"SPEAK LOW" (1943)

"Too sexy and profane" was how Marlene Dietrich described One Touch of Venus when she rejected the title role. Mary Martin went on to play Venus in the 1943 musical comedy that ran for over 500 performances on Broadway and made Martin a star. She sang "Speak Low", which became the signature tune of the show and went on to become one of the most recorded jazz standards.

Kurt Weill, who composed the music for "Speak Low", had been a prominent composer in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. There he collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on works that included The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera with his best known song "Mack the Knife". As a popular Jewish composer he was targeted by the Nazis, who criticized and interfered with his stage productions. In 1933 he fled Germany and ultimately arrived in the United States in 1935. After immigrating to the USA, Weill moved away from the European art-music tradition and devoted his efforts to writing for the Broadway stage. A comparison of "Speak Low" with "Mack the Knife" shows the extent to which he adjusted his style to adapt to the American musical theater. Some critics consider his American output to be inferior to his earlier compositions. However, his collaborations with a number of lyricists, including Ira Gershwin, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, and Ogden Nash, to produce individual songs and shows that became highly respected and admired demonstrate that the American Weill was no less talented than the German Weill. One Touch of Venus was his only collaboration with Nash.

Of "Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker" fame, Ogden Nash is best known for his light and humorous poetry characterized by puns, deliberately misspelled or invented words for comic effect and off-beat rhyming devices. He has been called the American Laureate of Light Verse and continues to be one of the most widely read and quoted American poets. When composing the lyrics for "Speak Low", Nash displayed his literary background when he based the first line of the song on a line from a Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing, in which the character Don Pedro says "Speak low, if you speak love" in Act II, Scene 1. Nash also wrote screenplays for MGM and lyrics for a Broadway revue, Two’s Company, but One Touch of Venus was his biggest hit.

"Speak Low" was first recorded by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians and peaked at 5th place on the charts in 1944. Its beautiful melody and the breathless urgency of its lyrics have made it a favorite of instrumentalists and vocalists, and earned it a rating as one of the top 300 jazz standards.

Speak Low by Ogden Nash and Kurt Weill

Speak low when you speak, love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we’re swept apart, too soon

Speak low, darling speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark, too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go
That tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon

Time is so old and love's so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief.

We're late, darling we're late
The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon.
I wait, darling, I wait
When you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon
Speak low