Abstract

[Top Hat] was one of the best [pictures] I ever did with Ginger Rogers, and it was the first I ever made with Irving Berlin’s music, which helped a lot. (Fred Astaire, 1948)

Much has been written about the glories of Top Hat and about Astaire’s innovative integration of narrative and character with dance. Irving Berlin’s songs, written in Hollywood especially for the film, are invariably praised, and the connections between his lyrics and the story-line are noted. But Berlin’s contributions extend beyond the literary to the structure and content of the music itself. The five songs trace a clear line of musical development, with their increasing complexity and subtlety furthering the development of character and plot and enhancing the potential of choreography.

This paper considers the music of the five songs, taken sequentially. I will show that evolving formal designs and harmonic and melodic details complement the narrative, choreography, and cinematography to create a morphology that is larger than each of its components. In this sense, despite lacking a continuous score, Top Hat is a worthy precursor of the integrated film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s; and Berlin’s songs––composed specifically for this context––mark a significant advance in writing for film.