Was ‘Over the Rainbow’ originally a song of Norway?
NewsClaims have been made in Hollywood that the torch song of Wizard of Oz was plagiarised from an obscure Scandinavian woman, who fortuitously registered copyright in the tune.
That the composer later turned into a vehement Nazi adds further spice to the story:
The similarities between Signe Lund’s Opus 38 and composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” cannot be dismissed. Though there are notable variations (the former is in a minor key, for example, and follows a different time signature), the melodies of the main themes are nearly identical. Decades after the deaths of Arlen and Harburg, it is impossible to unequivocally determine whether the similarities are unintended or deliberate
Read on here.
That picture is a production still from “Meet Me in St. Louis” of Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, orchestrated like a Bach chorale by the great Conrad Salinger.
Well let’s hope that Lund’s op. 38 can be uploaded to IMSLP. Only five of her works are posted and I for one would like to play this. And Stephen Schwartz’s explanation is likely correct. The subconscious mind plays tricks on composers all the the time.
Su kaçağı tespiti için kullanılan bazı yaygın teknolojiler arasında termal kameralar, nem ölçerler ve ses dinleme cihazları bulunur. https://www.sektorel.com.tr/firma-rehberi/kadikoy-su-tesisatcisi-28
The resemblance is a brief, but noticeable one.
But consider this… if that piece was published in the US ( not clear) in 1910, it’s possible an unrenewed copyright would have expired in time for Arlen to re-use a portion of it in 1938, whether he was aware of the similarity or not.
Before a certain year, there was no copyright law, and also no copyright on foreign publications. But to suggest that Harold Arlen needed to borrow ideas from anyone at all is laughable.
The theme from Lawrence of Arabia sounds a lot like the first movement of the Lalo piano concerto.
So much music has inspired composers over time. Can one suggest Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto subconsciously affected one of the themes in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, or perhaps the piano entrance in the second movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with the trill followed with an ascending scale to B-Flat Major affecting the opening of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? Was George in attendance of the 1921 NY performance of Prokofiev playing his third concerto? We hear music, it stays in our memories, and often innocent infringement can occur.
and if you sing “(There’ll be) Bluebirds over…..” underneath “Somewhere over ….” you’ll spot an interesting connection.
Did Vera’s Walter Kent ( 1941) steal that from Judy’s Harold Arlen (1939)?
In a similar vein, the famous song “Avalon” co-written in 1920 by Al Jolson, also had its share of bad luck.
I encourage you to listen to the total ressemblance of Giacomo Puccini’s aria E lucevan le stelle, from the opera Tosca, starting at the 1:00 mark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Al_Jolson_-_Avalon_(1920).ogg
Puccini’s publishers sued the song’s composers in 1921 for use of the melody, and were awarded $25,000 and all subsequent royalties of the song by the court.
To quote Stephen Schwartz in the Signe Lund article that is in the link above:
“These things happen all the time. More often than not, they’re inadvertent. There’s a little two-bar thing in one of my songs from Pippin, which years later I discovered, to my horror, was very similar to something in [the Puccini opera] La Bohème and was totally not deliberate. But, of course, these things are in your ears.”
Isn’t the accompanying photo from ‘Meet me in St. Louis’ and not WOO?
Stravinsky said something like mediocre composers plagiarize, while great composers steal.
In The Red Shoes, the ballet empresario tells the young composer whose teacher has stolen his work, “It is worth remembering, that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from.”
“Over the Rainbow” written after the film had wrapped when Arlen, Harburg and some of the production team felt Garland needed a torch song. It is fatuous to bring this matter up at this point, but even more bizarre is Sam Arlen still claiming he was Arlen’s son from birth, when he was in fact his nephew, the son of Arlen’s younger brother Jerry and his second wife Sherine Altman who passed when Sam was 2. Sam against his father’s initial wishes was adopted by Harold, who never had children with his wife Anya. Harold’s lawyer, thought it would be best if Harold would adopt Sam as his son when Sam was 22, so that the intellectual property after his death would flow to him more easily. It was a business transaction, not meant for a tall tale to be concocted. Read Ed Jablonski’s biography of Arlen, “Rhythm, Rainbow & Blues Harold Arlen” for the full scoop.
The most fascinating thing in the article is the battle over getting the song into the movie. Sometimes the experts are wrong, including people like Victor Fleming and Mervyn LeRoy. I wonder if either one of them went up to Harburg, Arlen and Freed and said, “You were absolutely right.”
That picture is from Meet Me in St. Louis, by the way.
What about Bernstein’s “THERE’S A PLACE FOR US” from West Side Story sounding very much like an exerpt from R. Straus’ s Burleske or the Intro to the Star Trek theme resembling a transition theme in the 1st movement of Mahler 7.
Yes, or opening from “Tonight” from WSS which is very close to Brahms Fa majeur cello sonata