to come away from the movie with anything other than it in their heads.
The difference between that song and the movie’s other material is the key distinction between standard popular songs of the past century and most songs of today. We’ll come back to what that distinction is, but first, meet the man whose music mightily and summarily levels every other song in “Marry Me”: Frederick Loewe.
The Man Behind the Music
Frederick Loewe (1901–1988) was born in Berlin to Viennese parents. His father sang operetta professionally, and as a little boy, Frederick learned by ear the piano accompaniments to his father’s arias. Conservatory education ensued, with the prodigy making his concerto debut at age 13.In 1924, his father traveled to New York City as part of an operetta production, and Frederick went with him. But when the father returned to Europe, the son remained in New York. He had begun to compose, and the Broadway musical, he believed, was his future.
The future took its time arriving—more than two decades. While striving to be the next George Gershwin, Loewe made his living at an unlikely range of professions. He played piano for silent films but also tried a stint at prizefighting. He moved out West for a year and delivered mail on horseback in Montana. Through it all, Loewe composed songs with various lyricists for a series of revues and the occasional book musical. Nothing caught on, though he persisted.
Finally, in 1942, he met a lyricist at a New York theater club who was looking for a composer. His name: Alan Jay Lerner. Lerner and Loewe eventually became a pairing to rival that of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Loewe’s Secret
What distinguished Loewe’s music, in addition to its unerring instinct for melody, was an uncanny ability to suggest time and place without cliché. “Brigadoon” takes place in a Scotland of myth and legend, and if you’re not careful you might just take “Go Home With Bonnie Jean” and “Come to Me, Bend to Me” as authentic Scottish folk songs.The contrast of roughness and longing in the old American West finds voice in Loewe’s melodies for “Hand Me Down That Can o' Beans” and “They Call the Wind Maria,” composed for “Paint Your Wagon.”
We shift to Edwardian England for Lerner and Loewe’s signature hit, “My Fair Lady,” with the restrained beauty of “On the Street Where You Live” and the sparkle, reminiscent of composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
“Gigi” transports us to La Belle Époque Paris with the can-can-like “The Night They Invented Champagne,” while “Camelot” plugs into the contemporary idea of what medieval music sounded like in “What Do the Simple Folks Do?”
The Melody of Harmony
The love song from “Camelot,” which went on to be the musical gem of the movie “Marry Me,” is a bit of an anomaly. “If Ever I Would Leave You” doesn’t try to sound quasi-medieval. If anything, it somehow combines the characteristic boldness of an operatic melody with the harmonic richness of a typical Broadway love song.This intersection of melody and harmony, in which the harmonic progressions—the chords—reveal the latent melodies concealed within them, is the quintessential musical language of old-school Broadway. The chord progression is central; the melody grows naturally out of it, shaped to match the rhythm of the lyric.
Harmony and Our Brains
In his astonishing book “The Master and His Emissary,” neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist essays the worlds of the left and right brain hemispheres. He points out that both hemispheres “do everything” but have different functions within a given area. In music, for example, the beat is the left hemisphere’s domain, and harmony belongs to the right hemisphere.
One could say that when Charlie Gilbert plays “If Ever I Would Leave You” in “Marry Me,” what happens to Kat amounts to a brain shift from left to right, from an incessant beat to the richness of harmony and its child, melody. Is it by chance that this also signaled change from a superficial relationship to a deeper one? Could music be as strong an influence on human culture as Plato said it was?
Perhaps we’ll find out. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will open a revival of “Camelot” this month (April). Advance publicity says the script will be updated and revised, with all the horrible potential for “historically corrected” content that entails. Not to worry. If they don’t touch Loewe’s music, if they don’t replace the melodies he somehow made to unfold effortlessly from a river of harmonies, the right brains of the audiences will light up like the Great White Way itself.
