When you hear the name "92nd Street Y," you know which Y is being talked about. It's distinct among the thousands of other YM and YWCA's and YM and YWHA's around the world. Music theater lovers know immediately that 92nd Street Y means the Jewish Y on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The main reason for this prominence? Its series, Lyrics & Lyricists, started by Maurice Levine in 1970 and hosted by him until his death in 1997.
The series focuses on the lyricist, the often neglected partner of all songwriting teams. After Levine started this series, lyricists no longer were neglected. When they started to appear in front of audiences it became apparent that the guys who write the words have the tools, the language, to discuss their choices of words. Their craft, as it turns out, is ideal for explanation in a way that composing music can never be. So the lyric writers turn out to be even more interesting than their composing partners.
Levine invited lyricist friends of his, such as Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer, Sheldon Harnick, Alan Jay Lerner, Sammy Cahn to discuss their songs. Along with the writers came talented singers who performed on the Y's stage, accompanied by the lyricist or the composer at the piano. Levine stood on stage as the emcee and interlocutor, asking the lyricists questions. The series soon became one of the hottest tickets in town, and Levine achieved the status of father-figure.
Levine was born in 1919 and grew up in West Haven, Connecticut. He remembered there were only five Jewish families in the town when he was young, "but I was raised to know treif from kosher." He means that in two ways. First, his parents taught him to observe Jewish dietary laws, and he did so, even when his observance marked him as different in a town that was 99 percent gentile. Secondly, to "know treif from kosher" means to know wrong from right - to observe ethical standards of conduct in his personal and business dealings. He studied violin, attended the Yale School of Music, and was accepted for the first charter class at Tanglewood in 1940. Composer Paul Hindemith and conductor Serge Koussevitsky were his teachers, Leonard Bernstein his classmate.
Drafted into the army in World War II, Levine wound up producing shows for the troops at Chanute Field, Illinois. "It was a great arrangement," he says; "Major Glenn Miller was my superior. I learned on the job and became a combination of Billy Rose (the showman) and James Petrillo (the tyrannical head of the musicians' union.)" One of the classical concerts that Levine conducted at Chanute Field was attended by the Hillel director at the University of Illinois and his wife. They were delighted to find that the army conductor was Jewish. The wife, Leah Silverman, said to Maurice: "My father is music director at the 92nd Street Y in New York. If you're ever interested in a job there, look me up."
When Levine came home from the war, he taught for awhile at Yale Music School and then moved to Manhattan to try "to crack into showbiz," as he put it. At this time he changed his first name of Morris into the more-prestigious Maurice. After he became famous, some of Levine's friends still called him Morris, but mostly they addressed him as Moish. Unable to get a job on Broadway, he looked up Leah Silverman who introduced him to her father, the composer and conductor A. W. Binder who was head of the Y's music programs. Binder hired him as a part-time conductor in 1947, and then Levine created his big breakthrough.
"I loved the music of Kurt Weill, so I dialed information and asked for his phone number, and - would you believe it? - he was listed. So I called him and asked if I could conduct the New York premiere of his folk opera, Down in the Valley. Well, he said, it was already promised to someone else, but would I like to conduct a concert version of his opera Street Scene? You bet I would! So, without any real credentials, I conducted it in February 1949. Weill came to rehearsals and to the performance and he took a liking to me.
"Weill was 48, I was 29. He looked at me as kind of a kid brother. Weill was sweet, kind, soft-spoken. And then he invited me to conduct his newest composition, Lost in the Stars, for its Broadway opening. I couldn't believe it myself. I was thrilled beyond words. On opening night he gave me a wallet and a note: 'Maurice, I'll keep writing them, and you'll conduct them.' How was anyone to know that a few months later he'd be dead of a heart attack?"
