Arts & Culture
The Hart of the matter
Published 12 February 1999
Jazz byRichard Cook
Do you know this song ? "Behold the way our fine feathered friend his virtue doth parade/Thou knowest not my dim-witted friend, a picture thou hast made." Not some ancient sonnet, but the most modern of modern love songs: "My Funny Valentine", by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and the most frequently sung song at this time of year. Those lines are the ones that commence the verse, which is hardly ever sung, and they betray something of Larry Hart's pretensions to a bard's immortality (he also wrote "Thou Swell"). When the chorus comes in, the mood of the song changes altogether, and an ironic spoof on romantic love becomes a tender though handsomely eloquent note to an ugly-duckling lover, whose lack of perfect looks is something to be cherished rather than chastised. It must have been a sentiment close to Hart, a diminutive, troubled soul. "Your looks are laughable, unphotographable/ Yet you're my favourite work of art."
While popular song is about nothing but the art of love, there have been surprisingly few other pretenders to the throne of the Valentine's Day tune, and none as fine as this. Rodgers and Hart put it in the score for their 1937 show Babes in Arms, a sort of backstage musical which has scarcely survived as an individual piece yet was full of their best work. It is more often remembered as an MGM movie vehicle for Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland - although, incredibly, the producers chose to drop the song from the film in favour of a group of tunes from other writers. Perhaps they were just being cautious: it is a difficult, perplexing song.
For one thing, it is not at all like the straightforward style of the popular AABA tune of the day. The form of the chorus suggests a single meditative line, which Rodgers cleverly evolves through a series of modulations and key changes. Hart's words are an almost accusatory list of lover's questions: "Is your figure less than Greek?/Is your mouth a little weak/When you open it to speak?/Are you smart?" What a cruel pageant of posers for an object of desire. No wonder the mollifying lines of "Don't change a hair for me/Not if you care for me" seem like a hasty attempt to soothe the object of affection.
The wit and deftness of the song both belie its age and underline it. What tunesmith of today would attempt something so ambiguous and urbane? A negative answer is scarcely ameliorated by the protest that songwriting is in another time and place now. All right: but even if such old-fashioned craftsmanship has gone out of pop, why should it have surrendered the refinement that was almost a given among the finest songwriters of yesterday? Anyone who came up with "My Funny Valentine" today would be accorded a maverick genius tag; when it was written, it stood merely as a part of a Broadway score by two hardworking players of the day.
It's a difficult song to sing - the subtle shifts in the melody make it easy to fumble - and there is perhaps no single deathless interpretation of the song. Ella Fitzgerald, in her peerless Rodgers and Hart Songbook collection, sang it as perfectly as anyone ever has, but it takes a certain vulnerability to get to the heart of the matter which Ella never quite succumbed to. Chet Baker, the star-crossed trumpeter-singer, came close to making it his own, with many interpretations from the 1950s onwards, but his artless croon is so pale that it skates over Hart's lyric. The most affecting version I know has no singing on it at all. Jimmy Giuffre arranged the song for a quintet of clarinet, oboe, cor anglais, bassoon and double bass, for an almost forgotten album called The Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet. He brought out all the poignancy in the melody without making it seem unduly melancholy, and the result is magical. It is, after all, a consoling song, which ends on an assurance: each day is Valentine's Day.
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