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

familiar sixty-six bars (AABA, each section consisting of sixteen bars, with an extension at the end). In itself, this evidently makes the song more rounded in form, which would have been AABCA. Furthermore, the melodic contours, harmony, and accompaniment style of this cut section do not sit easily with the rest of the song. But there is another possible reason for the cut. The section starting “Some men hate to wait and wait” bears a resemblance to the B section of Higgins’s cut song “Please Don’t Marry Me”: “Some chaps see their lady fair / Always as she looked their wedding day. / Some chaps do but this I swear: / When you’re old and ashen gray, I will see you just that way.” Higgins’s song is a declaration that he has no sympathy with women, whereas this section of Freddy’s song states the reverse. The similarity between the constructions “Some men” and “Some chaps,” and the subject in question, draws an automatic comparison between the numbers, while the messages they deliver are diametrically opposed. Had all this material remained in the show, it could have posited Freddy and Higgins more overtly as rival suitors for Eliza’s affection.

The full score of the number reflects the changes made during rehearsals. Most of it is by Lang, and it gives the original version of the verse, but the original middle section of the refrain was cut before the song was orchestrated.18 Attached to the back of the score is an orchestration for the final version of the verse in Bennett’s hand; it also includes a revision of the orchestration of the four bars before the words “And oh, the towering feeling,” as well as the final four bars of the number.19 Lang’s part of the orchestration contains a couple of places where the harmonization has been slightly amended, but on the whole it was left as he originally wrote it. The composer’s manuscript of the song in the Loewe Collection represents a postcomposition document; it is fluently written and uses the published verse, as well as completely omitting the original middle section of the refrain.

Ex. 6.3. “On the Street Where She Lives,” extract from cut section of original refrain.

Of the four key players in the drama, Freddy is the only one who does not undergo any kind of transformation.20 The emotions of Eliza and Higgins veer throughout and Doolittle’s change of social class affects his life (if not his personality), but Freddy is the constant, foolish romantic. This is best represented by the fact that when his first-act song returns in act 2, it does so without modification. Freddy is silly: he sings in rhyming couplets and romantic clichés, and, with Eliza’s “I Could Have Danced,” his song is one of only two based on a conventional lyric arch. But if his constancy is comically extreme—all he wants is to stand in the street where Eliza lives—it is also the crucial representation of Shaw’s insistence that Freddy and Eliza marry after the story’s conclusion. By making sure that Freddy stays in the story and looks after Eliza in her journey from Higgins’s house to Mrs. Higgins’s, Lerner and Loewe guarantee that we know that an Eliza-Higgins union is not inevitable, even if that is where the plot’s main point of tension lies.

SERVANTS AND LESSONS

“The Servants’ Chorus” is one of the show’s most ingenious numbers. It allows Lerner and Loewe to give momentum to the series of lessons for Eliza—each lesson is punctuated by a single refrain, played a semitone higher and faster each time. The relationship between song and dialogue is at its most fluid here: the verses begin with one bar of introduction to give the servants their pitches, and the music fades out in every case to the middle of Higgins’s next lesson, without musical closure. This was planned from the beginning: Outlines 1–4 all mention a montage of lessons. In Outline 4, the chorus appears both before and after “Just You Wait”; it is surely better that in the published version it comes afterwards only and propels us without interruption to “The Rain in Spain.”

The content and number of verses were decided late in the day. The rehearsal script indicates five places during the scene where the chorus was to be sung, but no lyrics for the number are included. Unusually, there are two copies of the number in Loewe’s hand: one in the Loewe Collection, and one in the Warner-Chappell Collection. Both plot out the first verse, though only the first page of the Warner-Chappell manuscript is in Loewe’s hand, and even then, Rittmann wrote both the “Moderato” tempo marking and the whole of the second page. The Loewe Collection version is in G minor—the key in which it was orchestrated and published—and is fluently written. At the top of the first page, Loewe wrote “Alan—Call Moss: How many verses?” while at the bottom of the final page he has indicated: “Each verse ½ tone higher into ‘Rain in Spain.’” That the lyric was written in pen (uniquely among the Loewe manuscripts) might, as Geoffrey Block has proposed, suggest that it was therefore a late addition, because the use of ink is a more final gesture than the more normal pencil.21

On the other hand, it is unclear which of the two manuscripts came first. After all, the Warner-Chappell version is in A minor, whereas the composer appears to have known that the final key would be G minor when writing the Loewe Collection version. Then again, that the Loewe Collection manuscript is entirely in the composer’s hand and the Warner-Chappell one is in a mixture of both his and Rittmann’s could point toward the latter being a subsequent version. At the bottom of the second page of the Warner-Chappell score is a message in an unknown hand indicating the verses and the keys they were to be written in next to them.22 On the reverse, Loewe himself wrote more specific directions:

(1). As is (Cup