The New York Times - USA (2020-10-15)

A24 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESTHURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020

Herbert Kretzmer, a London
theater critic who wrote the Eng-
lish lyrics to an all-but-forgotten
French musical called “Les Mis-
érables” in 1985, giving new life to
what has become one of the
world’s most successful theater
productions, died on Wednesday
at his home in London. He was 95.
Marc Berlin, Mr. Kretzmer’s
agent, confirmed the death.
A South African journalist who
sold his accordion to buy passage
to Europe, Mr. Kretzmer failed as
a novelist in Paris, playing piano
in a brasserie for meals. A thief
stole all of his money on his first
day in London. He wrote features
and columns for London newspa-
pers, and became a theater critic
for The Daily Express for 16 years
and then a television critic for The
Daily Mail for eight more.
But he loved music, and start-
ing in 1960, while still writing for
newspapers, he began developing
a second career as a lyricist and
songwriter. He wrote music for
the BBC’s satirical television
show “That Was the Week That
Was” and collaborated with the
French singer Charles Aznavour
on about 30 songs, including the
international hits “She” and “Yes-
terday, When I Was Young.”
The British producer Cameron
Mackintosh took notice and asked
Mr. Kretzmer to reimagine an ob-
scure musical that had opened
and closed after a few months in
Paris in 1980, five years earlier. It
was not an alluring prospect.
France had no tradition of musi-
cal theater, and “Les Misérables”
was based on Victor Hugo’s epic
tale of 19th-century student upris-
ings, with teeming streets, broth-
els, sewers and a vast panorama
of episodes and characters who
love, fight and die at the barri-
cades.
And it was all sung, in French.
Mr. Kretzmer’s task was not to
literally translate the original li-
bretto, by Alain Boublil and Jean-
Marc Natel. That might have been
impossible. Songs, like poems,
with their subtle nuances, refer-
ences and allusions, are notori-
ously resistant to translation. And
Mr. Kretzmer’s French was spotty
anyway.
What he tried to do instead was
to capture, in English, the spirit of
Hugo’s tale of revolution — the
songs of angry men and women
yearning for freedom.
“Words have resonance within
a culture; they have submarine
strengths and meaning,” Mr. Kret-

zmer told The New Yorker in 2013.

“Translation — the very word I re-

but and resent, because it min-

imizes the genuine creativity that

I bring to the task.”

“The show I inherited from

Paris ran for just two hours,” he

added. “The show I wrote in Eng-

lish ran for just over three hours.

You don’t need to be a math whiz

to calculate that at least a third of

the play did not exist before I got

my hands on it.”

With the Kretzmer libretto, ad-

ditional lyrics by James Fenton

and music by Claude-Michel

Schonberg, “Les Misérables”

opened in London on Oct. 8, 1985.

A few critics found it intriguing

and perhaps even important, but

most pronounced it a disaster.

“A lurid Victorian melodrama,”

concluded a critic in The Sunday

Telegraph. “A witless and syn-

thetic entertainment,” wrote an-

other in The Observer. The Daily

Mail, where Mr. Kretzmer then

worked, called it “Les Glums.”

Scholars condemned what they

called a corruption of French liter-

ature for pop music.

But something was up. In the

theater, as Hugo’s tale of oppres-

sion, liberation and redemption

unfolded, audiences were moved

nightly to sob and scream.

“The British public has long had

less respect for theater critics

than its American counterpart,

but rarely has there been an occa-

sion when so many nasty reviews

counted for so little,” Benedict

Nightingale wrote in The New

York Times. “Clearly the power of

the story or the music or both hit a

nerve in the show’s first audi-

ences, and word of mouth did the

rest.”

Fan mail poured in. The box of-

fice was swamped. A three-month

engagement sold out. Reviews im-

proved.

The London production ran

continuously from 1985 until this

March, when the coronavirus pan-

demic shuttered London’s the-

aters, making it the West End’s

longest-running musical and the

world’s second-longest, after “The

Fantasticks,” which ran Off

Broadway for 42 years.

