Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) (24 page)

Ex. 4.19.“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” sketch 2.

Ex. 4.20.“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight,” sketch 3.

In spite of the extended lyric reproduced earlier, the version of “Say a Prayer” used in the
My Fair Lady
tryout was the same as that used in
Gigi
. Conductor Franz Allers’s photocopy of a copyist’s piano-vocal score shows that this document (which was presumably used to rehearse the number) is almost identical with the published sheet music for the song in its
Gigi
incarnation.
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The orchestration of the number (by Jack Mason, the uncredited “ghost” orchestrator of
My Fair Lady
) is identical to this copyist’s score, right down to the fact that the first-time bars lie empty. In the same folder as the “Say a Prayer” orchestration is a two-page manuscript in Russell Bennett’s hand entitled “Bridge After Prayer,” which consists of six bars of transition music based on “Say a Prayer,” leading into an orchestral rendition of one verse of “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
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It is clear from the cut lyric reproduced above that the original conception of “Say a Prayer” involved an ABA form whereby the lyric for the repeat of A had a reversed meaning. Perhaps this was Lerner’s attempt to overcome what he evidently considered to be the bland nature of the song: suddenly it became more emphatic and personal in the final chorus. As it is, though, “Say a Prayer” had a similar function in
My Fair Lady
and
Gigi
: Eliza and Gigi both sing a simple song about being nervous about a forthcoming event. Nevertheless, the beauty of the melody, the subtle nuances of the harmony, and the sincerity of the lyrics show Lerner and Loewe at their best; and when Julie Andrews sang the number at a tribute concert for Loewe given in New York on March 28, 1988, a few weeks after his death, she was essentially reappropriating one of the finest songs Loewe had written for her in
My Fair Lady
.
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“Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” is a fitting climax to this chapter, because it demonstrates how Lerner and Loewe had the confidence to cut or discard songs if they did not work in the show as a whole, even when the material was of high quality in its own terms. Likewise, the material that did eventually make it into the final version of the score was heavily scrutinized and adjusted before Lerner and Loewe were content with it. This points the way to a new interpretation of
My Fair Lady
, one which sees the piece as the result of rigorous self-criticism and discerning revision, rather than an organic act of creation from one end of the show to the other.

PART I

Of the songs that eventually made it into the score of
My Fair Lady
, only “The Rain in Spain” and “Show Me” were left more or less as they were originally conceived by Lerner and Loewe, and only a couple of changes were made to the lyric of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”
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All the other numbers went through a considerable amount of revision and recomposition, with “Why Can’t the English?” particularly notable for the existence of four completely different versions in the Library of Congress’s collections. This chapter approaches the show’s musical numbers through the numerous types of compositional manuscripts identified in
chapter 4
. Such a process helps reexamine Lerner and Loewe’s approach to the show as well as the relationships between the different members of the “music department”: the orchestrators (Robert Russell Bennett, Phil Lang, and Jack Mason), dance arranger (Trude Rittmann), choral arranger (Gino Smart), and various copyists. More generally, this gives an insight into the complexities of the processes that went into producing the music for Broadway shows of the period as well as a critical examination of various aspects of the definitive published text.

Although it was standard procedure on Broadway for orchestrators and arrangers to create the overture for a show based on themes from the main songs, Frederick Loewe seems to have played a more active role than this in the creation of the Overture for
Fair Lady
. A two-page autograph piano score from the Library of Congress’s Loewe Collection shows that Loewe drafted out the opening statement, the theme from “You Did It” and the transition into “On the Street Where You Live” (only the first bar of which is included).
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At the top of the first page, Loewe wrote an instruction to Trude Rittmann—who
arranged the show’s incidental music in addition to the dances—to “Have [Robert] Russell [Bennett] confirm keys.” This highlights an unambiguous chain of command from composer (Loewe) to arranger (Rittmann) to orchestrator (Bennett). In addition, Loewe stated that the music should continue into a refrain of “On the Street” and “I Could Have Danced,” showing how the rest of the Overture was to be filled out, and underneath this he indicated the suggested key scheme that he wanted Bennett to confirm: “‘Street in C’, ‘Danced’ in E-flat, into ‘Opening’ in C.” Some of Loewe’s articulation and dynamics were retained in the published vocal score, but basically these two pages are a set of instructions to be handed down the line to Rittmann, who then wrote out a full-length, six-page piano score.

Rittmann’s score (in the Warner-Chappell Collection) reveals her contribution to the composition. Although her score is based on Loewe’s, Rittmann modified the voicing or in some cases some of the counterpoint to make it less pianistic and more appropriate for the purposes of orchestration. She mapped out the entire number for Bennett, though she used shorthand to indicate where the full refrains of “On the Street” and “I Could Have Danced” were to be played. Evidently she had two attempts at creating the transition music between these two themes; the first is crossed out and an arrow points toward the replacement. Her two-bar introduction to “I Could Have Danced” (bars 118–119) is also unfamiliar, consisting of a simple vamp rather than the more smoothly forward-driving published version. Also, the sixth-to-last bar of the overture appears as an ascending scale from B flat to B flat (the dominant of the key of the passage). This was later changed to a scale of ascending minor-seventh chords with a different destination chord, but in every other respect Rittmann’s score matches the published piano-vocal scores.

