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

Shoe”; and the furious third, in which the music whips into a frenzy before being interrupted by Eliza’s cry of “Aoooow!” on being knocked over by Freddy. The music for this brief piece is wonderfully free and harmonically complex, but its most obvious point of interest is in the reference to the English nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” which contains the line “my fair lady.” Rittmann and Loewe include the music that goes with this line as a sneaky reference to the show’s title. Since the musical was named only in late December 1955 (see chap. 2), the Opening music almost certainly has a late date of composition, probably during the rehearsal period, which would explain why no manuscript exists in Loewe’s hand.

ELIZA’S DREAMS, ELIZA’S RAGE

Eliza’s five solo songs fall into two main groups: those that express her anger (“Just You Wait,” “Show Me,” and “Without You”) and those that express her joy or aspirations (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “I Could Have Danced All Night”). She is prone to extremes of emotion, be it elation or fury, rather than a “middle ground” position. Nor do these songs particularly convey facts to the audience. That is not to say that they tell us nothing, but rather that they are more about expression and characterization than explanation. This is especially the case with “Wouldn’t it Be Lovely.” In addition to the published vocal scores, there are two slightly different lyric sheets for the song, Loewe’s autograph, a copyist’s piano-vocal score, and Bennett’s full score. Clearly, the song came easily to Lerner and Loewe—the lyricist describes how a visit to Covent Garden market in the early morning provided the inspiration for the lyric, which Loewe set to music “in one afternoon”4—and the sources all suggest that the song changed very little during the creative process.

Nevertheless, some ambiguities remain. The first lyric sheet (from Levin’s papers) consists of the refrain with just three deviations from the familiar version: “With one gigantic [instead of ‘enormous’] chair,” “Lots of fire [instead of ‘coal’],” and “Crept over the winder sill” instead of “Crept over me winder sill.”5 The second lyric sheet (from the Warner-Chappell Collection) includes the verse and changes the refrain into its final version, with the exception of “gigantic/enormous.”6 Evidently this version was used to prepare the copyist’s score in the Warner-Chappell Collection. A copy intended for Bennett is annotated throughout to show how the basic score—containing the verse and one refrain in F major—was to be developed into the whole number with dance music. Bennett’s orchestral chart is almost entirely free of blemishes or corrections: the only real modification to the orchestration involves the removal of the bassoon and clarinet parts in bars 66–69 (“Lots of choc’late for me to eat…,” second refrain).

The copy of the song in the Loewe Collection, however, is confusing. It contains the verse and one refrain, with indications for two repeats of the refrain; there are also some crossed-out bars. This would seem to identify it as an early version of the song that was passed on to the copyist and orchestrator.7 However, it is difficult to account for the fact that this supposedly “original” composer score uses almost the final version of the lyric: of the three instances of the “pre-improvement” lyric listed earlier, only “Crept over the winder sill” (as opposed to “over me”) is present here. None of this affects the authorship of the song, yet it suggests that this is not Loewe’s original manuscript but rather a fair copy for the use of others. This is the case with many of the piano-vocal scores in the composer’s handwriting held in the Loewe Collection that tend not to represent the actual pieces of paper on which the songs were first written. Like Richard Rodgers (more of whose sketches have survived), it seems that Loewe went about drafting his songs on a single stave before writing out a fuller piano-vocal score.8 This serves as a reminder that placing too much importance on one source, instead of taking a larger sample and putting them into a wider context, can lead to a misunderstanding of the compositional process.

Even though “Wouldn’t it be Loverly?” has a simplicity that is appropriate for its dramatic context, it is nevertheless full of interesting features. The verse begins with four arpeggiated chords to punctuate Eliza’s delighted cries of “Aooow!” upon being given the money by Higgins: a seamless way for the music to segue out of the scene. This leads to the introduction, with its lazily descending melodic turns. But Loewe cuts it short with a perfect cadence as the men break into their “Quasi recitativo” a cappella verse, in which they describe their dreams. The “false” introduction then returns and drives into Eliza’s F-major refrain. The latter’s outward cockney charm belies its complex harmonization and chromaticism. For instance, bar 21 (“room somewhere”) moves into the subdominant area, establishing the song’s warmth, but although bar 23 (“cold night air”) ends on the expected dominant-seventh chord, it does so via an abrupt G-major seventh at the start of the bar. Perhaps the most elegant feature is the use of contrary motion in bars 24–25 (“With one enormous chair”), whose appoggiaturas come into their own when the pattern recurs in 27–28 to accent the repetition in the phrase “Warm face, warm hands, warm feet” (ex. 5.1). The bridge section (“Oh, so loverly sittin’ absobloomin’lutely still”) also has a fast harmonic rhythm, again featuring examples of chromatic voice-leading, while the final section is extended beyond its expected eight bars because of a prolongation of the title phrase. The second refrain features four-part choral writing alongside Eliza’s line, followed by a brief dance section in A-flat major in which the men whistle the melody. The number ends as Eliza sings a final “Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?” to which the men respond by repeating the final word. What Loewe achieves in this song is an introduction to Eliza’s softer side and the camaraderie of