Posted 7:32 PM by Gene

Today, thanks to something of a spinoff of that now-vanished soundtrack blog, I came across one of the most remarkable recordings I've ever heard: the great Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick singing demos of Tevye -- an early version of Fiddler on the Roof. To say Broadway songwriters are their own best interpreters is a commonplace but these two outdid themselves; this is the best rendition of the score there is, yes, better even than Zero, because the pair wear their emotions on their sleeves, and Fiddler is nothing if not emotional. One does not know where to start -- perhaps with the fact that eight of the fifteen songs were cut, and they were too rambling and ungainly to have worked on Broadway; Bock and Harnick were thinking things through in music. Although not all the music was cut: the opening, "We've Never Missed a Sabbath Yet", contains the germ of "Tradition", the Jerome Robbins masterpiece that made the show. Yet Tevye may have been a stronger, more nuanced work than the Hallmark card it became. Bock and Harnick tried to put a little too much Sholom Aleichem in, which might explain some of the ungainliness, but only in the songs that survived is there that lazy authorial contentment that ultimately does it in. Listening to "Far From the Home I Love" I regretted that a truly inspired songwriter did not create the achingly tragic number the lyrics deserved; the melody could have fit into one of their revues. (Their limitations helped end the partnership, which wrote only two more shows before splitting acrimoniously in 1970.) And the closing number "Get Thee Out" has a note of hopeful defiance and no tug at the tear ducts. Heroic Russian Jews wouldn't fit but the eventual ending is not merely "Tradition"'s antithesis but its negation. Fiddler on the Roof is fine Kosher comfort food; it could have been immortal. But then it might not have been immortal.

P. S. We discovered Sony tacked five of the team's demos onto the '67 London cast album (Goddard Lieberson wanted to record the Broadway show but Bill Paley thought it too much of a downer), but while they appear to be from the same tapes (and they both have rotten sound) they may not be from this source. Now that Sony owns the RCA catalog outright now's the time for the reissue Fiddler deserves -- including all these demo tracks.