Clearly, it was the basis for Bennett’s full score of the number, because bars 118 and 119 were amended in Bennett’s score, with a new strip of manuscript paper stuck on top of the orchestration of Rittmann’s version of these two bars. Bars 134–135 were amended using the same procedure. Because Rittmann simply copied out a few bars of the melody and then wrote “etc. full chorus of I Could have danced,” Bennett was given no new material to increase the interest of this section and therefore orchestrated the bare song as it appears in its sung version in the show. The revision adds chromatic movement to fill in the spaces between phrases more inventively. It is impossible to know who decided that an improvement needed to be made, but it is likely that Loewe examined the score and highlighted areas for improvement such as this (not least because Bennett or Rittmann could have written them in this way in the first place).

The autograph full scores for the Overture and Opening Scene are physically bound together as if they were a single number, and the published vocal scores both list them as a single number. But though the music runs without closure from one to the other, clearly they are two separate pieces of music with disparate functions. The Overture is a conventional medley of key themes from the show, bringing the audience to attention with a fanfare; the Opening Music is mimetic and provides both a background to and an illustration of the events going on as the curtain goes up on Covent Garden market. Although George J. Ferencz implies that Bennett orchestrated both pieces, the autograph score indicates that Phil Lang was responsible for the Opening Music.
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There is no known Loewe autograph piano score for the piece, so it is likely that Rittmann was responsible for its composition: a complete piano score in her hand has survived, and that it contains both amendments and some unfamiliar elements—suggesting an initial composition that has then been modified and improved (possibly after Loewe’s intervention)–promotes her authorship. One such instance happens in bars 17–20, where Rittmann has bracketed 17–18 and 19–20 into two groups of two bars, with each group to be repeated; in the published version each is heard only once. The “Tempo di Soft Shoe” section is also twice as long in Rittmann’s version—sixteen bars as opposed to eight—and it is striking that she had an additional two bars at the end, again with repeat signs around them (allowing some extra time to improvise while Eliza appeared onstage), but then struck them out to create the now-familiar version, which has a sense of interruption about it.

With the exception of the latter amendment (which Rittmann must have made before handing it over), the full score shows that Lang orchestrated Rittmann’s score, and later modified it. Again, most of the revisions were made by pasting new strips of manuscript paper over the old bars. The repeat signs in bars 17–20 were scribbled out in pencil and “no repeats” written over the bars. At bar 48, she indicated with an arrow, “Phil, from here on different fill in,” and in response Lang reassigned the melody from the clarinet to the flute, oboe, and violins, also fleshing out the harp and trumpet parts, and adding trombones. The ruthless editing of some passages again suggests that Loewe may have helped shape the piece, even if he did not write out the score.

Regardless of authorship, the Overture and Opening are breathtakingly crafted. The four-bar call to attention at the beginning of the Overture is followed by a snippet of “You Did It”; the procedure is repeated, but this time the theme from the song is extended to lead into a complete refrain of “On the Street Where You Live.” A two-bar reference to the servants’ counterpoint in “I Could Have Danced All Night” (“It’s after three, now, / Don’t you agree now”) leads into a chorus of that number, interrupted at the end by
another brass fanfare that segues into the Opening. The Overture is traditional in the sense that it contains a medley of potential “hits,” but at barely three minutes’ duration it is also relatively short for a show so rich in melodic invention. Evidently, Loewe wanted to push straight into the action. The Opening music is also succinct. There are three main sections: the first, in which “Crowds are milling about Covent Garden Opera House”; the second, a dainty “Tempo di Soft Shoe”; and the furious third, in which the music whips into a frenzy before being interrupted by Eliza’s cry of “Aoooow!” on being knocked over by Freddy. The music for this brief piece is wonderfully free and harmonically complex, but its most obvious point of interest is in the reference to the English nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” which contains the line “my fair lady.” Rittmann and Loewe include the music that goes with this line as a sneaky reference to the show’s title. Since the musical was named only in late December 1955 (see chap. 2), the Opening music almost certainly has a late date of composition, probably during the rehearsal period, which would explain why no manuscript exists in Loewe’s hand.

Eliza’s five solo songs fall into two main groups: those that express her anger (“Just You Wait,” “Show Me,” and “Without You”) and those that express her joy or aspirations (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “I Could Have Danced All Night”). She is prone to extremes of emotion, be it elation or fury, rather than a “middle ground” position. Nor do these songs particularly convey facts to the audience. That is not to say that they tell us nothing, but rather that they are more about expression and characterization than explanation. This is especially the case with “Wouldn’t it Be Lovely.” In addition to the published vocal scores, there are two slightly different lyric sheets for the song, Loewe’s autograph, a copyist’s piano-vocal score, and Bennett’s full score. Clearly, the song came easily to Lerner and Loewe—the lyricist describes how a visit to Covent Garden market in the early morning provided the inspiration for the lyric, which Loewe set to music “in one afternoon”
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—and the sources all suggest that the song changed very little during the creative process.