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

one bar of introduction, Eliza floats in, her notes all short in expression of her excitement. The refrain is in ABCA1 form, with the B section a scarcely modified transposition up a tone of the A section; we feel Eliza’s growing joy and her inability to contain herself. Thematically, the C part is strongly linked to A and B, too, with similar configurations of note lengths and melodic shapes, and in the first two refrains Eliza ascends to a high F before coming back down to earth to a B and C, re-energizing the music for the next refrain. Throughout, the melody floats with long notes, while the accompaniment provides the motion; in the second refrain, the maids add to this with their commonsensical counterpoint, which Eliza ignores, merely repeating the main melody. Then she is left alone, and sings a final refrain pianissimo, before rousing herself for the final ascent to a high G. The composer’s intentions are clear: to set Lerner’s gloriously overstated lyric to music that illustrates Eliza’s thrill at her sense of achievement. The song is also clever in giving her a new vocal character at this point; compared to the low tessitura of her previous solos, “I Could Have Danced” shows Eliza in full lyric flow.

Musically, she goes silent at this point in the show, until her reprise of “Just You Wait” in Act 2.25 The number is sung up a tone in D minor this time, rather than in the darker key of C minor, and the mood is fragile. Eliza sings just over six bars before crying bitterly, and the mood is less martial: there’s no thudding trombone to lead into the singing this time, for instance, but lyrical clarinets and an appassionato violin solo instead. We then lose sight of Eliza for a couple of minutes, but the music continues straight into a reprise of Freddy’s “On the Street Where You Live.” His singing is interrupted upon Eliza’s appearance from Higgins’s house, but the music continues into the verse of “Show Me.” This is in two parts: first, Freddy maintains the lyric vein of “On the Street” with the words “Speak, and the world is full of singing,” then Eliza interrupts with the choppily textured “Words! Words! Words!” The emptiness of verbose language has become too much for her, be it from the adoring Freddy or the pedantic Higgins, and she cuts through Freddy’s waffling—two phrases, the second repeated higher than the first—with a furious Molto vivace in triple time.

“Show Me” has a Latin flavor, a bit like the huapango that Bernstein was later to use for “America” in West Side Story but without any obvious intention of evoking the exotic.26 In “Show Me,” seven bars of 3/4 time are concluded with a bar of 6/8. The same procedure is followed a minor third higher, then in the bridge Loewe uses three groups of four eighths in the melody (on “Here we are to-/ ge-ther in the / mid-dle of the”) to undermine the bar line and make the two bars seem like three. Eliza’s fury is dazzlingly presented in this way: it is almost as if she is in such control of her world now that she can move through multiple meters without losing her way. Her fury also makes her seem to get ahead of herself. Part of this comes from the lyric, too: whereas the standard lines are only six or seven feet long, Lerner resorts to wordy, thirteen-syllable lines in the bridge, such as “Never do I ever want to hear another word.” These are also colloquial and irritable in tone. Overall, the tension and fury of the piece are matched in words and music by dense harmonies and the imperative tense (such as “Don’t,” “Read,” and “Tell”).

There are no copies of the reprises of “Just You Wait” and “On the Street” in Loewe’s hand because, obviously, they required no new composition other than an introduction and linking material. This new music was provided by Rittmann, and her piano-vocal score survives in the Warner-Chappell Collection.27 “Just You Wait” is written out in full and presents the song exactly as it appears in the published score. Rittmann indicates that the first sixteen bars of “On the Street” are to be played by the orchestra, with Freddy joining in at “Are there lilac trees” and giving way to the underscoring again at “People stop and stare.” This was orchestrated by Bennett, and then discarded as the orchestral part was cut and Freddy sang from the beginning of “On the Street.”28 On a manuscript titled “Street Reprise,” Rittmann wrote out Freddy’s introductory verse to “Show Me” (“Speak, and the world is full of singing”).29 This was probably because Loewe’s autograph—which otherwise produces the song in full—does not contain the introduction to Freddy’s part. Still, it is intriguing that Bennett’s orchestration of this section follows Rittmann in writing the bass part as a D-flat major arpeggio (a false relation) rather than its enharmonic, C-sharp major, as in Loewe’s manuscript (again, probably a fair copy).30 The full score contains a certain amount of revision at this point alone, where Lang seems to have orchestrated an earlier version of Freddy’s opening line in F-sharp major rather than E major; this one-page score is crossed out and hidden beneath Bennett’s revision.

Eliza’s final number, “Without You,” was partly revised during the rehearsal period—though not quite in the way Lerner later described. The lyricist claimed that during the last week of rehearsals in New York, “a major storm was gathering” because Rex Harrison refused to stand on the stage in silence while Julie Andrews sang “Without You” to his face. Lerner continues: “In preparation for the struggle over ‘Without You’, Fritz and I thought it might incorporate it more into the emotional action if Harrison interrupted the song at the climax with: ‘I did it. I did it. I said I’d make a woman and indeed I did.’”31 However, not only does the rehearsal script include the