Otto Harbach

The names of some songwriters are lost to time. A lot of them, really. I know songs that date back centuries, and no one knows who wrote them. What’s a little more interesting is those songs that are from the modern day, that everyone knows, and that no one even stops to consider might have been written by someone. Oh, I know the average person doesn’t really stop to think about songwriters much, but how many people know who wrote “Smoke Gets Into Your Eyes”?

In many cases, the answer is “Otto Harbach.” He was the child of Danish immigrant parents who changed their family name of Christiansen to Hauerbach, after the farm where they worked in Utah. No, I don’t know why. Otto graduated from Knox College, where he befriended Carl Sandburg, and then moved to Walla Walla, Washington, where he taught English at Whitman College. He moved to New York, initially to do grad work at Columbia, but he dropped out and became a newspaper reporter. He couldn’t afford his expenses at Columbia.

How did a man like that end up writing “I Won’t Dance”? One day, he attended a musical and fell in love with the genre. He met and began collaborating with Karl Hoschna, and their songs began attracting attention. They had their first hit with “Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine,” from their musical Three Twins. Hoschna died in 1911 at the age of 35. Producer Arthur Hammerstein paired Harbach with multiple other composers; Harbach actually became Harbach during World War I, because it sounded less German.

And then Hammerstein had a nephew who did a spot of composing. Harbach worked on several shows with that Oscar Hammerstein II kid, serving as something of a mentor for him. They wrote a handful of musicals together, including Rose-Marie. He also worked with Jerome Kern, among other things creating the show No, No, Nanette. However, in no small part due to the work of Hammerstein and Kern, the public’s taste in musicals changed, and the operetta-influenced works at which Harbach excelled were out of fashion, and so was he. He spent the last thirty years of his life in retirement.

How have we forgotten? In addition to the names already mentioned, Harbach worked with George Gershwin, Herbert Stothart (who wrote the music for the 1939 The Wizard of Oz), and other names you wouldn’t recognize but whose work you would. A hundred years ago, Otto Harbach was one of the biggest names on Broadway. Even today, songs of his are being performed—at least three on The Muppet Show, admittedly a while ago but still. He’s yet another person ideal for this column.