His Weill credentials helped Levine get other jobs conducting Broadway shows. He worked with Oscar Hammerstein on a revival of his Music In The Air which Hammerstein personally directed, and with Yip Harburg - and young singer Barbara Cook - on Flahooley. Levine conducted two Columbia albums of Weill songs sung by Lotte Lenya, and he conducted a crossover album of songs by Metropolitan Opera baritone Leonard Warren. Because of his knowledge of music and his love of Judaism, Levine became the conductor and director of fund-raising Hanukkah concerts at Madison Square Garden, with stars such as Jan Peerce, Roberta Peters and Richard Tucker, between 1958 and 1971. He also was in demand as a producer and director of star-studded special events at the Kennedy Center, in Las Vegas and elsewhere.
In 1969 the Billy Rose Foundation offered the Y a $5000 grant to do a series on American lyric writers. It was a subject dear to showman and philanthropist Rose, who was a part-time lyricist himself. Binder had died in 1966 and his younger daughter, Hadassah Markson, was now the Y's music director. She asked Levine's opinion. His first thought was: "Forget it. No one will come to hear about lyrics." But Levine, fortunately, had second thoughts and asked his friend Yip Harburg for advice: "I spoke to Yip and he told me so many good stories that I thought, if the audience is half as excited by this as I am, we'll have a hit." A hit indeed.
Lyrics and Lyricists was so successful, Levine couldn't get away from it. When he had no more lyricists lined up and wanted to retire in 1982, the Y told him that he couldn't quit because the next year was sold out without anyone even knowing what the programs would be. As the series continued, some lyricists returned a second or third time, and Levine presented one season of composers û Arthur Schwartz, Sammy Fain, Jule Styne and Charles Strouse û talking about their lyricists. After awhile, he needed to present seasons of dead lyricists' songs. When I asked Levine if he would put on programs by new writers, he said that he'd like to but was concerned that attendance would be low. There were empty seats in the auditorium in June, 1995, when young Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty introduced a song they had just written for their upcoming Ragtime. ASCAP co-sponsored the program, titled "The New Breed" and featuring Craig Carnelia, David Zippel, Ahrens & Flaherty. It was an artistically stimulating afternoon, but it lost money.
Levine, with his friend Richard Seader, formed a record company in 1977 and issued a set of albums of songwriters singing and talking about their own songs, assisted by guest artists, recorded at the Y. Those records are now available on CD from DRG Records: An Evening With Alan Jay Lerner, ...With Johnny Mercer, ... With Jerry Herman, ...With Sammy Cahn, ...With Kander & Ebb, ...With Sheldon Harnick...With Dorothy Fields. The records, like the live programs, are fascinating slices of music history as well as fun. Levine told me his secret: "I'm at heart a teacher. But I never give anyone a lecture. I inform people entertainingly!"
He also produced a series of video programs based on the 92nd Street format, and they were briefly seen on CBS Cable before it went out of business in 1981. His guests were Yip Harburg, Burton Lane, Kander & Ebb, Sheldon Harnick, Arthur Schwartz, Charles Strouse and Mitchell Parrish. Singers included Larry Kert, Judy Kaye, Debbie Shapiro and Nancy Dussault. On each videotape, the song-writer talks about his career and tells how he wrote his hits. These vivid slices of history, on VHS tape, are available by special order from DRG Records. They are essential viewing for anyone who loves American popular music.
Levine suffered a stroke in 1980 but six months later came back to work, walking slowly. Once he had black hair; now it was white. In later years he began to use a cane, and finally a walker. He died September 8, 1997. The Lyrics and Lyricists programs continue at the 92nd Street Y under the leadership of Barry Levitt, who had been pianist and music director of more than a dozen Y concerts during the later part of Levine's regime, and who has a background as orchestrator and conductor for The Little Shop of Horrors, Swinging on a Star and The Catskills on Broadway.
Levine had two children with his wife Dorothy. They divorced, she later died, and he married singer Bobbi Baird, whom he met at an audition in 1976. They had a daughter who is now 23. Baird continues to sing and manages the estate of her late husband.
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