Fiddler on the Roof

The secret of its success:
why we all love Fiddler

A Jewish milkman, living in a Russian village in the Ukraine, loses his daughters to various men and is then forced to emigrate to America. Why should a Broadway musical play with such a story be a huge success, not only in New York, but also in Jerusalem, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Paris? The most heart-rendering subjects have often received the musical treatment and gone on to become incredibly successful hit shows. But, while there is a certain amount of glamour involved in the transformation of a cockney flower girl to a society princess, or in the epic story of showbiz folk on the Mississippi, or even in the imaginative song-and-dance show performed by a bunch of felines, Fiddler on the Roof stands, with the exception of Les Misérables, as possibly the least glamorous musical ever. So why should it be so popular? Why should any of us want to sit in a theatre and watch the hard-knock life of Tevye and the rest of the shtetl?

It is less than surprising that the show should be so popular in America. The real-life pogroms delivered an enormous number of Russian Jews to Ellis Island, which took the world’s unloved and unwanted, and poured them into the melting pot which is the USA. Many of these Jewish families settled in the Jewish quarters of New York. From these inauspicious beginnings came many of the finest popular songwriters of the twentieth century. It was the Baline family who arrived from Siberia in 1894, whose young son Isiah changed his first name to Irving and his surname to Berlin and lived to be America’s granddaddy of popular song.

The year 1894 also saw the arrival of Morris Gershovitz from St Petersburg, who had immigrated in order to marry his sweetheart, Rose Burskin. Once safely wed, the couple produced four sons, among them George and Ira, and they changed their name to Gershwin. Another young Jewish immigrant couple, this time from Germany, met on the Lower East Side in 1886. His European name, Hertz, soon became Hart. Their son Lorenz teamed up with the son of an immigrant Jewish family, Richard Rodgers to write over 1000 songs, many of which are standards of the American stage. The list of Jewish immigrants turned songsmiths seems to be endless: Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Dorothy Fields, E Y ‘Yip’ Harburg, Leonard Bernstein…if you took away all the Broadway shows written by Jewish songwriters in the past century, there would barely have been a musical on the Great White Way. And just imagine a world without 'Send in the Clowns', 'Manhattan', 'The Man I Love', 'Over the Rainbow', 'You’ll Never Walk Alone', 'Oh! What a Beautiful Morning', 'Hey Big Spender!'…Strangely enough, practically the only exception to the ‘you must be Jewish to write songs’ rule was Cole Porter, and yet he wrote the most Jewish music of them all, with songs like 'Begin the Beguine', 'Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye' and 'Night and Day'.

In their book Song by Song, Ned Sherrin and Caryl Brahms suggest that the reason why so many first and second generation Jewish Americans successfully took to lyric-writing was because they enjoyed discovering a language that their parents barely understood. In later years Morris Gershwin referred to 'Embraceable Up' as “that song about me” on the strength of the line

“Come to Poppa,
Come to Poppa Do!”

But this theory about Jewish lyricists ignores the success of their music-writing partners. It doesn’t explain why George Gershwin’s music is every bit as popular as his brother Ira’s lyrics. Many Jewish composers went to Hollywood where their tunes provided the underscoring to so many of the first “talkies”. It is worth bearing in mind that Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer is the story of a Cantor’s son who becomes a musical showbiz star. Cartoons such as Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry often have soundtracks with remarkable Jewish music - normally it was music being played by Jews who had left Eastern Europe just a few years earlier. Surely the key to the popularity of Jewish music lies in the way that the Jewish people have been consistently scattered across the globe, taking their music with them wherever they have gone.

Every culture has its own specific musical style and the Jewish musical language has permeated the American popular song for a century. It has become a major ingredient in the language of musical theatre. Stephen Sondheim once said that “If you can hum it you've probably heard it before” - that we find so much music by Jewish writers hummable is surely because wherever we live in the Western world we are likely to be familiar with Jewish music.Jewish music has its own musical scale, which is different from the Western European major and minor scales. It a different form of the minor scale, and it is the use of this pattern of notes that gives the music its particularly “Jewish” flavour. Along with the African rhythms introduced by the black population, the Jewish minor scale forms the basis of Jazz music. Indeed, the distinctive sound of Jazz of the 20s and 30s is in that combination of the scale and rhythms. You can hear the Jewish scale used again and again in the work of composers of the period, particularly Gershwin and Bernstein. Listen to 'Rhapsody in Blue', or 'An American in Paris', or 'On the Town' and there it is. As the years went on, the direct Jewish influence became less pronounced, but it was still evident.

