Mitch Leigh

Born Irwin Stanley Michnick in Brooklyn in 1928, Mitch Leigh took his bachelor's and master's degrees at Yale, where his composition teacher was Paul Hindemith — an unlikely apprenticeship for a man whose living came first from advertising and then from Broadway, though Hindemith's insistence on craft never left him. In 1957 he founded Music Makers, a company writing music for radio and television commercials, work that teaches a composer to plant a melody in the ear within seconds. The lesson paid in 1965, when Man of La Mancha opened with a book by Dale Wasserman and lyrics by Joe Darion. It brought him the Tony Award, and it released "The Impossible Dream" into the world as a song most people can hum without knowing where it came from. He died in 2014. He took his Bachelor of Music at Yale in 1951 and his master's the year after, and had played jazz and written advertising music before Man of La Mancha, which grew out of Wasserman's 1959 television play I, Don Quixote and ran 2,328 performances in its first engagement. Leigh later produced and directed the 1985 revival of The King and I, in which Brynner gave his last performances as the King of Siam, and was nominated for a Tony as its director; the Songwriters Hall of Fame gave him its Contemporary Classics Award for “The Impossible Dream”.