A Broadway production of “Les

Misérables” opened in 1987 and

ran 16 years, and there were

Broadway revivals in 2006 and

2014. A Hollywood film version in
      2012 earned more than $440 mil-
      lion. Showered with awards,
      translated into 22 languages, the
      musical has been performed by
      100 touring companies and seen
      by 80 million people worldwide.
      Its estimated earnings are up-
      ward of $3 billion.
      Herbert Kretzmer was born on
      Oct. 5, 1925, in Kroonstad, South
      Africa, one of four sons of William
      and Tilly Kretzmer, Lithuanian
      Jewish immigrants who fled the
      pogroms of czarist Russia. His
      parents ran a furniture store. His
      oldest brother, Elliot, became
      mayor of Johannesburg.
      Songs inspired Herbert. He had
      no musical training, but played
      the piano by ear. He graduated
      from Kroonstad High School and
      Rhodes University in Grahams-

town, where he wrote lyrics for

school musicals. He began writing

weekly cinema columns in 1946

for Africa Film Productions. In the

early 1950s, he was a reporter and

entertainment columnist for The

Johannesburg Express.

After landing in London in 1954,

he wrote for The Daily Sketch and

The Sunday Dispatch. As The Ex-

press’s theater critic from 1962 to

1978, he wrote 2,500 reviews and

interviewed John Steinbeck, Tru-

man Capote, Tennessee Williams

and many stage and screen stars.

He won two national awards as

The Daily Mail’s television critic

from 1979 to 1987.

Mr. Kretzmer married Elisa-

beth Wilson in 1961. They had two

children, Danielle and Matthew,

and were divorced in 1973. In 1988,

he married Sybil Sever, an Ameri-

can. He is survived by his second

wife, his two children and two

grandsons, Mr. Berlin, his agent,

said.

In his second career, Mr. Kret-

zmer adapted and wrote the lyrics

to a 1964 musical, “Our Man Crich-

ton,” based on J.M. Barrie’s play

“The Admirable Crichton,” which

ran for a respectable eight months

in London. His collaboration with

Mr. Aznavour on “She” (1974)

helped introduce the French sing-

er to international audiences.

Mr. Kretzmer’s royalties from

“Les Miz” amounted to about $20

million. He bought a townhouse in

London and filled it with art, and

he was a celebrity wherever he

went. Queen Elizabeth II named

him Officer of the Order of the

British Empire in 2011.

But he was always at something

of a loss to explain what had hap-

pened after that fateful opening

night in London.

“When you are working on

something like that, the hope is to

avoid disgrace,” he told The Daily

Mail in 2015. “You are thinking,

‘Please do not let me be too ridicu-

lous.’ ” He recalled his shock the

next day when Mr. Mackintosh,

the producer, told him that the box

office had never had a day like

that in its history.

“I sat back in wonder,” Mr. Kret-

zmer said. “I have never been able

to explain what happened. The

overnight success of ‘Les Miz’ has

become a myth now. But it lit-

erally was overnight.”

Herbert Kretzmer, Lyricist Who Reimagined ‘Les Misérables,’ Dies at 95

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Herbert Kretzmer onstage at an anniversary performance of “Les

Misérables” in London in 2010. The show, for which he wrote the

English lyrics, opened in London in 1985 and ran until March,

left, shortly before theaters there closed because of the pandemic.

DAVE M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES

AARON CHOWN/PA IMAGES, VIA GETTY IMAGES

Alex Marshall contributed report-
ing.

Turning a little-known

French musical into a

global blockbuster.

