Photo: Patrick Riviere / Getty Images
The beloved characters and familiar plot points were mostly in the original children’s book, from the Kansas farm girl in sparkly slippers transported to Munchkin land by a terrible tornado, to the wicked witch, the brainless scarecrow, the heartless tin woodcutter, and the cowardly lion he meets once he gets there.
But what is missing, of course, in Frank Baum’ssuccessful novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is the music that helped make those characters so beloved and those plot points so familiar.
First published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was adapted numerous times for stage and screen and was even set to music before 1939. However, it was that year’s film adaptation that earned Baum’s work a permanent place not only in film history, but also in music history. .
Lyricist Yip Harburg and composer Harold Arlen were both seasoned professionals in songwriting before joining in 1938 to write the original songs for The Wizard of Oz, though they had worked very little together.
Harburg’s best-known credits to date were “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” (1931) and “It’s Only A Paper Moon” (1933), and Arlen’s were “Get Happy” (1929) and “Stormy Weather” (1933). His first collaboration was in the Broadway musical Hooray why! (1937), which produced the now-standard “Down With Love.” The success of The Wizard of Oz, however, would quickly eclipse those earlier achievements.
Judy Garland’s signature song, “Over The Rainbow,” not only earned Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg the Oscar for Best Song at the Academy Awards for 1939, but which quickly became an indispensable standard in the American Songbook, and was later recognized as the #1 song on the “Songs of the Century” list compiled in 2001 by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In the first place, however, Arlen and Harburg’s songs achieved their main goal with flying colors, conveying and deepening the impact emotional part of the story in the movie they were written for.
As innovative and impressive as the production values of The Wizard of Oz were in 1939, it is impossible to imagine that the film would earn its place in the popular imagination without songs such as “The Lollipop Guild”, “If I Only Had A Brain” and “We are going to see the magician”.
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