Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler and She Loves Me Lyricist, Dies at 99

Sheldon Harnick, the legendary lyricist behind Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, and more, has died. Harnick celebrated his 99th birthday on April 30.

Born in Chicago in 1924, Harnick earned a Bachelor of Music degree at Northwestern, majoring in Violin. He moved to New York in 1950 to pursue a career in theater, contributing his first song to a Broadway show in 1952 (it was called “Boston Beguine” for New Faces of 1952). He also contributed songs to the revues Two’s Company and John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, before beginning an extremely prosperous partnership with composer Jerry Bock.

With Bock, Harnick co-created the musicals Fiorello!, which won a Tony and a Pulitzer, Tenderloin, She Loves Me, Fiddler on the Roof (for which they won the Tony for Best Composer and Lyricist), The Apple Tree, and The Rothschilds. The writing process with Bock was a “lovefest,” Harnick told TheaterMania in 2016. “Jerry would start to write musical numbers. He would put it on a tape and say, ‘I think this is for Amalia’ or ‘I think this is for Georg,’ and then when he had about a dozen numbers, he would send me the tape. He was very generous, because on every tape, there would only be one or two numbers that coincided with ideas I had, and all the rest went back into his trunk.”

Harnick’s other musicals include A Christmas Carol (with Michel Legrand), Rex (with Richard Rodgers), A Wonderful Life (with Joe Raposo), and The Phantom Tollbooth (with Arnold Black). His songs have been heard in the movies The Heartbreak Kid, directed by his brief former wife Elaine May, and Blame It on Rio. He was also known for his English-language translations, including Bizet’s Carmen, Lehar’s The Merry Widow, and Michel Legrand and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. 

Harnick worked steadily into his 90s, on hand for the recent revivals of She Loves Me and Fiddler on the Roof, the latter both in English and Yiddish. A documentary about the worldwide success of Fiddler on the Roof, titled Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, was released in 2019.

Over his career, Harnick won a Pulitzer, two Grammys, two Tonys (including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016), and various Drama League, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards. He and his wife, Margery, were married for 57 years; she survives him, alongside children Beth and Matthew, and two grandchildren.

“I still remember,” Harnick recalled of the opening night performance of She Loves Me in 1963, “the show was going well and the audience was loving it. And then Barbara [Cook] did ‘Ice Cream’ and there was a curtain that was supposed to cross the stage. When it crossed, Georg would do ‘She Loves Me.’ The [curtain] got stuck. It was going so well. You could tell the stagehand was jerking on it, and it didn’t clear. I thought, ‘Oh my God, the show’s going to die now.’ Whoever was offstage gave it a heroic tug and [it] cleared and the audience cheered.”