World Theater, Opera, and Performance: Jerome Moross and John Latouche | "Lazy Afternoon" from The Golden Apples / 1954

It’s difficult to really talk about either the composer of this marvelous song, Jerome Moross or the rather amazing lyricist, John Latouche. In many respects these talented artists, born one year apart, were both completely involved in their classical and performative worlds—Moross was influenced by both Bernard Hermann and Aaron Copland, and La Touche had so many major literary, operatic, and theatrical connections that one might suggest that he was the most connected individuals of his era—yet both were still extreme outsiders, daring to take music and theater into different dimensions. Had La Touche, who died at the early age of 41, primarily of alcoholism, and Moross who died, also a bit early, at the age of 69, have been allowed their full dimensions, we might have truly seen a great revolution in theater and operatic history.

As it was, both left behind several important works—Moross, an operatic musical Susanna and the Elders, several classical pieces, and the musical The Golden Apple, and Latouche, wonderful lyrics for Cabin in the Sky, Candide, and The Golden Apple. One aches for their talents to have been more appreciated in their day, and not basically forgotten as they seem to have been. My poet friend, Kenward Elmslie, who lived with Latouche for many years, had long encouraged me to write about him; and I eventually I did. Had I only known what I pretended to.

The Golden Apple is filled with wonderful musical numbers, but one stands out, and has been recorded by nearly every performer of the 50’s: “Lazy Afternoon.” That song is so languid and restful that it hardly seems to have been written: it appears to be a song spun out of the boring community of Angel’s Roost, Washington, and the nature surrounding:

It's a lazy afternoon

And the beetle bugs are zooming

And the tulip trees are blooming

And there's not another human in view but us two

It's a lazy afternoon

And the farmer leaves his reaping

In the meadow cows are sleeping

And the speckled trouts stop leaping up stream

As we dream

A far pink cloud hangs over the hill

Unfolding like a rose

If you hold my hand and sit real still

You can hear the grass as it grows

It’s amazing to me how Latouche seemingly embeds words in his text that are never heard, but remain in our head nonetheless. In the very first stanza we “hear” the word “human being” despite its absence. In the second stanza, despite the afternoon occurrence, he still expect the rhymed word “moon” which would hook up easily with the last stanza’s “dream.” In the last stanza of this section, the word “seems” keeps creeping out to rhyme with “dream.” And we know that that “rose” must soon “close.” Not to even speak about how everything in this piece continually “slows.” The lyricist says always far more that he seems to say. Our ears naturally hear words that aren’t even spoken.

This is perhaps one of the most slow-motion songs ever. Shirley Horn slows in down to a stunningly hover, expanding its notion of laziness to a practically stalled, minimalist musical number, when the lyrics almost counter the emotional content of the young Helen (originally Kaye Ballard) from any of her possible seductiveness. And the usually brassy Kaye Ballad even sings it, in 1954, with a seductive breathiness that you might have never imagined possible from her. She’s quite charming in this early version.

Lucy Reed is one of the best interpreters of this piece, with Helen Merrill and even Barbra Streisand coming in close. But I’d give the best to Eartha Kitt’s utterly seductive version from 1992: she truly summarizes its slow, steady, intonations that brings Paris to her woodland bed. Even I, as a gay man, would follow her to the “place that’s quiet / ‘Cept for daisies running riot / And there’s no one passing by it to see.”

Los Angeles, December 24, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2017).

World Theater, Opera, and Performance

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Jerome Moross and John Latouche | "Lazy Afternoon" from The Golden Apples / 1954

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