Tom Lehrer, mathematician and singer-songwriter known for colorful satire, dies at 97

By Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press

CANVAS Arts

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tom Lehrer, the popular and erudite song satirist who lampooned marriage, politics, racism and the Cold War, then largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities, has died. He was 97.

Longtime friend David Herder said Lehrer died Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did not specify a cause of death.

Lehrer had remained on the math faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.

A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math degree from the institution at age 18), Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to old traditions and current events. His songs included “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Old Dope Peddler” (set to a tune reminiscent of “The Old Lamplighter”), “Be Prepared” (in which he mocked the Boy Scouts) and “The Vatican Rag,” in which Lehrer, an atheist, poked at the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. (Sample lyrics: “Get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries. Bow your head with great respect, and genuflect, genuflect, genuflect.”)

Accompanying himself on piano, he performed the songs in a colorful style reminiscent of such musical heroes as Gilbert and Sullivan and Stephen Sondheim, the latter a lifelong friend. Lehrer was often likened to such contemporaries as Allen Sherman and Stan Freberg for his comic riffs on culture and politics and he was cited by Randy Newman and “Weird Al” Jankovic among others as an influence.

He mocked the forms of music he didn’t like (modern folk songs, rock ‘n’ roll and modern jazz), laughed at the threat of nuclear annihilation and denounced discrimination.

But he attacked in such an erudite, even polite, manner that almost no one objected.

“Tom Lehrer is the most brilliant song satirist ever recorded,” musicologist Barry Hansen once said. Hansen co-produced the 2000 boxed set of Lehrer’s songs, “The Remains of Tom Lehrer,” and had featured Lehrer’s music for decades on his syndicated “Dr. Demento” radio show.

Lehrer’s body of work was actually quite small, amounting to about three dozen songs.

“When I got a funny idea for a song, I wrote it. And if I didn’t, I didn’t,” Lehrer told The Associated Press in 2000 during a rare interview. “I wasn’t like a real writer who would sit down and put a piece of paper in the typewriter. And when I quit writing, I just quit. … It wasn’t like I had writer’s block.”

He’d gotten into performing accidentally when he began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse his friends. Soon he was performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he remained at Harvard to teach and obtain a master’s degree in math.

He cut his first record in 1953, “Songs by Tom Lehrer,” which included “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” lampooning the attitudes of the Old South, and the “Fight Fiercely, Harvard,” suggesting how a prissy Harvard blueblood might sing a football fight song.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Lehrer began to perform concerts of his material in venues around the world. In 1959, he released another LP called “More of Tom Lehrer” and a live recording called “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” nominated for a Grammy for best comedy performance (musical) in 1960.

But around the same time, he largely quit touring and returned to teaching math, though he did some writing and performing on the side.

Lehrer said he was never comfortable appearing in public.

“I enjoyed it up to a point,” he told The AP in 2000. “But to me, going out and performing the concert every night when it was all available on record would be like a novelist going out and reading his novel every night.”

He did produce a political satire song each week for the 1964 television show “That Was the Week That Was,” a groundbreaking topical comedy show that anticipated “Saturday Night Live” a decade later.

He released the songs the following year in an album titled “That Was the Year That Was.” The material included “Who’s Next?” ponders which government will be the next to get the nuclear bomb … perhaps Alabama? (He didn’t need to tell his listeners that it was a bastion of segregation at the time.) “Pollution” takes a look at the then-new concept that perhaps rivers and lakes should be cleaned up.

He also wrote songs for the 1970s educational children’s show “The Electric Company.” He told AP in 2000 that hearing from people who had benefited from them gave him far more satisfaction than praise for any of his satirical works.

His songs were revived in the 1980 musical revue “Tomfoolery” and he made a rare public appearance in London in 1998 at a celebration honoring that musical’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh.

Lehrer was born in 1928, in New York City, the son of a successful necktie designer. He recalled an idyllic childhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that included attending Broadway shows with his family and walking through Central Park day or night.

After skipping two grades in school, he entered Harvard at 15 and, after receiving his master’s degree, he spent several years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate.

“I spent many, many years satisfying all the requirements, as many years as possible, and I started on the thesis,” he once said. “But I just wanted to be a grad student, it’s a wonderful life. That’s what I wanted to be, and unfortunately, you can’t be a Ph.D. and a grad student at the same time.”

