Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies), McHugh, Dominic [fantasy books to read TXT] 📗

first is on a page consisting of four separate melodies, the third of which has been crossed out (because it is an early version of the fourth melody on the page) and all of which are slightly untidy; this feels like a true page of sketches. The E-flat major version is on a page titled “Sketches” containing three very short melodic extracts numbered 10, 11 and 12. All three are very brief, very neat, and fluently written, and the first two end with “etc.”; the document seems like a sort of “thematic catalogue” to remind Loewe of melodies he had invented and perhaps intended for a specific purpose. None of the other extracts on these pages is familiar as a song from another Lerner and Loewe show, so either they were very aborted attempts at writing songs for Fair Lady or they were related to another show altogether. Loewe could conceivably have had the melody on his desk for some years before it was used in the New Haven version of this show.

Ex. 4.18.“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” sketch 1.

Ex. 4.19.“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” sketch 2.

Ex. 4.20.“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” sketch 3.

In spite of the extended lyric reproduced earlier, the version of “Say a Prayer” used in the My Fair Lady tryout was the same as that used in Gigi. Conductor Franz Allers’s photocopy of a copyist’s piano-vocal score shows that this document (which was presumably used to rehearse the number) is almost identical with the published sheet music for the song in its Gigi incarnation.37 The orchestration of the number (by Jack Mason, the uncredited “ghost” orchestrator of My Fair Lady) is identical to this copyist’s score, right down to the fact that the first-time bars lie empty. In the same folder as the “Say a Prayer” orchestration is a two-page manuscript in Russell Bennett’s hand entitled “Bridge After Prayer,” which consists of six bars of transition music based on “Say a Prayer,” leading into an orchestral rendition of one verse of “I Could Have Danced All Night.”38

It is clear from the cut lyric reproduced above that the original conception of “Say a Prayer” involved an ABA form whereby the lyric for the repeat of A had a reversed meaning. Perhaps this was Lerner’s attempt to overcome what he evidently considered to be the bland nature of the song: suddenly it became more emphatic and personal in the final chorus. As it is, though, “Say a Prayer” had a similar function in My Fair Lady and Gigi: Eliza and Gigi both sing a simple song about being nervous about a forthcoming event. Nevertheless, the beauty of the melody, the subtle nuances of the harmony, and the sincerity of the lyrics show Lerner and Loewe at their best; and when Julie Andrews sang the number at a tribute concert for Loewe given in New York on March 28, 1988, a few weeks after his death, she was essentially reappropriating one of the finest songs Loewe had written for her in My Fair Lady.39 “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” is a fitting climax to this chapter, because it demonstrates how Lerner and Loewe had the confidence to cut or discard songs if they did not work in the show as a whole, even when the material was of high quality in its own terms. Likewise, the material that did eventually make it into the final version of the score was heavily scrutinized and adjusted before Lerner and Loewe were content with it. This points the way to a new interpretation of My Fair Lady, one which sees the piece as the result of rigorous self-criticism and discerning revision, rather than an organic act of creation from one end of the show to the other.

5

SETTLING THE SCORE

PART I

Of the songs that eventually made it into the score of My Fair Lady, only “The Rain in Spain” and “Show Me” were left more or less as they were originally conceived by Lerner and Loewe, and only a couple of changes were made to the lyric of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”1 All the other numbers went through a considerable amount of revision and recomposition, with “Why Can’t the English?” particularly notable for the existence of four completely different versions in the Library of Congress’s collections. This chapter approaches the show’s musical numbers through the numerous types of compositional manuscripts identified in chapter 4. Such a process helps reexamine Lerner and Loewe’s approach to the show as well as the relationships between the different members of the “music department”: the orchestrators (Robert Russell Bennett, Phil Lang, and Jack Mason), dance arranger (Trude Rittmann), choral arranger (Gino Smart), and various copyists. More generally, this gives an insight into the complexities of the processes that went into producing the music for Broadway shows of the period as well as a critical examination of various aspects of the definitive published text.

SETTING THE SCENE: CREATING THE OVERTURE AND OPENING

Although it was standard procedure on Broadway for orchestrators and arrangers to create the overture for a show based on themes from the main songs, Frederick Loewe seems to have played a more active role than this in the creation of the Overture for Fair Lady. A two-page autograph piano score from the Library of Congress’s Loewe Collection shows that Loewe drafted out the opening statement, the theme from “You Did It” and the transition into “On the Street Where You Live” (only the first bar of which is included).2 At the top of the first page, Loewe wrote an instruction to Trude Rittmann—who arranged the show’s incidental music in addition to the dances—to “Have [Robert] Russell [Bennett] confirm keys.” This highlights an unambiguous chain of command from composer (Loewe) to arranger (Rittmann) to orchestrator (Bennett). In addition, Loewe stated that the music should continue into a refrain of “On the Street” and “I Could Have Danced,” showing how the rest of the