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

Book online «Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) đŸ“–Â». Author Block, Geoffrey



1 ... 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 ... 223
Go to page:
Weill Revisited Vol. II (Painted Smiles PSCD 109).

28. Another song, “Who Am I?,” which Savory sang in his bedroom early in act II before being surprised by the angry Anatolian Zuvetli, was also dropped after Weill had orchestrated it.

29. A typescript of I Am Listening is located at the State Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin. The Weill-Gershwin correspondence and other Ira Gershwin documents are housed in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and Weill’s musical manuscripts are housed at Yale University. Copies of all Hart, Gershwin, and Weill materials for Lady in the Dark are available for study at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York. I am grateful to all of the above institutions for making these materials accessible to me, especially Harold L. Miller (State Historical Society), Raymond A. White (Library of Congress), Victor Cardell and Kendall Crilly (Yale), and David Farneth (Kurt Weill Foundation). Thanks are also due to Tom Briggs of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Theatre Library for enabling me to examine the full orchestral score of Lady in the Dark.

30. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 2, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress.

31. Ibid.

32. Letter from Weill to Ira Gershwin, September 14, 1940, Music Division, Library of Congress. Since they had cut the Hollywood Dream (but not the Hollywood sequence) and Randy Curtis now had nothing to sing in the second act, all concerned were eager to have this character sing something. The problems with all of Curtis’s music, however, stemmed from the disturbing discovery about the man they had cast in this role, Victor Mature. As Ira Gershwin expressed it in Lyrics on Several Occasions, “when handsome ‘hunk of man’ Mature sang, his heart and the correct key weren’t in it” (144).

33. Ira Gershwin annotations (September 1967) to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 1,” Music Division, Library of Congress; and Lyrics on Several Occasions, 207–8; reprinted in Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin, 291–92.

34. Gershwin annotations to “The Third Dream Sequence Section 2.”

35. Ibid. In his annotations of November 3, 1967, appended to the texts for “Three Discarded Songs,” Gershwin briefly explains their originally intended place in the show. “Unforgettable,” recorded as “You Are Unforgettable” on Ben Bagley’s Kurt Weill Revisited (Painted Smiles PSCD 108) and “It’s Never Too Late to Mendelssohn” were deleted from the second dream (some of the lyrics of the latter were retained). “Bats about You” “was written for a flash-back scene and supposedly was a song of the late Twenties, sung at a Mapleton High School graduation Dance.” In Kurt Weill: A Handbook, Drew lists “Bats about You” and “You Are Unforgettable” under unlocated songs.

36. Ira Gershwin, Lyrics on Several Occasions, 187. Arthur and Francis were the given names of George and Ira’s lesser known younger siblings. The conclusion of the Wedding Dream (including the Mendelssohn Endelssohn and Lohengrin and Bear It material) is borrowed from another wedding song, “Bride and Groom,” in the act I finale of Ira’s collaboration with his brother George, Oh, Kay! (1926), starring Lawrence as Lady Kay.

37. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 274. See also Drew, “Reflections,” especially 243–48.

38. Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook, 220.

39. Michael Morley offers a possible “common denominator” between “In der Jugend Gold’nem Schimmer” and its reincarnations in Marie Galante and One Touch of Venus. See Morley, “‘I Cannot/Will Not Sing the Old Songs Now’: Some Observations on Weill’s Adaptation of Popular Song Forms,” in Kim H. Kowalke and Horst Edler, eds., A Stranger Here Myself, 221.

40. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 117.

41. Originally published as “Über den gestischen Charakter der Musik.” Weill’s article is translated by Kim H. Kowalke in Kurt Weill in Europe, 491–93 (the quotations in this paragraph are found on p. 493).

42. Ibid., 493.

43. Ibid., 494. The remaining quotations from Weill’s essay are also found on this page.

44. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 113–23.

45. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines the doctrine of affections as “the belief, widely held in the 17th and early 18th centuries, that the principal aim of music is to arouse the passions or affections (love, hate, joy, anger, fear, etc., conceived as rationalized, discrete, and relatively static states).” Don Randel, ed., The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 16.

46. bruce d. mcclung, “Psicosi per musica,” 53–54.

47. Weill’s self-borrowings parallel the controversial self-borrowings of Handel. See George J. Buelow, “The Case for Handel’s Borrowings: The Judgment of Three Centuries,” in Handel: Tercentenary Collection, ed. Stanley Sadie and Anthony Hicks (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 61–82.

48. Lewis Nichols, “‘One Touch of Venus,’ Which Makes the Whole World Kin, Opens at the Imperial,” New York Times, October 8, 1943; review excerpted in Steven Suskin, Opening Night on Broadway, 526; reprinted in New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, vol. 4, 264.

49. “September Song” from Knickerbocker Holiday, “My Ship” from Lady in the Dark, “Speak Low” from One Touch of Venus, “Green-Up Time” from Love Life, and the title song from Lost in the Stars are perhaps the best known song legacies from Weill’s otherwise currently little-known Broadway shows.

50. Weill, Notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Rodgers explains his ideas about dramatic unity in Chee-Chee (1928) in his autobiography, Musical Stages, 118 (see also chapter 5, p. 85). Larry Stempel notes Rodgers’s early attempt at an integrated musical and adds Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (1924) to the short list of integrated 1920s musicals (see Stempel, “Street Scene,” 324).

54. William G. King, “Music and Musicians.”

55. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 popular film adaptation of the Weill-influenced Cabaret (1966), for example, the songs that took place outside the Kit Kat Club on Broadway were mostly removed, an artistic decision that deprived the central male character the inalienable right of any central character in a musical: the right to sing.

56. Lady in the Dark (Chappell, 1941). Hart dates his remarks March 18, 1941.

57. mcclung, “Psicosi per musica,” 242–45.

58. Ibid., 250–63.

59. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune, October 17, 1943, wrote

1 ... 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 ... 223
Go to page:

Free ebook «Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) đŸ“–Â» - read online now

Comments (0)

There are no comments yet. You can be the first!
Add a comment