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

(2). 3 (blackout) Higgins continues 4-5-6 A flat min

(3). As is. 11th bar “How kind of you” (Orch.) blend to Higg.

(4). As is (Rain in Spain) A min.

These slightly cryptic fragments indicate what dialogue the verses are to fade into, with a special case of enjambment in the second chorus where the servants end by counting the hours of the morning at which Higgins is working (“One a.m., / Two a.m. / Three…”) followed by a quick blackout, after which Higgins continues the numbers by counting marbles into Eliza’s mouth (“Four, five, six marbles”).

Inserted into the score is a typed lyric sheet with four verses of the song. The published version has only three, but originally the following was the penultimate verse:

Stop, Professor Higgins!

Stop, Professor Higgins!

Stop we pray

Or any day

You’ll drop, Professor Higgins!

Hours fly!

Weeks go by …!

Keith Garebian writes that the servants “sympathise with Higgins rather than Eliza” in this number, but this early lyric (which is also used in the copyist’s piano-vocal score and Bennett’s orchestration) shows that it was originally more sympathetic to him than it is in its published form.23 In the cut verse, the servants encourage Higgins to “stop before he drops”; but Lerner and Loewe left in the far-from-sympathetic final verse, which tells him to “quit” before the servants do.

The climax of the lessons sequence is, of course, “The Rain in Spain.” As Geoffrey Block has noted, there is a discrepancy between Lerner’s account of when it was written and Harrison’s autobiography, which names the song as one of those played by Lerner and Loewe for him at their initial meeting.24 The actor claimed that at the time this was “the only number that really whizzed along,” adding that it was “about all they had in the way of show tunes, and it was obviously a great one.” Lerner, by contrast, says that the song was written later, during auditions in the summer of 1955. It was supposedly their only “unexpected visitation from the muses” and came as the result of Lerner’s idea to write a song in which Eliza can now speak correctly all the things she has done wrong before. Since her main problem is with the letter A, Lerner suggested calling it “The Rain in Spain.” This inspired Loewe to write a tango, taking only ten minutes to finish it. Since Outline 1 mentions both the song and its function in quite a lot of detail—“In the joy of the moment the line turns into a song, a Spanish one-step, which the three sing and dance jubilantly”—Lerner’s chronology is clearly inaccurate. Furthermore, he obscures the chronological relationship between “The Servants’ Chorus” and “The Rain in Spain,” even though the latter was clearly one of the earliest songs and the former was one of the last to be finished.

Still, the ease that Lerner associates with its creation is upheld by the sources. Loewe’s autograph score reproduces the vocal section of the song in its final version, though the dance music is not included, and as before, it is a fair copy, not an “original” manuscript. Although there are lines on the second and fourth pages where the music has been crossed out, these are the result of a slip of the pencil (p. 2) and perhaps the need to reuse manuscript paper that already had a small sketch of a different piece of music on it (p. 4, which has two-and-a-half bars of unrelated material crossed out at the top) rather than showing Loewe’s evolving ideas. In most respects, the voicing is too well worked out and the writing too neat and fluent to allow us to consider this the initial result of Loewe’s thought patterns. Once more, Rittmann composed the dance music. A negative photocopy of her piano score for the dance has survived, though the original pencil copy has not.25 She indicates the righthand part only for the first fifteen bars, which are a continuation of the “Rain in Spain” music, but from bar 16 on (the “Jota” section from the change to triple time) she writes out the whole thing, including the final shout of “Olé” from Higgins, Eliza, and Pickering. Together, Loewe and Rittmann provided Bennett with all the information he needed to orchestrate the number, and his autograph score is clear of changes.

ELIZA ON SHOW: ASCOT AND THE BALL

Brief mention is due to the scene change music (No. 10a) that follows “I Could Have Danced” and leads quickly into “The Ascot Gavotte.” This little snatch of music for solo trumpet takes up only two bars and eight notes (ex. 6.4) and was written by Lang on a blank system in the middle of Bennett’s “I Could Have Danced” full score (in line with the final bars of that song). But there can be no doubt that Loewe is responsible for the theme, because it is an exact copy of the first two bars of the introduction of his 1941 song “The Son of the Wooden Soldier,” written with lyricist John W. Bratton (ex. 6.5).26

Piecing together the score for the Ascot scene was complicated. The autograph score contained in the Loewe Collection is so brief that it does indeed seem to be the basis for the copyist’s arrangements.27 Loewe provided a three-page score containing a full verse of the song, completely harmonized. However, Rittmann stepped in to flesh out the number to its familiar proportions, and there are surviving fragments of her manuscripts for the dance section, the introduction, and the music that closes the scene (including the brief reprise).28 Dance pianist Freda Miller’s copy of the copyist’s score is fully annotated to show how Rittmann’s “Gavotte Dance” music was to be fitted into the middle of the sung verses. A separate photocopy of Rittmann’s “Intro to Gavotte” manuscript, marked “Freda” at the top, shows a new, longer introduction for the final version,29 as well as the original lyric, which had an extra verse and different words for the reprise (see appendix 4).30 A lyric