Frederick "Fritz" Loewe was the musical half of the team Lerner and Loewe; Alan Jay Lerner was the librettist other half. The two wrote many hit musicals, including Brigadoon (1947), Paint Your Wagon (1950), My Fair Lady (1956), Gigi (1958), and Camelot (1960).

Loewe was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1901 (some sources say 1904) to Edmond and Rosa. Edmond was a famous musician who was constantly on tour; his parents would dump the boy in a boarding school for months on end while they toured the world. Loewe could play piano by ear from a young age and helped his father with rehearsal and scoring by the time he was none; his father was most impressed, though his mother thought all boys could do such things. As a teenager he trained as a concert pianist at a famous Berlin conservatory, then travelled with his father to New York, where he stayed. After some rough years, he began composing while playing piano restaurants and cinemas in the 1930s; in 1942 he met Lerner, and the two embarked on a successful career. Loewe died in 1988.

The official Frederick Loewe website, from whence many of these details were gathered, is at
http://www.frederickloewe.org/index.html

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