I Wish I Were In Love Again

Titel

I Wish I Were In Love Again

Text & Musik

Musik von Richard Rodgers, Text von Lorenz Hart (1937)

The song information, presented in English, has been translated from the original German text and follows below.

Main Event Infos

Main Event Infos (English version)

For many years, until Hart's untimely passing, composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) were one of the most successful duos in the history of the "Great American Songbook" and Broadway. In 1937, they crafted the musical "Babes In Arms," which premiered on April 14, 1937, at the Shubert Theater in New York. The musical became a hit, particularly for Sinatra, as it included songs like "My Funny Valentine," "Where Or When," and "The Lady Is A Tramp."

Among the many evergreens from this production is "I Wish I Were In Love Again," which was originally performed as a duet but later mostly performed solo. In the Broadway production of "Babes In Arms," the song was sung by Grace McDonald (1918-1999) and her partner Rolly Pickert, who was only seventeen at the time.

Two years later, when the musical was adapted into a film by MGM with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in the lead roles (directed by Busby Berkeley), the song was absent from the final film. However, Rooney and Garland performed it as a duet in "Words and Music" (MGM 1948, directed by Norman Taurog), a musical film that depicted the partnership between Rodgers & Hart and featured numerous other stars such as Perry Como, Gene Kelly, and Lena Horne. A year prior (1947), Judy Garland had already recorded "I Wish I Were In Love Again" solo for Decca Records, and this recording, along with the duet with Rooney, helped popularize the song.

In the fall of 1956, Frank Sinatra chose to include the song in his now-legendary Capitol album "A Swingin' Affair!" and recorded it in the studio in November with Nelson Riddle and a prominent orchestra. A year later, he performed the song again on his weekly TV show on ABC.

Nelson Riddle's exceptional swing arrangement took Sinatra, who only felt satisfied after the ninth take, to unparalleled heights of text interpretation and swing, a fascination that remains undiminished nearly fifty years later - pure Sinatra!

Even the relatively "complicated" lyrics couldn't deter him - after all, the song is the answer to the popular trivia question about which Sinatra song features fast Indian sleighs, flying plates, black eyes, and trained sea lions!

The individual lines of text with which Lorenz Hart describes, so to speak, "scenes from a marriage" are what make the lyrics so special. (The reference to the sea lions is reminiscent of the "setting" of the original musical, which takes place in a fictional coastal town).

Perhaps the most famous line from the song, "the faint aroma of performing seals," even inspired a book title through Sinatra's interpretation: Writer and jazz pianist Robin Douglas-Home (a nephew of British Prime Minister Alexander Douglas-Home) wrote a semi-autobiographical novel under this title in 1968, in which he tried to come to terms with the failure of his love affair with Princess Margaret, the Queen's sister. A few weeks later, he committed suicide. His small book titled "Sinatra," published in 1962 (in which he reports on this song and the recording sessions for the Capitol album "Point Of No Return" in September 1961, to which Sinatra had personally invited him), remains one of the best reads about Sinatra.

© Bernhard Vogel for Sinatra - The Main Event 2005