He began to teach part-time at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, mainly to escape the harsh New England winters.

From time to time, he acknowledged, a student would enrol in one of his classes based on knowledge of his songs.

“But it’s a real math class,” he said at the time. “I don’t do any funny theorems. So those people go away pretty quickly.”

Former Associated Press writer John Rogers contributed to this story. Rogers retired from The AP in 2021.

First published at PBS News, July 27, 2025

Mahler Symphony No. 2 'Resurrection'. Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simone Young. Released 2025.

Mahler Symphony No. 2 - “Resurrection”

Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Simone Young

Deutche Gramophone 487 7484 and 7485

Reviewed by Tony Magee

Released in 2025, from live recordings at the Sydney Opera House in 2022, this 2LP gatefold issue is the first time an Australian orchestra has been recorded by the great yellow label in its 115 year history.

Presentation is very, very stylish. One is expecting great things.

And so the tonearm and stylus drop down onto the vinyl with that satisfying plop through the speakers.

Mahler based the first movement of the symphony (Andante moderato) on his symphonic poem Todtenfeier, composed in 1888.

He also had drafted a third and fourth movement during 1891 to 1894. Then followed a period of stagnation.

But inspiration comes from strange places. 

Later in 1894, Hans von Bülow died and Mahler attended the funeral in Hamburg. The choir sang a setting of the ode The Resurrection by the religious poet Friedrich Klopstock.

Mahler recalled, “Everything was revealed plain and clear to my soul in a flash”. Klopstock’s poem provided the basis for the choral finale he was considering, which would fulfil the work musically.

The first movement opens with a dramatic gesture, somewhat reminiscent of the storm sequence in Wagner’s Die Walküre, continuing with more and more themes, all centred around C minor. One such theme is recalled in the Finale, depicting the resurrection of the dead. It is long and complex, containing an enormous range of tonal colours, made possible by the huge orchestra required, including a vastly expanded brass section.

Simone Young’s realisation of this first movement is reserved at first. Rather than a dramatic gesture, there is a sense of understated intrigue. A valid interpretation, although one that I have heard done so much more convincingly on another recording. More on that later.

Splashes of crescendo chords increase the intensity, before a short cantabile melody takes them over.

The main entrance motif returns.

Young and the orchestra bring a sense of drama and urgency as the piece continues, before dissolving into sustained pianissimo passages. The woodwind section shines forth at times, before the brass and strings fire back with more drama and intrigue.

More storm sequences follow and are very well executed by Young and the orchestra. It’s quite scary.

Again the opening motifs are repeated, this time in a different key. The brass section bursts forth with triumphant fanfares.

The SSO then deliver another well executed sequence of storm passages with fury.

Once again the opening motifs are stated, this time with playing much more aligned with what are stated as Mahler’s intention - a dramatic gesture.

As the first movement progresses, Young’s interpretation builds considerably. 

How to follow this massive opening movement presented a problem for Mahler, one he eventually solved by insisting on a long and sustained pause before beginning the second movement which is short and rather light weight by contrast, and a remembrance of happy times in the life of the deceased.

On this recording, the listener can make this happen, as the second Andante moderato movement begins on side two. 

Beginning gently and reflectively, Young urges the orchestra to continue with passages of happiness, as Mahler intended.

The third Scherzo movement begins ominously with tympani before the orchestra joins with dramatic passages. It is also short, representing a view of life as meaningless activity.

The fourth movement, Ulrich, is a wish for release from life without meaning. Wagnerian passages abound.

The 17 section Finale, at first recalling the questions of the first movement and the doubts of the third, ends with a fervent hope for everlasting, transcendent renewal.

Mahler introduces the soprano and alto soloists here - Nicole Car and Deborah Humble on this recording - joined by the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. Young builds and builds the intensity with massive fortes and sensational triumphant passages. It’s really wonderful stuff and brings forth the sense of hope and renewal. A choral finale like no other.

Otto Klemperer’s recording on EMI from 1963 is perhaps the most definitive version of this great work and one that I keep coming back to as my benchmark.

Right from the opening motifs, his is a bold and majestic performance of great drama and intrigue. In addition, the EMI Engineers have captured the orchestra with incredible clarity, something that this new recording on Deutche Gramophone lacks in places.

Both recordings share a convincing stereo sound stage.

The Resurrection Symphony was first performed in its entirety in 1895, with Mahler himself conducting. It established him as a major European composer.

