Song archive offered to library

NEW YORK — The making of "Fiddler on the Roof." The creation of "Cabaret."

Those magical musical-theater moments are documented in the papers of John Kander and Fred Ebb, the composer and lyricist behind "Cabaret," and in the files of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, the men who wrote the score for "Fiddler."

Now this material and more will reside in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which announced Tuesday that it had received major collections from both sets of songwriters.

"These guys represent the best of American musical theater — at a time in our history when things were better, fields were greener, the opportunities were greater," said director and producer Harold Prince, who introduced the quartet during a ceremony in the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the library, which is located in Lincoln Center.

The Bock-Harnick collection starts with their first collaboration, "The Body Beautiful" in 1958. Besides "Fiddler," it includes "Tenderloin," "She Loves Me," "The Apple Tree," "The Rothchilds" and "Fiorello!"

The Kander and Ebb archive will begin with "Cabaret," the team's 1966 hit that was revived on Broadway in 1998. Material from their other shows — such as "Flora, the Red Menace," "Zorba," "The Happy Time," "70, Girls, 70," "Woman of the Year," "The Rink" and "Steel Pier" — will come in a later bequest.

The "Fiddler" treasure trove includes more than a dozen songs written for the show but which never made it to Broadway — songs with such intriguing titles as "Dear, Sweet Sewing Machine" and "If I Were a Woman."

There are pages of unused lyrics, tracing the development of "Tradition," the show's opening number, as well as various versions of the script and programs from the show's out-of-town tryouts in Detroit and Washington.

The "Cabaret" collection also includes unused songs with titles such as "Never in Paris" and "It Must Be Love" as well as early manuscripts when the show was known as "Welcome to Berlin."

The four men reminisced about their work habits and tried to answer that oldest of songwriting questions: "Which comes first — the music or the lyrics?"

"Everybody works differently," said Kander. "Fred and I work in the same room at the same time. He will often have an idea for a first line or a title and then we'll start. . . . It's weird. It's really hard to describe it."

Harnick explained the unique way he worked with Bock.