For those too young to recall the original 1950s television programs or even the 1970s reruns of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, its theme song, “The Love Nest,” might be as unfamiliar as the composer's name, Louis Achilles Hirsch (1881–1924).Footnote ¹ Clearly, the initial popularity of “The Love Nest,” Hirsch's biggest hit, and the decades of television and movie exposure it enjoyed, were not enough to keep the composer's name alive. At long last, Louis Hirsch is receiving the undivided attention and name recognition he deserves in the CD under review, Midnight Frolic: The Broadway Theater Music of Louis A. Hirsch, performed by The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. This ensemble is directed by Rick Benjamin, who, as a bonus, includes in the CD booklet what is likely to be the most extensive biographical essay on the composer and his work to date. Over the past decade the Paragon has established a reputation in a series of New World recordings that rescue various ragtime writers and other popular composers of the 1910s and early 1920s, including James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and “Members of the Legendary Clef Club” (Black Manhattan, 2003), Joe Jordan (From Barrelhouse to Broadway, 2006), Cohan (You're a Grand Old Rag, 2008, and reviewed in this journal, volume 6, number 2), and Benjamin's historical reconstruction of Scott Joplin's “ragtime” opera Treemonisha (2011).

With the exception of Treemonisha, in each case Benjamin relies exclusively on original orchestrations from the vast storehouse of materials he had acquired as a teenager, and, with two augmented exceptions—the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 and Going Up (1917)—the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra adopts the standard “eleven and piano ensemble” common to theater orchestras of the day (two violins, viola, cello, bass, flute/piccolo, clarinet, two cornets, trombone, and one percussion player for drums, bells, and mallets). Of the seventeen tracks, eleven are sung straightforwardly and engagingly in what might be called classic musical theater “restoration style” (i.e., about as far as one can depart from “American Idol” style) by soprano Bernadette Boerckel and baritone Colte Julian, either as solos or duets. The CD booklet does not provide words to these songs, but the diction is exemplary. Although generally understated and exhibiting slightly more leisurely tempos than those usually heard on actual period recordings (compare, for example the Paragon rendition of “The Love Nest” with that of John Steel's 1920 recording, readily available on YouTube), these songs are impeccable performances of a missing repertoire to welcome and savor.

Benjamin's richly informative thirty-four pages of biographical discourse include a comprehensive list of shows and a selected bibliography and discography. Most of Benjamin's prose predecessors start off by citing Hirsch's birth year inaccurately as 1887, and before they are finished express their regret at how much the musical world has lost by Hirsch's early death in 1924. The final sentence of the most recent Wikipedia entry, for example, notes that “the composer died in New York City of pneumonia at the age of 36.” Gerald Bordman, first alone and then in tandem with Thomas S. Hischak in The Oxford Companion to the American Theatre, and Kurt Gänzl in The Musical Theatre previously offered Hirsch's correct birth year of 1881, but in the recent Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television (2008), the generally reliable Hischak (without Bordman) follows the Encyclopedia of Popular Music (the only biographical reference source currently offered in Oxford Music Online) and lists the 1887 date. This point is not minor. At thirty-six, a composer, aside from perhaps Mozart or Schubert, can be excused for not living long enough to achieve his or her potential, although some Broadway composers have achieved greatness by that age; at forty-three it's harder to make a similar claim stick.

Although Benjamin might be accused of overstatement and an advocacy that comes close to special pleading on behalf of Hirsch's pioneering status, modernity, and overall historic importance and artistry, he is persuasive in making the case that “by the late 1910s Hirsch was one of America's most popular composers” (2) and perhaps also that Hirsch “was the link from Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan on to Jerome Kern and George Gershwin” (3). But Hirsch died before achieving a legacy to match Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910), Berlin's “Alexander's Ragtime Band” (1911) and pioneering ragtime musical Watch Your Step (1914), Kern's “They Didn't Believe Me” (1914) and Princess Shows such as Very Good Eddie (1915) and Oh, Boy! (1917), or Gershwin's “Swanee” (1919). And by the time he died a few months after a twenty-six-year-old Gershwin debuted Rhapsody in Blue and a few months before Gershwin's first major hit show Lady, Be Good!, Hirsch, who had by then produced less than a handful of lasting songs (of which “The Love Nest” remains the most durable), had played his important transition role and quickly exited the musical stage. By way of contrast, at forty-three Kern was about to create Show Boat, Cole Porter Anything Goes, Richard Rodgers Oklahoma!, and, to recycle a classic Tom Lehrer quip, Gershwin had been dead for four years.

Unmistakably, although Hirsch, in my view, lacked the individuality of these contemporaries, he possessed considerable craft and remains a significant Broadway composer of his era. In addition to his shows (about forty) and his many successful songs, he also served his profession as a founding and later a Board member of The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). His music for The Passing Show of 1912 helped launch Jake Shubert's yearly attempt to rival Ziegfeld's Follies. After a highly successful two-year sojourn in London, Hirsch returned and in 1914 joined Ziegfeld, beginning with the impresario's launching of New York's first “night club,” the Midnight Frolic (the name Benjamin appropriated for his album title). The following year Hirsch created almost half of the songs in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915, including the charmingly staged long-distance telephone hit “Hello, Frisco,” described by the New York Times on 6 January 1918 as “so lilting a melody that it became one of the great nuisances of the age.” He also contributed songs for Ziegfeld's 1916, 1918, and 1922 editions. In the 1916 Follies Hirsch shared the stage with both Kern and Berlin who each contributed one song (Berlin also contributed two songs in 1918). When Kern decided to abandon the historic Princess Shows he had successfully composed with Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse since 1915, Hirsch, who had lived next door to the Kerns between the ages of seven and sixteen, stepped in with Kern's blessing to write the music for the last and today least-known offering in the series. After a reasonably successful and profitable run, Oh, My Dear! (1918) was quickly forgotten. In his notes, Benjamin defends the show's reputation and praises Hirsch's score (as he does nearly all of the composer's output), but unfortunately chose not to include any of its music.

Most of Hirsch's songs were composed for revues, but the years between 1917 and 1921 exhibit a shift in emphasis towards the potentially less ephemeral book musical, most notably his longest-running show Going Up (1917) and Mary (1920), both of which are represented by instrumental medleys in Midnight Frolic with the two big Mary hit songs also receiving individual attention by Boerckel and Julian. Going Up, which introduced “Tickle Toe” (heard in an instrumental “highlights” track), a song the New York Times described in the Hirsch profile quoted earlier as “the first melody of the season which has a chance of taking the town by storm,” was revived by the Goodspeed Opera House and ran for forty-nine Broadway performances in 1976. Mary (1920), often placed among the “Cinderella” trilogy along with Harry Tierney's Irene (1919) and Kern's Sally (1920), offered a light but sturdy plot, a catchy syncopated ragtime title song and, of course “The Love Nest.” The forty-year exposure launched by John Steel and Al Hickman, and by the long-running Burns and Gracie show (and reruns of the latter), granted Hirsch an extended, albeit anonymous, presence in the American musical consciousness. One year after the composer's death, F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby asked his character Ewing Klipspringer to serenade Jay Gatsby's love interest Daisy Buchanan on the piano with a rendition of “The Love Nest.” With Benjamin's recorded love fest, Hirsch has finally achieved a musical as well as literary immortality.