Obituary - Dame Cleo Laine

Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth on The Les Dawson Show in 1975. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

Celebrated singer with an agile contralto voice who, with her husband John Dankworth, helped bring new audiences to jazz

Cleo Laine, who has died aged 97, was not only the most creatively and materially successful jazz singer the UK scene has known, but was also respected worldwide as one of a handful of truly original jazz-inspired vocalists. From modest beginnings in the pubs and dancehalls of austerity Britain in the 1950s, the diminutive singer with the majestic and agile contralto voice went on to achieve international fame in a career that also embraced acting and writing.

Laine could travel easily in almost any idiom, from jazzy standards-singing to the frontiers of classical music and opera, and she was the only female singer to receive Grammy Nominations in the jazz, popular and classical categories. When she became the first British artist to win a Grammy as best female jazz vocalist (for the third of her live Carnegie Hall albums) in 1985, she received two dozen roses from Ella Fitzgerald and a card inscribed: “Congratulations, gal – it’s about time!”

Even late in her career, Laine’s remarkable range, theatrical awareness of contrast and drama, sensitivity to melody and mood, and astute choice of high-class songs, prevented her from ever sounding remotely dated. Whether in coolly counter-melodic duets with her husband John Dankworth, the alto saxophonist, in flat-out exercises in zigzagging scat or stomping swing, or in spacey moods of poignant reflectiveness, Laine was never less than the classiest of acts.

In 1997, she and Dankworth were, fittingly, given a Royal Albert Hall Prom Concert in honour of their joint 70th birthdays. As long-time stars of a usually low-profile British jazz scene, they brought together the worlds of dinner-jacket arts and unruly jazz. They helped put British jazz on the map, encouraged music education, smuggled jazz into the sensibilities of listeners who had thought they loathed it, and generally added a splash of style and confidence to a sometimes shadowy and defensive subculture.

Laine’s onstage glamour would give way to a far more worldly and down-to-earth magnetism as soon as the spotlight was off. A candid and personable woman, she impressed those who met her with her easygoing alertness, unexpectedly small stature for those who had previously only encountered her on a concert stage, and penetrating green eyes framed by dark curls.

She was also – in the age of the ubiquitous psychotherapist – mock-guilty about her lightness of spirit, saying simply: “I’m not a very neurotic person.” This realism allowed her to consider both her talents and her shortcomings with neither self-importance nor guilt. She would occasionally ponder whether two parents spending a lifetime on the road was not textbook childcare by some standards, but pointed out the independence and self-reliance of her children with Dankworth – their son, Alec, became a successful double-bassist and bandleader, and daughter, Jacqui, a vocalist, actor and songwriter with much of her mother’s canny timing, emotional subtlety, and inclusiveness of taste.

Laine singing with the John Dankworth Group at the Jacksonville jazz festival, Florida, in 1997. 
Photograph: Will Dickey/AP/The Florida Times-Union

Laine was born in Southall, west London, one of three children of a Jamaican father, Alexander Campbell, and an English mother, Minnie Bullock, who took in lodgers. Raised as Clementina Campbell (the fact that her birth had been registered under her mother’s name, before her parents married, did not emerge until she applied for a passport at 26, by which time she was performing as Cleo Laine), she showed early singing talent and was encouraged by her mother to take singing and dancing lessons.

After leaving school at 14, she found work in a hairdresser’s, milliner’s, pawnshop, cobbler’s and library, and married for the first time, to George Langridge, in 1947, while still in her teens. But she was restless and the example of her father – who sang, and loved music, but made his living selling goods door-to-door – had also given her an inkling that a life in music might provide an escape.

Modelling herself on the black singers she heard in American musicals such as Cabin in the Sky, she unintentionally developed a sound that was conspicuously different to that of most popular female singers of the 40s and early 50s. Choosing black artists seemed obvious to her, and the threatening implications of being in a racial minority in Britain were not as evident as they were to become later in the 50s. Laine recalled, however, that as a child during the second world war she had speculated on where children like herself might hide if nazism won.

In her mid-20s Laine began seriously to apply herself to singing. She had started out in pubs (“useful training for improvisation” she would ruefully recall) and eventually auditioned for the successful British modern jazz band led by Dankworth. Though she was a raw unknown, Dankworth and his musicians recognised her promise.

