Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

in their musicals. Here too, the issue is that Lloyd Webber, perhaps more than any major Broadway figure, is accused of indiscriminate or dramatically meaningless reuse.

Borrowing

This volume has shown that the composers of our featured shows occasionally quote or allude to the music of other composers. The most interesting borrowings are those that are dramatically purposeful and meaningful—for example, the use of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony as a source of the River Family in Show Boat, the use of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and Wagner’s “Redemption through Love” leitmotiv in West Side Story, and the “Dies irae” in Sweeney Todd. It has also been observed that a number of borrowings are seemingly less than meaningful to the work at hand (e.g., the Puccini allusions in My Fair Lady or the undisguised resemblances between Bernstein’s “Maria” and Blitzstein’s Regina).

Writers such as Stephen Citron, John Snelson, Jessica Sternfeld, and Michael Walsh who have discussed the music of Lloyd Webber’s shows more often than not dismiss the borrowings as inconsequential. This chapter espouses the view that the sheer number of examples and their closeness to their borrowed sources suggest that students of musical theater should examine this phenomenon critically rather than ignore it. Lloyd Webber’s first major hit, Superstar’s “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” is the first of many examples that writers have noticed and commented on for its strong melodic and harmonic similarity to the second movement of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, op. 64. Before he goes on to show what Lloyd Webber added to Mendelssohn, Snelson writes that “from a musical standpoint, the resemblance between the pop melody and the concerto is so obvious and continues through such an extended passage (some seven bars) that any claim to coincidence is untenable.”18

In his chapter-length study of “musical reminiscences” in Lloyd Webber, Snelson describes the even closer connection between “On This Night of a Thousand Stars,” sung by the nightclub singer Magaldi in Evita, and the popular Latin tune “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” by the composer who wrote under the nom de plume Louiguy, as “self-evident.”19 He concludes that since the borrowing “sticks so closely to those features which create the character of the Louiguy number, the whole piece can even be seen as a vocal extemporization around ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ in the manner of an interpretation-in-performance of the original.”20 In short, Lloyd Webber’s “Thousand Stars” has accomplished for the unknown Louigay what Romberg’s Blossom Time earlier did for Schubert.

By way of comparison, Magnolia in Show Boat sings Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball” to evoke fin-de-siècle popular music. The published score, however, credits Harris (and not Kern) as the composer. The composers of much of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “On This Night of a Thousand Stars” receive no attribution. Before moving on to Phantom I would like to bring up another likely “musical reminiscence” that to my knowledge has gone unrecognized, at least in print. When I used to give an annual musical plagiarism lecture to non-music majors, I frequently asked students whether the melody and harmony of the opening of “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You,” also from Evita, reminded them of any other popular song they happened to know. Invariably several students would immediately volunteer the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

The relationship between these songs is analogous, but not identical, to the bop practice of creating new tunes using harmonic progressions from older popular tunes (e.g., “Shaw Nuff” and “Cottontail,” among others, employ the harmony of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”). Among music historians, the term of choice to describe this practice is contrafacta (the plural of contrafactum), a fancy name used to describe either the appropriation of harmony from one song to another or the recycling of melodies with new texts. “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You” borrows more than a little from both the melody and harmony of “Yesterday,” but unlike most contrafacta the borrowing does not continue throughout the entire song. The technique of contrafacta as more commonly practiced was widely used in the Renaissance and can be found later in multi-texted reharmonized chorale melodies in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and in popular songs recycled with texts, such as the conversions of “Anacreon in Heaven” into “The Star Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King” into “America.” The technique ensures unity and musical integration and provides opportunities to create new dramatic meanings for previously heard musical themes.

Several borrowing possibilities in Phantom have been proposed, some by more than one author. Both Mark Grant and Michael Walsh, for example, suggest that the distinctive, powerful, and meaningfully employed descending instrumental chromatic figure that introduces Phantom’s overture, title song, and seven additional Phantom appearances in the score is noticeably derived from Ralph Vaughan William’s Second (or “London”) Symphony, the first version of which appeared in the years before World War I (see Example 16.1).21

No fewer than three borrowings have been offered for the opening phrase of “Music of the Night” alone: “Come to Me, Bend to Me” from Brigadoon, “School Days” from 1907 (“School days, school days / Dear old Golden Rule days”), and a phrase from “Recondite armonia” from Puccini’s Tosca.22 In each case only the first five notes, and in the first two examples the rhythms also, are the same. The “School Days” connection became a part of popular culture when the character played by Billy Crystal in the movie Forget Paris (1995) left a performance of Phantom with Debra Winger accusing “Music of the Night” of ripping off the old tune. To prove his claim, Crystal sang the opening phrase of the earlier melody.

Example 16.1. Descending chromatic motive in Vaughan Williams’s Second (“London”) Symphony

The second phrase of the Phantom’s serenade shares eight consecutive notes and the same rhythmic contour with another melody, this time by Puccini (see Example 16.2). Snelson acknowledges that this phrase in “Music of the Night” “is identical to the climactic section of Dick Johnson’s declaration of love to Minnie at