A power that can mobilise millions, silence guns ...
SA-born lyricist behind songs of Les Mis dies
Herbert Kretzmer, giant of the English musical scene, was a South African journalist who sold his accordion to fund his passage to Europe, where he failed as a novelist in Paris, playing a piano for meals in a brasserie. He moved to England, where he wrote features and columns for London newspapers, and became a theatre and TV critic.
Kretzmer, who died last week aged 95, eventually found fame and 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 created the English version of Les Misérables, which, since it opened in 1985, has broken almost every box-office record. Adapted from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, it included Kretzmer’s showstopping ballad I Dreamed a Dream.
Kretzmer rewrote almost all the existing material from the French original. The result — the longest-running musical in the West End and which has 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.
Kretzmer’s first berth as a theatre reviewer was at the Daily Express, where in 1962 he took over from Bernard Levin, who’d decamped to the Daily 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 again 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.
In 1984 Kretzmer tried to persuade the West End producer Cameron Mackintosh to back a
1964 musical he’d written, Our Man Crichton.
Mackintosh declined. But as Kretzmer was leaving, 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 favourites.
“Six months later,” Kretzmer recalled, “when he was stuck for a lyricist for Les Misérables, Mackintosh remembered that snatch of conversation. In those 15 yards, my life totally changed.” The show’s original English language lyricist, the poet James Fenton, had struggled with the project. Mackintosh gave Kretzmer five months to come up with something that worked.
One of four sons of Jewish immigrants who fled Lithuanian pogroms, Kretzmer was born in
Kroonstad on October 5 1925 and educated at Kroonstad High School and Rhodes University. 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 entertainment columnist for the Sunday Express in Johannesburg. 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. 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).
Richard Kay wrote in the Daily Mail shortly after Kretzmer died that the musical writer was watching citizens of Hong Kong protesting at the threat to their liberties and independence from mainland China on TV. As they marched they sang Do You Hear The People Sing? from Les Misérables , as a song of defiance he’d written 30 years before (it was banned in communist China). Kay says Kretzmer felt a lump rise in his throat.
Kretzmer never forgot the inequalities of his native SA, wrote Kay. “He wore his social conscience easily but the paradox of that June day last year when he tuned in to those protesters was not lost on him. He’d written the tune to demonstrate the power of words when set to inspirational music — ‘a power that can mobilise millions, silence guns and lay down weapons’. Sung in solidarity, he believed, it could not only overwhelm oppressive 1830s France — where Les Mis is set — but could also apply to modern times in the form of freedom-crushing regimes of the Left and Right, and to the apartheid regime that he had left behind when he set sail from his homeland to England 72 years ago.”
A generous donor to charities, Kretzmer, notes Kay, also remained close to his roots. A passionate supporter of Black civil rights, he was a contributor to funds to meet legal fees of poor South Africans.
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 an OBE in 2011.
With Schönberg and Boublil, Kreztmer received an Oscar nomination in 2013 for best original song, Suddenly from Les Misérables. Fellow lyricist Sir Tim Rice described him as “a giant of his trade”. ©