“I was amazed they liked me,” Laine told the Guardian in 1997. “I had begun to think auditions were my hobby, I’d been rejected on dozens of them, and talent competitions too.” But Dankworth was after somebody different, and Laine was unusual as a rich-toned contralto. She listened closely to Billie Holiday for her presence and sense of drama, Fitzgerald for the thought processes and technique that allowed her to improvise so exuberantly, and Sarah Vaughan for her operatic range. The mature Laine was to exhibit all these qualities.

She toured the UK extensively with the Dankworth band in the mid-50s. She divorced Langridge in 1957 and the following year married Dankworth, and shared the care of her first son, Stuart – by then 13 and sometimes a traveller with her on the road – with her mother and sister. She accompanied Dankworth to the US in 1959 for his appearance at the Newport jazz festival, and sang with the band at Birdland in New York on the same trip. She also began to read widely, and developed an enthusiasm for poetry – particularly that of ee cummings, one of whose pieces she was to record as a song.

Laine with Pearl Prescott in Flesh to a Tiger at the Royal Court, London, 1958. Photograph: David Sim

She also started to act and was initially confined to Caribbean roles, but her skill bloomed, and she was to regard her appearances at the Edinburgh festival in the 60s and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1967, as high points. But there were many others: Flesh to a Tiger, directed by Tony Richardson at the Royal Court theatre in 1958, the English musical Valmouth, the title role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, plus musical appearances in Show Boat, Colette, The Seven Deadly Sins, A Little Night Music and The Merry Widow.

She also originated the role of Princess Puffer (and won several awards and nominations for it) in the Broadway hit musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1985. She took on parts as diverse as the voice of God in the BBC Proms’ production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde (1990) and the Witch in Stephen Sondheim’s Los Angeles production of Into the Woods (1988).

She recorded prolifically in the 60s, on show-song and soundtrack projects (Dankworth was an in-demand movie composer at the time) and straight jazz albums with guests including the British sax virtuoso Tubby Hayes and her vocalist contemporary Annie Ross, and in that decade she was also a frequent guest on the British TV satire That Was the Week That Was.

Dankworth, meanwhile, had begun exploring jazz variations on non-jazz traditions in his own music, and broke through to a new public with arrangements of Shakespeare sonnets – Shakespeare and All That Jazz (1964), which won widespread acclaim and a five-star accolade in the US magazine DownBeat. Laine took to them eagerly – on slow pieces such as O Mistress Mine and Shall I Compere Thee to a Suummer’s Day, she showed a remarkable ability to make the quietest sounds ring like tiny bells, and then be enveloped in a wash of resonant low notes.

Classical audiences, too, were now beginning to wake up to Laine’s skilful control, rich tones and spontaneous jazz sensibility. She was Julie in the spectacularly successful 1971 London production of Jerome Kern’s Show Boat, made an acclaimed New York debut in 1972 and the first of her Carnegie Hall appearances (her Live at Carnegie Hall album from 1974 brought her a first Grammy nomination), and further expanded her palette in recording Arnold Schoenberg’s poetry-cycle Pierrot Lunaire, which was nominated for a classical Grammy. Despite an increasingly frenetic working life, she and Dankworth also oversaw the development of their Buckinghamshire home at Wavendon as a working theatre.

Laine and Dankworth at their home in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, in 2009. 
Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian

Over the next decades, Laine collaborated with the flautist James Galway (1980) and classical guitarist John Williams (1984), contributed to Michael Tilson Thomas’s LSO series The Gershwin Years (1987), and a tribute to female songwriters including Joni Mitchell and Holiday (Woman to Woman, 1989). Her bluesily soulful encounter with Ray Charles (Porgy and Bess, 1976) was a highlight, as was a hip and swinging meeting with Mel Torme (Nothing Without You, 1992). Laine also appeared alongside Frank Sinatra during a week of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in 1992:

Following her autobiography, Cleo (1994), Laine also published You Can Sing If You Want To (1997) – an informal guide to learning to use the voice freely and confidently as an instrument.

The Dankworths slowed down only marginally in their 70s – their concerts worldwide still continued to sell out – and when Laine hit 80 in 2007 (Dankworth’s 80th having preceded hers by a month), she performed a series of UK shows, including a reunion of the John Dankworth Sextet that had set her stardom in motion. A four-disc box set, I hear the music, was released documenting the pair’s work from 1944 to 2005.