Don Piccard, a pioneer in the
sport of hot-air ballooning and sci-
on of a balloon family whose par-
ents reached the stratosphere,
died on Sept. 13 at a hospice center
in St. Paul, Minn. He was 94.
His daughter Mary Louise con-
firmed his death but did not speci-
fy a cause.
In 1947, when he was just 21, Mr.
Piccard made the front page of
The New York Times, among
many other newspapers, for his
solo flight in a salvaged (and im-
proved) Japanese Fu-Go balloon,
floating aloft for two hours over
Minneapolis. (Fu-Gos were enor-
mous paper balloons loaded with
explosives and sent across the Pa-
cific by the Japanese during
World War II in the hope that they
would crash and burn along the
California and Canadian coasts;
the few that survived were sal-
vaged by the U.S. military.)
But Mr. Piccard was already
ballooning royalty. His scientist
parents had flown a balloon to the
stratosphere in 1934.
Mr. Piccard made headlines
again in 1963, when he and Ed
Yost, a former bush pilot and aero-
nautics engineer, crossed the Eng-
lish Channel in a balloon. Mr. Yost
designed the modern hot-air bal-
loon, with air heated by propane
— as opposed to the more expen-
sive and dangerous hydrogen- or
helium-filled balloons first
launched by French noblemen in
1783.
In an effort to land before the
winds changed, Mr. Piccard and
Mr. Yost made a rapid descent and
crashed in a muddy field. Mr. Pic-
card said it was the closest he had
come to being killed, while Mr.
Yost, who died in 2007, said he was
more frightened by the ride of-
fered them by the French police to
the ceremony in their honor.
Mr. Piccard had had close calls
before. A decade earlier, he and his
wife, Joan, and a crew had taken a
writer and photographer for
Sports Illustrated, Coles Phinizy,
on a gas balloon flight from Valley
Forge, Pa. At 4,200 feet, the fabric
ripped and they began to plum-
met.
On the way down, Mr. Piccard,
typically calm and coolheaded,
had the crew practice bracing for
the inevitable crash landing by
holding tight to the basket’s
edges. On the terrifying descent,
as Mr. Phinizy wrote in his ac-

count for the magazine, the bal-

loon missed power lines, hit an as-

paragus field and bounced into a

field of barley. Ms. Piccard broke

her leg and foot; Mr. Phinizy

broke his toes.

When a state trooper arrived to

make an accident report, bran-

dishing his form, he asked, “Make

or model?”

“It was a convertible,” a passer-

by suggested.

Mr. Piccard once told an inter-

viewer he preferred ballooning in

the winter, because you don’t have

to pay for crop damage.

Driven by concerns about

safety, Mr. Piccard would go on to

design and manufacture his own

balloons, which were distin-

guished by their airy wicker bas-

kets, undulating shape and re-

inforcing load tapes, a safety inno-

vation that bolstered the fabric

seams.

A Piccard balloon made pop-

music history when a teenage

Jimmy Webb, the hitmaking song-

writer behind “Wichita Lineman”

and “MacArthur Park,” took a ride

in one at a radio station event in

Colton, Calif.

“The experience was an epiph-

any, a delightful introduction to an

ancient form of flight,” Mr. Webb

recalled in an email. “That led to

my writing later that week, in a

practice room at San Bernardino

College, ‘Up, Up and Away.’ ” It

was, Mr. Webb said, the fastest he

has ever written a song — it took

him barely 30 minutes to com-

pose.

“Up, Up and Away,” as recorded

by the 5th Dimension, would

reach the Billboard Top 10 and win

multiple Grammys in 1968. It has

since been recorded by numerous

other artists.

Mr. Webb also said that Marc

Gordon, the group’s manager, and

Florence LaRue, one of the

group’s singers, were married in a

Piccard balloon, with Mr. Piccard

at the helm.

“Don was a slightly eccentric,

lithe man with sparkling dark

eyes and a fine Gallic nose,” Mr.

Webb said, “and a busyness and

enthusiasm about him.”

Donald Louis Piccard was born

on Jan. 13, 1926, in Lausanne,

Switzerland. His mother, Jean-

nette (Ridlon) Piccard, was a sci-

entist and a high-altitude balloon-

ist, and her 1934 flight with her

husband made her the first wom-

an to reach the stratosphere in a

balloon. (In 1974, when she was 79,

she would become an Episcopal

priest, one of the first American

women to be ordained.)

