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

are punctuated by chromatic scales in the woodwinds. A sinister edge is added by the use of the subdominant minor on the lines “Then get on to the enthralling / fun of overhauling you.” The larger gesture is that Loewe paints Higgins’s description of himself in a tranquil light and his description of life with a woman as—literally—a nightmare: everything about the verses is relaxed, but the refrains are uneasy throughout, complete with howling high woodwind scales. This contrast is brought to a head at the end of the song, when Higgins turns on several phonographs with “gibberish voices” playing on them, while the music whips itself into a frenzy until Higgins suddenly turns them off and makes his final statement: “I shall never let a woman in my life.” No less than in the Soliloquy from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which has long been held up as the outstanding example of a musical monologue in loose form, Loewe is capable of tying together disparate musical strands to create an insight into a character’s psyche.

Likewise, there are several different types of material in “A Hymn to Him,” rather than a regular structure. The song begins without introduction, and the declamatory manner of the lyric for the verse is matched by a simple vamp accompaniment. A transition passage, during which Pickering calls the Home Office to get help in tracking down Eliza after she has bolted, takes us into D major, and the same material is repeated with a slight melodic variation. The refrain is a self-righteous march in 6/8 time (from bar 59). The use of compound duple time here is clever, because it allows the composer to mix a martial character with Higgins’s characteristic elegance, whereas a straight common-time march could have been heavier. At bar 79, Loewe turns the ascending “Why can’t a woman” theme on its head and writes a descending melody for “Why does ev’ry one do what the others do?” Then at bar 90, the music briefly moves into cut time as Higgins delivers his punch line (“Why don’t they grow up like their father instead?”). This alternation of time signatures continues throughout the song, then in the final refrain Higgins finally comes clean and says what he has been thinking all along: “Why can’t a woman be like me?”

“A Hymn to Him” was one of the final songs to be completed. Lerner explains that it was added after Harrison’s worried reaction to the show during its first rehearsal: “His face grew longer and longer and his voice softer and softer. … Somehow Higgins had gotten lost in the second act and because this is the central story, I felt his concern was justified … I turned to Fritz and Moss and said that I thought Higgins needed another song in the second act.”53 Harrison confirms this chronology and motivation in his autobiography, adding that Lerner’s wife invented the title “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” and that the song did not reach him “until almost the last week of rehearsals.”54

None of the pre-rehearsal outlines of the show contain a reference to the song nor does the rehearsal script, and there are no lyric sheets for the piece among the others in the Levin or Warner-Chappell materials. All of this confirms a late composition. However, the latter collection does contain an autograph piano-vocal score for the number.55 The lyric, title, and vocal line are in Loewe’s hand, while Rittmann is responsible for the rest of the material (accompaniment, expressive markings, etc.). She probably completed the score on the basis of Loewe’s melody, perhaps with the accompaniment taken down by ear on hearing him play it on the piano. There are a couple of changes of lyric in this version of the song.56 In two places, fragments of lyric dangle out of context, saying “Ready to see you” and “We’re cold in the winter.” Another small difference is that both the Rittmann/Loewe score and Lang’s full score have “But by and large they [rather than ‘we’] are a marvellous sex.”57 Otherwise, the lyric is familiar from the published version. The composer autograph in the Loewe Collection contains neither the introduction nor any sign that the original version of the lyric was ever present, so again this was probably written out later, perhaps for publishing purposes.

The Rittmann/Loewe autograph does contain a tantalizing musical difference, though. Whereas the published song begins without an introduction because Higgins speaks the first few words (“What in all of heaven”), this manuscript shows an extended introduction of nine bars (as shown in ex. 5.7), quoting five bars of “The Rain in Spain,” followed by an echo of the introduction of “I Could Have Danced All Night.” This creates an allusion to Eliza’s two songs of triumph on learning how to speak properly, and makes it more obvious to the audience that the music of Higgins’s “What in all of heaven…” is based on the introduction and verse to Eliza’s “Danced.” This makes new connections between both the characters (Higgins and Eliza sharing the same music) and the two acts (music from act 1 comes back in act 2 to link the two)—another instance of Loewe acting on both micro and macro levels.

One of Lerner and Loewe’s golden moves in the show is the positioning of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” By delivering it at the last moment they kept the tension high right through to the end of the story. On November 29, 1955, Lerner wrote to Harrison in the wake of having composed the number, telling him about the character of the song (“funny, touching”) and its structure (a reprise soliloquy framed by new material):

Ex. 5.7. “A Hymn to Him,” original introduction.

The big news of the letter is that we are practically finished with your second act number and our collective enthusiasm is boundless. I think it’s going to be one of the most important things you’ll do in the show—funny, touching in an