Dankworth’s health declined late in 2009, on a US tour that had to be curtailed. He died on the morning of 10 February 2010. He and Laine, plus a glitzy cast of guests, had been due to play at Wavendon that night, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Stables theatre. Impelled by the conviction that Dankworth would have wanted the celebration to go on, Laine went home from the hospital, played the gig, and broke the news of his death to a stunned audience only at the close.

She continued to perform for some years, frequently with a Dankworth rhythm section including Alec on bass and the pianist John Horler, thus demonstrating, as at the Cheltenham jazz festival in 2011, that Laine could still deliver a classic jazz song such as Duke Ellington’s Creole Love Call with a freshness not far away from Adelaide Hall’s 1920s version of the original.

Laine and Dankworth foresaw the contemporary developments that have led to the growing embrace of jazz innovation by audiences coming from the European art-music tradition, from western pop, or from cultures unrelated to either. Laine would readily agree that grand opera at its best was “glorious … but Louis Armstrong is glorious, too, and operatic in his own way”.

For her musicianship, and for that breadth of view, she acquired a raft of accolades and prizes, and in 1997 she was made a dame. Her achievements were a rich blend of the creative journey and the crusade, qualities of a musical life that she and Dankworth conducted with the lightest of touches. Despite all the globetrotting, the jet-lag and the impossible schedules, it seemed more fun to them than working.

Stuart died in 2019. Laine is survived by Alec and Jacqui.

Cleo Laine (Clementine Dinah Bullock), singer and actor, born 27 October 1927; died 24 July 2025

First published in The Guardian, July 26, 2025

Australian TV actor Henri Szeps dies aged 81

Award-winning actor Henri Szeps has died. (Supplied)

Henri Szeps, award-winning actor and star of ABC's Mother and Son, has died at the age of 81.

Szeps shot into televised entertainment through his role in the iconic sitcom, playing dentist Robert Beare alongside Ruth Cracknell and Garry McDonald.

The show's 10-year run saw it voted as the best Australian television program, before wrapping up in 1994.

"He died as he lived, loving life, his family, and his audience," his wife Mary Ann said.

Henri Sezps featured in Mother and Son between 1984 to 1994. (ABC)

A storied career on screen and stage

Born to two Polish Holocaust survivors in a Swiss refugee camp in 1943, Szeps moved to Australia at the age of eight and went on to study electrical engineering at Sydney University.

Moving into acting, Szeps enjoyed a storied career on the stage, featuring in the London production of I, Cladius in his twenties before moving back home in the 1970s.

But it was his first stage production in the 1968 rendition Boys in the Band that earned him critical acclaim at home.

From there, he trained in the Sydney Ensemble Theatre, where a green room is now named after him.

The final years of his performing career saw him star in a series of one man shows.

Szeps officially retired at the age of 70 after performing in his last play, citing that his memory was "no longer up to the task", a statement confirming his passing read.

Szeps, pictured in 2012, was also known for his string of sold-out, semi-autobiographical one-man shows. (Stateline NSW)

In 2021, Szeps revealed he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and had been living in a care facility since 2023.

"He was awarded countless acting prizes, culminating in an Order of Australia Medal in 2001," Thursday's statement said.

"His decline from Alzheimer's was largely peaceful, and Henri retained his sense of wonder and joie de vivre until the end."

On the stage he played characters such as Gandalf in The Hobbit and Sigmund Freud, before earning a role in war drama Vietnam as Harold Holt alongside a young Nicole Kidman.

The series won a Logie and shot Nicole Kidman onto a path of global super-stardom.

He leaves behind his wife Mary Ann, two sons and four grandchildren.

Sons pay tribute to Szeps's 'quick wit'

One of the two sons, Josh Szeps, paid tribute to the late actor.

"I cannot imagine a father with more passion, more zest for life, more curiosity and ferocious good humour. A room was never the same after dad had walked into it," he told the ABC.

"Part of me is relieved that his sharp mind, his quick wit and his deep love of philosophising, which dementia robbed of him in recent years, is now restored … in our memories, at least."

Szeps's son Amos said he would remember an important quote their father lived by.

"He always told Josh and I: 'Life's a gift, but only if you receive it'. Dad grabbed life with both hands. Our world will be smaller without him," he said.

First published at ABC News, July 24, 2025