Francis Beckett 

Tom Lehrer obituary

Singer, songwriter and satirist who eschewed the limelight to return to teaching mathematics
  
  

Portrait of Tom Lehrer sitting at piano at 2000
Tom Lehrer during a rare interview at home near Santa Cruz, California, in 2000. Photograph: Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns

No one ever fought off the trappings of fame and success so fiercely as the singer, songwriter, and mathematician Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97. He was an enigma. The songs that made him famous were mostly written and recorded before 1960, after which he returned to teaching mathematics and tried to behave as though no one had heard of him.

His songs were by turns gloriously vulgar, ludicrously macabre or ferociously political: I Got It from Agnes – “it” being a sexually transmitted disease; I Hold Your Hand in Mine, in which the held hand is no longer attached to a body; and We Will All Go Together When We Go, perhaps the best anti-nuclear weapons song ever written, praising “Universal bereavement / An inspiring achievement”.

Others were wonderfully clever games with words and music, including The Elements (1959), which names all the chemical elements, set to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.

He began writing songs as a graduate student at Harvard, where he had enrolled at 15 and had taken a first-class maths degree at 18. He sang them to his friends and soon people started asking him to perform at parties. “My songs spread slowly,” he said. “Like herpes, rather than Ebola.”

The politics and rudeness of his material put off the record companies, so in 1953 he paid for 400 discs to be cut of a record called Songs of Tom Lehrer, having worked out that if he sold them all, he would break even. He sold many more than that: he had to keep getting them cut.

His university idyll was broken by a period with the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, and two years in the army. “I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody,” he said. “I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board.”

Afterwards he wrote the song It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier, about strange and disturbing army folk: “Now Fred’s an intellectual, brings a book to every meal. / He likes the deep philosophers, like Norman Vincent Peale.” Peale was a famous evangelical Christian of even more than usual banality and intolerance, and also the Trump family pastor, who gave the US president his ethical base.

After the army, Lehrer returned to studying and singing in night clubs in New York and other cities, while his reputation grew in a samizdat sort of way – record companies ignored him and newspapers sneered, but his growing army of fans loved him. He undertook a series of concert tours, including in the UK, and produced another album, More of Tom Lehrer, in 1959, with a live concert version, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, also released.

Then, in 1960, he stopped, and that was almost that, except that in 1964 he was lured back to write some songs for the American version of That Was the Week That Was. During the 1970s he contributed songs to the children’s educational television programme The Electric Company and, two years later, appeared in episodes of the Frost Report at the BBC.

There were occasional songs after that – (I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica in 1990 is probably the best known (“Amid the California flora / I’ll be lighting my menorah, /Like a baby in his cradle / I’ll be playing with my dreidl”). In 1980, the British producer Cameron Mackintosh persuaded him to agree to a revue of his songs called Tomfoolery, which started life at the Criterion theatre in London. But Lehrer neither appeared in it nor wrote new material for it. He was done with performing.

Born in New York, Tom was the elder son of James Lehrer, a prosperous necktie manufacturer, and his wife, Anna (nee Waller). He learned to play the piano, fell in love with the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter, and attended private schools, which discovered they had a mathematics prodigy on their hands.

So he went to Harvard, and took a master’s in 1947, the year after his degree, before settling down to the life of a graduate student, which he enjoyed. He registered for a doctorate but never finished it.

Over the years he gave various reasons for stopping song-writing and performing. “What’s the point of having laurels if you can’t rest on them?” he asked. He said he never supposed he might be doing some good, and quoted Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin kabaretts of the 30s, “which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the second world war”.

Things that were once funny now scared him. “I’m not tempted to write a song about George W Bush,” he said of the then US president. “I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.” He said that satire died when they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel peace prize, but that was not his reason for giving it up.

However, if you listen to his students, you come away thinking the biggest factor was that he loved teaching and wanted to spend his life doing it. He taught on the US east coast until 1972, when he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where for almost 30 years he taught two classes: The American Musical and The Nature of Math.

The American fiction writer Greg Neri wrote: “He was very humble, his fame meant nothing to him, the past he’d fob off as nothing more than messing around with satire. But get him talking about the American musical and he was off and running … He was truly delighted to see a play get on its feet and the day we performed it, he was all grins … He was extremely kind and patient with students.”

Other former students reported that you did not mention his career as a performer, or ask about his personal life: it was an unspoken rule in his class.

There is a video he recorded in 1997 called The Professor’s Song. One of the songs, to another Gilbert and Sullivan tune, begins “If you give me your attention I will tell you what I am. / I’m a brilliant mathematician, also something of a ham.” But these were private songs for his students. He had turned his back on fame and fortune. And the most dramatic illustration of that came in 2020 when he announced that his lyrics and sheet music were now available for anyone to use or perform without paying royalties.

I benefited from this when writing a play called Tom Lehrer is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You, and including many of his greatest songs. It was performed last year at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, north London, and is due to return this November at the OSO Arts Centre, south of the river in Barnes. “Help yourselves, and don’t send me any money,” he wrote on his website. So I did.

• Thomas Andrew Lehrer, singer, songwriter, satirist and mathematician, born 9 April 1928; died 26 July 2025

 

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