HARVEY SCHMIDT
Monteargentario
Notes by Jon Burlingame
Harvey Schmidt has the distinction of having composed the longest-running musical in theatre history, the immortal The Fantasticks. But he also composed two of Broadway’s loveliest scores, 110 in the Shade and I Do! I Do!, as well as Celebration, Philemon, Colette Collage, Roadside, Mirette, and the musical version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Grover’s Corners, all written with his longtime collaborator Tom Jones.
Schmidt composed this collection of short piano pieces during the fall and winter of 1964 and the spring of 1965. While working on the score for I Do! I Do!, he was living in a rented villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea about 100 miles north of Rome – more specifically, as the title attests, the Argentario promontory which, in Schmidt’s words, “emerges suddenly and majestically from the Italian coastal waters.” Continue reading…