When Shelton Harnick and Jerry Bock began to work on the songs for their musical Tevye and His Daughters they needed to write specifically Jewish songs. Jerry Bock, himself Jewish, said, some years after Fiddler opened:

“I felt a sense of quiet confidence in being able to write this score…because I was able to draw on my own background, my own memories of music I grew up with. I never felt the urge to research the score. I felt it was inside me.”

The music of Fiddler is inherently Jewish, and sounds it, but it is simultaneously American because the two musical cultures were so closely tied until the advent of rock and roll. When audiences hear Fiddler they hear a very pronounced version of the musical language that dominated popular song for so many years. But the secret of Fiddler’s success is not only in its use of specifically Jewish music.

Where other musicals have an ethnic setting, Fiddler on the Roof has its ethnicity right at the very centre of the show. This is in marked contrast to musicals like Brigadoon, which is set in Scotland but is not about Scotland at all - it is actually about whether a character will give up everything for the chance of love in a mysterious village that appears only once every 100 years. This village could be in Scotland, or it could be in Hungary, or China. Similarly, the love stories of South Pacific do not need to be set in the South Pacific: they are stories about people coming to a common understanding. This case is not simply confined to Broadway musicals. How much does Puccini really need to set Madam Butterfly or Turandot in the Far East? How much of Verdi’s Aida is intrinsically Egyptian? Fiddler on the Roof, on the other hand, is about being Jewish.

Surely such a Judaic musical could hardly fail to be successful in New York, a city which has one of the largest urban Jewish populations outside Jerusalem. Ethnic audiences love a chance to see themselves represented on the normally WASPy Broadway stage. (It is certainly no mistake that it’s called the Great White Way.) Some producers have specifically aimed for ethnic markets including David Merrick’s famously crass scheme to increase audiences for Hello Dolly! by casting Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway and an all-black cast in a show that is specifically about the rich, white, Northern middle-classes at the turn of the century.

On the other hand, how could its Jewish theme explain the huge success of Fiddler in Japan, which has one of the smallest Jewish populations anywhere in the world? When Joseph Stein was in Tokyo he met a young fan who told him of his surprise that Fiddler had been such a success in New York - because ‘it is so Japanese’.

That comment perhaps gives us a clue to the real reason for the show’s success. It is, after all, about the coming of progress and upheaval, about the erosion of tradition and about family values. These are universal themes, as relevant to life in a Tokyo suburb as in a Ukrainian village. That the Jewish shtetl is so heavily ruled by tradition simply makes it the perfect setting for a story about the collapse of a certain way of life. We know, when the characters set off for America at the end of the show, that even if they can only take

“A little bit of this
A little bit of that”

they will take their traditions with them as they head for Ellis Island.

The importance of this idea is emphasised by Fiddler’s opening number, ‘Tradition’ which provides a perfect introduction to the village and all the themes of the show. It also introduces the unifying musical theme: it is no accident that Tevye returns to it when his daughters reject his values and he judges the husbands they have chosen. As a matter of fact, the song was written shortly before Fiddler began its run on Broadway, when the show still desperately needed a unifying theme. Bock and Harnick’s original idea was that the curtain should rise on the family at prayer, but the director, Jerome Robbins, persistently asked: “What is this show about?” So the writers came up with the number which was to give the show one of the best openings ever written for a musical.

Along with the attempt of a community to preserve its way of life against the odds, Fiddler is also about the relationship between parents and children. It is very easy to identify with Tevye and Golde as they try to keep their family together for e more Sabbath prayer, and there cannot be a parent who hasn’t felt the wrench when he or she realises that the children are starting to grow up, are starting to feel like adults and are able to make their own decisions. Yet it is as futile for parents to fight against their children’s longing for independence as it is for the villages of Anatevka to fight against the destruction of the village by the Tsarist forces. The show’s sympathetic portrayal of a family following the story of every other family before it, breaking up and breaking away, is what gives it its great warmth. It demonstrates how we all use tradition to keep our lives in order, to keep on surviving, to stop ourselves from failing. Like a fiddler on the roof.