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

about the Americans—is not in fact written down. Furthermore, the two bars of accompaniment that follow the musical tacet have clearly been erased and rewritten, and there is also evidence of the joke about the French (squeezed into the last bar on the page) having being rubbed out and replaced (though Loewe omits the word “actually” from the revised version—probably due to a lack of space on the page). This all fits in with the evidence about final revisions to the song and shows that Loewe revised his personal manuscript to document the changes.

As before, the full score of the number is a complicated document rather than a consecutively written, neatly produced manuscript. It is the work of both Lang and Bennett and contains numerous modifications. Broadly speaking, bars 1–95 (up to “Oh, why can’t the English learn to”) are Bennett’s orchestration, and 96 (from the key change at “set a good example”) to the end are by Lang. The introduction seems to have caused a few problems: the original orchestration consisted of a solo clarinet giving Higgins his opening pitch (A) and the harp playing a D-major scale from A to A to strengthen the lead-in. This was rejected, and instead Bennett wrote a short A-major chord on all the instruments, perhaps to act as a more assertive introduction for Higgins. That in turn was crossed out, however, and the two-bar bassoon introduction that appears in the published score was added. Curiously, this, too, was crossed out, but was later reinstated for the published show. The first three pages of score contain significant alterations, usually with lines being taken away from one instrument and given to another or the harmony being filled out. There are also places where changes were indicated but went unused in the definitive version. An example is in bars 14 and 15, where Bennett added trumpet parts to accompany Eliza’s cry of “Aooow,” but the final orchestration does not include them. Another case is in bars 34–39, where the original orchestration was saturated with busy sixteenth notes in the flute and oboe parts; Bennett replaced them with a eighth-note motif on the trumpets’ staves, indicating with arrows that they are for flute and oboe. Such examples are to be found throughout the score. Lang’s part of the orchestration can be dated fairly accurately, because he clearly orchestrated the version shown on the lyric sheet from January 27 (i.e., almost the final version, but not quite). The line about the Americans is written in its sung version but crossed out and changed to allow for the new spoken line; the comment about the French is spoken but in the second person rather than the third; and the line “Use decent English” still appears. Aside from this, the final two bars have been crossed out and replaced with a new version on the subsequent page, proving that, no less than Lerner and Loewe, the meticulousness of the orchestrators knew no bounds.

In his autobiography, Lerner describes how the composition of both “Why Can’t the English?” and “I’m an Ordinary Man” was the result of having met Harrison and evolved a style of music for him. Supposedly, the two songs took “about six weeks in all to complete.”47 “I’m an Ordinary Man” replaced “the totally inadequate” “Please Don’t Marry Me” and was greeted with enthusiasm by Hart and Harrison.48 The few surviving sources for the song uphold this image of a smooth creative process. Levin’s papers contain the earliest version of the lyric, both as a loose lyric sheet and as part of the rehearsal script. The words are almost the same as in the published version, with a few minor edits.49 Lerner’s only substantial change improved one of his images: “I’m a quiet living man / Who’s contented when he’s reading / By the fire in his room” became “I’m a quiet living man / Who prefers to spend his evenings / In the silence of his room.” Whereas the original picture merely portrayed Higgins as bookish, the replacement promotes the stony “silence of his room”; the point was not to show his scholastic side but his solitary, unsociable nature.50

Not surprisingly, the autograph score of “I’m an Ordinary Man” in the Loewe Collection is a fair copy. Although it does not match the published vocal score, it contains only one major difference.51 The passage “Let them buy their wedding bands / For those anxious little hands” was originally punctuated by two imitative gestures in the music. These are crossed out but are still legible. The material in the second half of the song that repeats the earlier music is written out in shorthand with the melody alone; Loewe indicated with numbers where the piano part was to be copied from the first half of the song, suggesting the score was written for the use of the copyist. This is corroborated by the fact that Bennett’s autograph full score uses the same earlier version of the lyric as Loewe’s autograph. The orchestration is largely free of corrections and modifications: the one-bar flute melody following the line “free of humanity’s mad inhuman noise” was cut, as was the nine-bar harp part after the thrice-repeated “Let a woman in your life” near the end, and there are some small additions of expressive markings and string bowings in pencil. Otherwise, the number does indeed seem to have been written with ease, as Lerner suggested.52

Like Eliza’s “Just You Wait,” Higgins’s “Ordinary Man” is constructed with a freedom that helped to portray the two sides of Higgins—charm and arrogance—within the same number. The verse is roughly twelve bars long, and the gracefulness of the dotted rhythms, gently descending harmonic lines and flexed, rather than strict, triplets add to Higgins’s charm, even if he is arrogant in his idealized description of himself. With the refrain comes a shift to the subdominant, E-flat major. A typical rising-and-falling Broadway thumb-line creates unrest while Higgins sings “But let a woman in your life,” and many of his lines