Has Somebody Stolen Their Song?

So Morris Albert's Feelings isn't really Morris Albert's Feelings at all. No, the treacly pop song that sold more than a million records in 1975 is really a rewrite of Pour Toi, a hitherto obscure French cafe tune composed nearly 20 years earlier by one Louis Gaste. That, at least, is what a nonmusical federal-court jury in Manhattan decided last July, awarding Gaste a settlement of at least half a million dollars. Gaste pronounced himself vindicated. Albert's feelings were unknown.

Every so often, it seems, an aggrieved composer emerges from obscurity to lay claim to a particular pop hit. More often than not, somebody is ready to believe him -- or afraid somebody else will. The melodic and rhythmic resemblance between a four-bar stretch of Jerry Herman's 1964 classic Hello Dolly ("Hello, Dolly, well, hello Dolly. It's so . . .") and Mack David's 1948 quotidian hit Sunflower ("She's a sunflower, she's my sunflower, and I . . .") cost Herman $250,000 when he indignantly settled out of court in 1966. Ten years later, former Beatle George Harrison was nicked for $400,000 when a judge ruled that the 1970 number My Sweet Lord ("Hare Krishna") closely resembled the Chiffons' 1963 single He's So Fine ("Doo lang, doo lang, doo lang"). And in 1983 a Chicago jury ruled that the Bee Gees' How Deep Is Your Love (1977) was a little too deeply influenced by a 1975 ditty called Let It End, by Ronald Selle.

Intentional homage, subconscious emulation or calculated rip-off? For Selle's suit against the Bee Gees, four bars of the two scores were blown up to display a suspiciously exact correspondence of notes; on the witness stand, even Bee Gee Maurice Gibb couldn't tell the two songs apart. The similarities between Herman's song and David's consisted of an identical series of ten intervals. And My Sweet Lord really does sound very much like He's So Fine, in melody and rhythm.

Even so, is this really irrefutable evidence of plagiarism? Musicians, if not juries, know the question is not so easily answered. "We're very childish in our notions as to what constitutes originality in music," wrote the composer and music critic Deems Taylor in 1939. "Suppose a play should open tomorrow in which one of the actors had the line, 'Now go to the door and stay there till we call.' How many dramatic critics would point out that it was a direct steal from Shakespeare? But it is. It's straight out of the first scene of the third act of Macbeth. If a new symphony contained that much of a quotation from Beethoven or Wagner, the music critics would jump all over the composer."

Maybe. Maybe not. Taylor's example is hardly the most important or memorable line from Macbeth, whereas a whole song can be constructed out of a distinctive musical figuration. In any case, classical music thrives on recycled melodies. Some are frank borrowings; others are not. How to tell the difference? As Louis Armstrong said when asked to define jazz, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." The big, broad, striding theme of the finale of Brahms' First Symphony is strikingly akin to the main subject of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, written 52 years before. "Any ass knows that," Brahms said when someone pointed out the resemblance. On the other hand, the second subject of the finale of Schubert's Ninth Symphony, contemporaneous with Beethoven's, is also akin in shape, yet entirely different in feel. But blown up side by side and exhibited in court, the similarity of the two themes would convict poor Schubert of malicious intent in a minute.

Other classical sound-alikes abound: the openings of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Smetana's overture to The Bartered Bride; the first few notes of the Prize Song from Wagner's Die Meistersinger and the slow movement of the Beethoven Ninth. But this is only the coincidence that results when composers use the same limited palette of twelve well-tempered notes with which to design their melodies. Other borrowings are plainly acknowledged: Brahms' Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel for piano; Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, which used a Mozart melody. Paganini's Twenty-Fourth Caprice for solo violin has lent itself to full- length -- and very different -- treatments by Brahms, Rachmaninoff and the contemporary composer George Rochberg, among others. Composers as disparate as Vaughan Williams, Mussorgsky and Stravinsky borrowed freely from folk music. In the baroque period, it was perfectly permissible to cadge someone else's tunes; Bach helped himself to several concertos by Vivaldi and arranged them for organ without so much as a by-your-leave.

Some pop composers have been just as sticky fingered. The 1941 hit Tonight We Love originated in Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto; Full Moon and Empty Arms was lifted from Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff, in fact, is a particular source of inspiration: Eric Carmen's 1976 pop hit Never Gonna Fall in Love Again borrowed the soaring melody of the slow movement of the dour Russian's Second Symphony. The classically trained Andrew Lloyd Webber quotes a theme from Puccini's Turandot in his new smash London hit, The Phantom of the Opera. Other apparent steals, however, may be subliminal or simply happenstance. Were the swaggering themes from the movies Star Wars and Born Free both liberated from the relatively obscure Sixth Symphony by Anton Bruckner? Did Somewhere, the poignant anthem from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, derive from the slow movement of the same Bruckner symphony? Who knows?

Sometimes not even the composers do. When Harrison sat down to write My Sweet Lord for his first post-Beatle album, in all likelihood one set of chords seemed logically to suggest another; he simply forgot that he had heard them somewhere else before. ("Because of my lack of formal training," Harrison explained at the trial, "I think of myself as a jungle musician.") The sequence of thirds that distinguishes both Hello Dolly and Sunflower no doubt is entirely accidental. The similarities between the Bee Gees' hit from Saturday Night Fever and the unpublished Let It End are amusing; it seems to defy chance that two composers could have hit upon the same ugly tune. Yet a judge later absolved the Bee Gees, overturning the jury's verdict.

As for Feelings, its real source is not Pour Toi but Violetta's aria Addio, del passato, from Verdi's La Traviata. But in the words of another pop smash: Who Cares?