Herbert Kretzmer
Lyricist who wrote the English libretto for Les Misérables as well as songs for Charles Aznavour
HERBERT KRETZMER, who has died aged 95, was at various times an influential theatre and television critic on Britain’s two rival midmarket newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, before finding greater fame and infinitely greater fortune with the English libretto for the West End hit musical Les Misérables, widely reckoned the greatest show in musical history.
With Alain Boublil (original French lyrics) and Claude-michel Schönberg (music), Kretzmer was the third of the triumvirate who created the English version of Les Misérables, which since it opened in 1985 to largely negative reviews, has broken almost every box-office record. Adapted from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, it included Kretzmer’s show-stopping ballad I Dreamed a Dream, later successfully revived by Susan Boyle on the television show Britain’s Got Talent.
Not only did Kretzmer create new material for the London version of Les Misérables, making it a third longer than the show that had been only moderately successful in Paris, but he rewrote almost all the existing material. The result – the longest-running musical in the West End, which has also played to more than 70 million people in 42 countries – has since been translated into at least 22 languages and made Kretzmer an extremely wealthy man.
As a drama critic, his Fleet Street heyday in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the postwar revival of the British stage and the decline of the Lord Chamberlain’s powers as the nation’s official censor. Both the Mail and the Express responded by running lengthy and outspoken overnight reviews.
Kretzmer’s first berth as a theatre reviewer was at the Express, where in 1962 he took over from Bernard Levin, who had decamped to the Mail. Together they established an entertaining first-night rivalry with their ruthless – sometimes brazen – outspokenness and readability. When they had filed their respective notices, Kretzmer and Levin would meet for supper at midnight.
Known in some theatrical circles as the “kosher butchers” (for their ability to kill a play purely and cleanly), the pair exercised a new and provocative influence with their forthright views and trenchant style. Moreover, they put competitors at the quality end of the market, The Times, Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, on their mettle.
Between 1979 and 1987, Kretzmer was the Mail’s television critic (he was named Critic of the Year in 1980). In 1984 he tried to persuade the West End producer Cameron Mackintosh to back a sharper, angrier version of a 1964 musical he had written, Our Man Crichton.
Mackintosh declined. But as Kretzmer was crossing the vast expanse of carpet to leave, he inquired: “Why didn’t you go on writing lyrics?” Kretzmer listed a number of songs he had written, including She and Yesterday When I Was Young for the French crooner Charles Aznavour. These, it turned out, were among Mackintosh’s all-time favourites.
“Six months later,” Kretzmer recalled, “when he was stuck for a lyricist for Les Misérables, Mackintosh remembered that snatch of conversation between the sofa to the door. In those 15 yards, my life totally changed.”
The show’s original Englishlanguage lyricist, the poet James Fenton, had struggled with the project, turning out words which (as the musical historian Mark Steyn observed) “looked great on paper but were mostly unsingable”. Mackintosh gave Kretzmer five months to come up with something that worked.
One of four sons of Jewish immigrants who had fled Lithuanian pogroms, Herbert Kretzmer was born in Kroonstad in the central flatlands of South Africa, on October 5 1925 and educated at Kroonstad High School and Rhodes University, Grahamstown. When he was 21 he moved to Johannesburg and started writing commentaries for weekly cinema newsreels and documentary films.
By the early 1950s he was a reporter and entertainments columnist for the Sunday
Express, Johannesburg, and in 1954 he moved to London as a feature writer and columnist on the Daily Sketch.
He joined the Sunday Dispatch in 1959 and in 1962 the Daily Express as chief dramatic critic, succeeding Bernard Levin who, having single-handedly created at Lord Beaverbrook’s instance a new approach to theatre coverage in a mass-circulation daily newspaper, had been poached by the Daily Mail. Where before, blunt or unkind criticism had been discouraged, now neither Levin nor Kretzmer pulled any punches.
“We have all come to recognise these Pintermimes a mile off,” Kretzmer wrote of Harold Pinter’s “intensely unattractive” The Homecoming in 1965, “with those long, unblinking pauses, the aura of something horrific behind the humdrum action, the sense of suppressed violence beneath the banal utterance.”
Edward Bond’s Saved (also 1965) was, Kretzmer reported, “peopled by characters who, almost without exception, are foulmouthed and dirty-minded and barely to be judged on any recognisable human level at all.”
During his 16 years on the Express, Kretzmer also established himself as an accomplished songwriter, working mostly at night at his flat in Knightsbridge. With George Martin, he wrote Can This Be Love?, a British Top 30 entry for Matt Monro in 1961, and two novelty hits for Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, Goodness Gracious Me (1960) and Bangers and Mash (1961).
Kretzmer also penned further comedy duets in Kinky Boots, an Avengers spin-off for Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman. His work for BBC Television’s weekly satirical show That Was the Week That Was included the much-recorded In the Summer of His Years, with words by Kretzmer, music by David Lee, and performed by Millicent Martin within hours of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
The following year Kretzmer made his West End debut with the book and lyrics for the musical Our Man Crichton (Shaftesbury, 1964), based on J M Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton. He supplied the lyrics for The Four Musketeers (Drury Lane, 1967) and those for Anthony Newley’s musical film Can Heironymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969).
His lyrics for Les Misérables earned him a Tony award in 1987 and a Grammy the following year. He held several honorary doctorates and in 1989 received the Jimmy Kennedy award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. He was appointed a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Minister of Culture in 1988, and OBE in 2011.
With Schönberg and Boublil, Kreztmer received an Oscar nomination in 2013 for Best Original Song, Suddenly from Les Misérables. A collection of his interviews with assorted celebrities, Snapshots: encounters with 20th century legends, was published in 2014.
Herbert Kretzmer married, firstly, in 1961, Elisabeth Margaret Wilson (dissolved 1973), with whom he had a son and a daughter. He married, secondly, in 1988, an American, Sybil Sever.
Herbert Kretzmer, born October 5 1925, died October 14 2020