Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) đ
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FRANKIE: A handsome young man.
SEVERAL STUDENTS: A girlâa girl.
OTHERS: A boy.
JUNIOR: Noâa pork chop, a glass of beer and liverwurst; Schubert should be very close to our hearts here for he was born poor with no W.P.A.27
Abbottâs 1936 dialogue lets audiences know unequivocally that Frankieâa contemporary Schubertâis the one inspired by âa handsome young man.â28 Also in 1936, with a remark that would mean more to Depression audiences, Junior disregards love as a motive and attributes Schubertâs inspiration to a good meal. âThe Three Bâsâ in the 1936 version (renamed âQuestions and Answersâ in 1983) also demonstrates the essence of the conflict between classical music and jazz so central to On Your Toes. Classical music, with its âcharms of Orpheus,â throws lovers of popular music âright into the arms of Morpheus.â Although the scholarly establishment would not lower itself in 1936 (or even a 1983 version of 1936) to explain the artistic merits of jazz in a university classroom, classical music is characterized as boring for all its artistic pretensions while jazz, a âcheapâ (or âderivativeâ) pseudo-art, provides much greater entertainment.
Throughout âThe Three Bâsâ the jazz-loving W.P.A. Extension University class unabashedly reveals its ignorance of and derision for art music. To the strains of the Symphony in D Minor and Les PrĂ©ludes they mispronounce CĂ©sar Franckâs name as Seezer Frank and convert Lisztâs popular classic into a drinking song (Example 5.2).29 Next they add ignorance to sacrilege when they confuse Shostakovichâs recently banned opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, with celebrity stripper Gypsy Rose Leeâs burlesque house Minskys, and reach a ânew lowâ (to rhyme with âVon BĂŒlowâ) when they assert that Puccini wrote the popular song classic âPoor Butterflyâ instead of Madame Butterfly. In exclaiming in the chorus of âBach, Beethoven, and Brahmsâ that âtwo of them wrote symphonies and one wrote psalms,â they add the sin of a weak rhyme âBrahms/psalmsâ to a tenuous historical claim (Bach wrote chorales, after all, not psalms). But the students show that they are not complete dunces when they place âthe man who wrote Sariââthe now-obscure Emmerich KĂĄlmĂĄn (1882â1953)âon a par with Bernardino Molinari (1880â1952).30 To paraphrase a line from Pal Joeyâs âZip,â âWho the hell is Molinari?â
Example 5.2. âQuestions and Answers (The Three Bâs)â
(a) with Franckâs Symphony in D Minor and Lisztâs Les PrĂ©ludes borrowings
(b) Lisztâs Les PrĂ©ludes
The dramatic context of the song âItâs Got to Be Loveâ in act I, scene 3, is a pretext for Frankie to sing the song she wrote (with Junior in mind). Here is the exchange that leads to it in 1936:
JUNIOR: Well, I seem to remember that primarily you wanted to talk about the song of yours.
FRANKIE (cross to desk): Oh, no, not really. Itâs so unimportant. Just look at the title, âItâs Got to Be Loveââthatâs unimportant to start with, isnât it?
JUNIOR: I wish I knew.
FRANKIE: What?
JUNIOR: I mean, well, perhaps if you play it for me a few times, Iâll change my mind.31
Following a five-measure introduction and a tuneful verse of twenty-three measures, which provides a smooth musical transition between spoken dialogue and a song hitâFrankie has indeed composed a hit worthy of RodgersâFrankie and Junior sing two thirty-two-bar choruses. The melody of the first chorus (the first A of an A-A form) is shown in Example 5.3.
Example 5.3. âItâs Got to Be Loveâ (chorus, mm. 1â18)
A
a
[Itâs] got to be love! [upbeats in brackets]
It couldnât be tonsillitis;
It feels like neuritis,
But nevertheless itâs love.
(8 measures, mm. 1â8)
b
[Donât] tell me the pickles and pie Ă la mode
(2 measures, mm. 9â10)
ĂĄ
[They] served me
Unnerved me,
And made my heart a broken down pump!
(6 measures, mm. 11â16)
The first eight measures start off conventionally enough and present what anyone familiar with the standard popular song form would interpret as the beginning of an A section. Instead of the more conventional repeat of A, however, the words that continue the song, âDonât tell me the pickles and pie Ă la modeâ during the next two measures, inaugurate something new, which in retrospect we can call bâ (we can call the first part of A, âaâ). More surprisingly, two measures later, beginning with âserved me,â Rodgers interrupts bâ and returns to a new version of a (more accurately aâ), a version much transformed through condensation. Probably relatively few listeners would recognize that aâ (mm. 11â16) is fundamentally the same as a (mm. 1â8), albeit stripped of all but the bare essential notes of the earlier phrase. Together a, b, and aâ make up the sixteen measures of the first A.
After the first eight measures of the second A (a), Rodgers offers another surprise when he returns to b, âbut doubles its length from two measures to four (mm. 25â28, not shown). The added measures (mm. 27â28), for which Hart wrote the words âsinking feeling,â stand out from the rest of the song as the only occasion (other than the ends of phrases) where a note is held longer than a single beat. Hart understood that the descending melodic line of these measures, D-C-B-B, aptly fits the sentiment of the lyric here, just as in the previous line he set the melody that turns around the note E to capture the feeling of âspinning around aboveâ (m. 23). When he arrives at the phrase that inspired Hartâs âsinking feeling,â Rodgers also presents a harmonic rhythm dramatically altered from everything that came before in the song. Instead of allowing several melody notes for each chord, he now allots one note per chord.32 The final aâ (mm. 29â32) starts off like a before returning to the opening lyrical idea and a new concluding musical phrase, âBut nevertheless itâs only love!,â to conclude the song.
âItâs Got to Be Loveâ contains a characteristic Hartian sentiment about love as an unwelcome malady and its negative effect on the body and spirit. Two years later in The Boys from Syracuse, Rodgers and Hart composed a sequel, âThis
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