KERN, JEROME (b. New York, USA, 27 Jan 1885; d. New York 11 Nov 1945 )
Kern came from a musical family and studied music with his mother. After advanced tuition in piano and composition, he continued his studies in Germany. He returned to New York in 1904 and took a job as a pianist and salesman for a music publishing company. The following year he published his own first song and became famous overnight.
His first stage success was with The Red Petticoat, a musical comedy premièred in 1912. From then on he continued to write and produce for the theatre. By 1917 he had no less than seven shows on Broadway; by the end of his career he'd composed over sixty stage works and several film scores.
Show Boat, which he composed in association with the writer Oscar Hammerstein II, was his most remarkable score, best remembered for its bass aria, Ol Man River. It premièred in New York in 1927, though its opening was delayed so long that it lost three of the singers originally signed by Kern to perform in it. These included Paul Robeson, who joined the cast in a revival three years later and became forever identified in the mind of the public with Ol Man River.
Kern continued to work to the end of his life, composing an orchestral work, Portrait of Mark Twain, in 1942. He died in 1945, already so much of an American legend that a film dramatisation of his life was released the following year.
The Jerome Kern Song Book, a selection of his songs, was published with an introduction by his friend and collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1955.
