Poor Harold Arlen. The coals haven’t yet cooled beneath accusations of plagiarism, in regard to his immortal, Academy Award winning classic “Over the Rainbow,” and now there’s an illustration in this video tying “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” to Mahler’s 7th! Purely tongue-in-cheek, I suspect. Both songs, of course, are exceedingly well-known, first of all, for their inclusion in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), which was recognized with music awards for both original song (“Over the Rainbow,” with lyrics by E.Y. Harburg) and score (Herbert Stothart riding their coattails to victory in the year of “Gone with the Wind”).
Last month, there was a Kansas-style dust-up over whether or not Arlen may have lifted his indelible melody from an obscure Norwegian pianist-composer he may have heard as a boy. I must say, the similarity to Signe Lund’s Concert Etude, Op. 38, is uncanny. (Listen to it at the link below.)
But, as has been pointed out on many occasions, there are only 12 notes in the scale, and we all hear an awful lot of music in our lifetimes, so coincidences and inadvertent similarities do occur. Why, I myself once unwittingly composed “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” in my Philadelphia apartment. Too bad Debussy got there first.
Of course, popular songs get up to this sort of thing all the time. Rachmaninoff has been especially hard hit.
While we’re on the subject of Mahler, Sammy Fain’s World War II classic “I’ll Be Seeing You” sounds an awful lot like the overarching melody in the last movement of Mahler’s 3rd – a similarity pointed out by musicologist Deryck Cooke in 1970. Coincidence or theft? It’s there for anyone with ears to draw their own conclusions.
Looking forward to hearing Mahler 7 at the Philadelphia Orchestra this week, with my old chum Robert Moran.
Philly’s principal timpanist, Don Liuzzi, with tongue in cheek: “Ding! Dong! The Wicked Witch?”
The case against Arlen
Signe Lund’s Concert Etude, Op. 38, rediscovered… somewhere over the rainbow?
“I’ll Be Seeing You”
Borrowed from Mahler’s Symphony No. 3?