His father, Jean-Felix Piccard, a

Swiss-born chemical engineer,

had made his first flight in 1913

with his twin brother, Auguste,

who went on to design underwa-

ter diving vessels. The twins were

inspired by Jules Verne to imag-

ine an enclosed balloon ship, and

it was that design that sent first

Auguste, in a record-breaking

flight in Europe, and then Jean

and Jeannette, who took off from

Dearborn, Mich., to the strato-

sphere.

The Piccards had been teaching

organic chemistry in Lausanne

when Don was born; they moved

to the United States when Jean-

Felix Piccard was offered a job at

M.I.T., and to Minneapolis in 1936

when he took a position teaching

aeronautical engineering at the

University of Minnesota.

Don Piccard attended the Uni-

versity of Minnesota and Swarth-

more College. He served in the

Navy as a balloon and airship rig-

ger during World War II, and at a

naval air station in New Jersey

during the Korean War.

In the 1950s, he worked for G.T.

Schjeldahl, a Minnesota plastics

company that was developing

Mylar communications balloons.

Mary Louise Piccard recalled that

on summer nights, from the dock

of her family’s island on a lake in

northern Minnesota, her father

would point out the Echo weather

satellite, which he had worked on,

passing overhead.

Flying was a family affair, Mary

Louise Piccard described week-

ends working in her father’s bal-

loon loft in Newport Beach, Calif.,

with her sisters, Elizabeth and

Wendy, and their mother, Joan

Piccard.

In the summer of 1967, the fam-

ily traveled all over Europe flying

the “Golden Bear,” a balloon de-

signed in the colors of the state

flag of California. That same year,

Mr. Piccard appeared on “The To-

night Show Starring Johnny Car-

son,” after having taken Mr. Car-

son for a ride.

“He was instrumental in keep-

ing sport ballooning alive in the

1950s, and single-handedly creat-

ed the modern sport of hot-air bal-

looning in the 1960s,” Richard M.

Douglass, a balloon historian,

wrote in the November-Decem-

ber issue of the magazine Balloon-

ing. He envisioned the sport as be-

ing akin to yacht racing or polo,

“with elegant balloons launched

from the lawns of country estates,

” Mr. Douglass wrote.

In 1962, Mr. Piccard organized

the country’s first hot-air balloon

race, for the St. Paul Winter Carni-

val, launching from the solidly

frozen White Bear Lake. In 2012, a

half-century later, at the age of 86,

he recreated that flight.

Mr. Piccard’s marriage to Joan

Russell, who wrote a young-adult

adventure novel about a balloon-

ist, ended in divorce. In addition to

his daughters, Mr. Piccard is sur-

vived by his wife, Wilma Piccard;

a stepdaughter, Mary Eckmeier;

two stepsons, Lyle Eckmeier and

Chuck Eckmeier; and five grand-

children.

Mr. Piccard never lost his awe

for the romance of ballooning, a

sport in which you never knew

where you were going or when

you might get there. Whenever he

was about to launch a balloon,

someone would invariably ask

where he was headed, and he

would look at the sky before giv-

ing his usual answer: “Wherever

the wind takes me.”

Don Piccard, 94, Pioneer Who Created Modern Sport of Hot-Air Ballooning

Don Piccard organized the country’s first hot-air balloon race in 1962 at the St. Paul Winter Carnival at White Bear Lake, Minn. The next year, he and Ed Yost completed

the first hot-air balloon flight across the English Channel. In an effort to land before the winds changed, they made a rapid descent and crashed in a muddy field, at left.

JEAN TESSEYRE/PARIS MATCH, VIA GETTY IMAGES DON GANGLOFF, VIA MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, VIA MARY LOUISE PICCARD

By PENELOPE GREEN

His destination was

always ‘wherever the

wind takes me.’