The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #13608   Message #1089239
Posted By: SueB
09-Jan-04 - 02:58 AM
Thread Name: Origin: Stouthearted Men (Hammerstein, Romberg)
Subject: RE: stout hearted men: where is it from?
Hold on again - I just came up with this from Google:

The New Moon, as Eric Myers informs us, was Romberg's final hit. (The plots of these shows tend to be so byzantine and zany, one can scarcely get into them.) It contains one very familiar song, "Stouthearted Men," which is sometimes mistaken for a Gilbert and Sullivan number. (An endearing line: "Start me with ten who are stronghearted men, and I'll soon give you ten thousand more." The lyrics are by Oscar Hammerstein II, who was co-lyricist on The Desert Song. He was to move on to much greater things, chiefly with his partner Richard Rodgers.) Thomas Hayward is the dreamy tenor here, and Lee Sweetland—a wonderful name for an operetta singer—is the dreamy baritone. It may be said that listening to Romberg at length increases one's regard for the masters of opera proper, even the "low" variety: Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, in comparison to The Desert Song, is a late Beethoven quartet.

Proving once and for all that my memory isn't worth a nickel. I shouldn't even try. I couldn't make the blickies work, and I didn't know what you all were going on about, since I was sure I had never heard of Romberg or The New Moon... Oh, well. My heart's in the right place.