Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber by Block, Geoffrey (good story books to read .TXT) 📕

the conclusion of act I of La fanciulla del West.” Although he does not claim a dramatic purpose in the borrowing, in Lloyd Webber’s defense Snelson finds an “emotional [italics mine] link from one musical theater work to the other.”23

Example 16.2. Dick Johnson’s “Una gioia” from Puccini’s La fanciulla del West

Walsh notes that the melody first sung by Christine when she describes the Phantom to Raoul on the rooftop of the opera house with the words “Yet in his eyes, all the sadness of the world,” “is closely related to Liù’s suicide music in the last act of Puccini’s Turandot” (see Example 16.3).24

This is not the first time audiences heard this famous theme, however. It appeared earlier in the orchestra after the Phantom had cursed Christine for unmasking him in his lair and again in the orchestra when Raoul and Christine first arrive on the roof. The theme then reappears at two significant moments in the second act, once when Raoul asks Christine to sing the Phantom’s opera and later when Christine tells the Phantom in the final scene that “This haunted face holds no horror for me now.” The melody is one of the most important in Phantom, as Liù’s melody is in Turandot.

Example 16.3. Liù’s motive in Puccini’s Turandot

Surprisingly, neither Citron, Snelson, nor Sternfeld mentions the extraordinary melodic and rhythmic correspondence between this Phantom theme and Liù’s comparably significant melody, heard relentlessly for nearly eight minutes in Turandot’s second act. Snelson, who alone among this trio acknowledges that scholars need to seriously consider the issue of Lloyd Webber’s borrowing, provides numerous examples that he tries to explain or justify, but not this one. For the most part, Sternfeld’s response to Lloyd Webber’s accusers seems unwarrantedly dismissive: “When critics or historians do go hunting for actual stolen tunes, they rarely find any, and when they do, the results do not amount to much.”25

Unless one is wearing a mask that covers the ears, however, I would argue that borrowings come to some of us unbidden and that they do add up to something significant. The amount Lloyd Webber borrows from Fanciulla in “The Music of the Night” and the Turandot borrowing in “Yet in his eyes” and “This haunted face” is approximately the same as Bernstein’s appropriation of Wagner’s “Redemption through love” motive in “I Have a Love” and the death processional in West Side Story. The issue is not the fact of borrowing or even how much is borrowed. The problem lies in the gratuitousness and apparent arbitrariness of the borrowings. In another famous, more recent Puccini borrowing that occurs in Rent, Roger, the character doing the borrowing, informs the audience that he is trying to compose a love song that does not sound like “Musetta’s Waltz” from Puccini’s La bohème. Eventually Puccini’s melody returns, but not before Roger has finished his own original love song, “Your Eyes,” inspired, but not composed, by Puccini.

To a remarkable extent perhaps not seen since his British predecessor Handel, who is nonetheless generally credited for borrowing with interest, Lloyd Webber reuses music by other composers and does not acknowledge his sources. A typical Lloyd Webber show also contains more reprises and contrafacta than most previous and current successful Broadway shows. More significant than the number of reprises is the frequent absence of dramatic meaning. Lloyd Webber continues to receive criticism from many quarters for these practices and habits and audience approbation in spite of them. Either way, friends and foes alike perhaps might concede that the works he created for London and Broadway from Joseph to Sunset Boulevard amply support Lloyd Webber’s claim as the reigning champion of Broadway.26

Musical Organicism

If Rodgers and Hammerstein did not invent what soon would become known as the “integrated” musical, their success with Oklahoma! and Carousel popularized this approach, gave it cachet, and arguably made it desirable, if not imperative, for others to follow in their path. The fundamental principles of the integrated musical, in contrast to the allegedly more frivolous fare of the 1920s and 1930s, are that the songs advance a plot, flow directly from the dialogue, and express the thoughts of the characters who sing them. In addition, the presence of dance serves to advance the plot and enhance the dramatic meaning of the songs that precede them, and the orchestra, through accompaniment and underscoring, parallels, complements, or advances the action.27

Despite increased attention to these basic principles of integration, which also involved greater attention to the integrity, coherence, and depth of the book, the principle of the integrated musical is to some extent undermined by the separation of dialogue and song.28 The megamusicals of Lloyd Webber and Boublil-Schönberg from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s increased the possibility of integration by making their works through-sung. Even such a harsh detractor of the megamusical as Scott McMillin, who finds Phantom “pretentious and overblown,” concedes that the through-sung musical, often composed in a rock style, surpasses the Rodgers and Hammerstein integrative model: “I can see the logic of claiming that the drive for integration has finally been achieved in Lloyd Webber. Perhaps Phantom should be celebrated for being a musical on the verge of becoming an opera.”29

One of the problematic side effects of the integrated, through-sung mega-musical is the potential for integration that lacks dramatic meaning. Evita, Les Misérables, and Phantom are musically integrated in the sense that they use a relatively small repertoire of motives and themes and recycle these melodies continuously, usually with new lyrics (i.e., contrafacta, a term used extensively in Joseph Swain’s chapters on Lloyd Webber and BoublilSchönberg).30 When characters in musicals use each other’s music and when the underscored passages appear without seeming regard for the appropriateness of the appropriation, the increased integration leads to decreased dramatic meaning. The reuse, or overuse, of contrafacta in the work of the composer at hand, according to Swain, “has become a rather careless infatuation with [Lloyd] Webber’s not inconsiderable powers of melody.”31

The reliance on contrafactum also frequently results