Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (e reader comics TXT) 📕

relative inferiority. The original does not serve the show as well as the final version, often because the initial lyric is about linguistic fastidiousness where the final lyric deals with a social concern.

A copyist’s score based on the original version also exists in the Warner-Chappell Collection.40 The verse by this point had almost taken on its definitive form, with a few exceptions: Higgins says “Heavens, what a sound!” (rather than “noise!”) and “Take a Yorkshireman” rather than “Hear a Yorkshireman.” The couplet about the “writing on the wall” was completely removed (including the music) so that the verse goes straight from Higgins’s “I ask you sir, what sort of word is that?” to the chorus via a new two-bar introduction. The refrain, however, still retained its original poetical structure, with some amendments to the lyric. The couplet dealing with the Germans was expanded slightly and brought forward to replace the weak lines about the French.41 Lerner also worked on the image of the Irish, taking the lyric closer to its final form and removing the Canadians from the picture: “The Scotch and the Irish do some / Pronouncing that is gruesome.” The Norwegians have gone, and in their place Lerner alludes to the Orient and introduces the joke about the French with the musical tacet: “With ev’ry Oriental good speech is fundamental. / In France make a slight mistake; they regard you as a freak … (Spoken:) The French never care what you do, as long as you pronounce it properly.” The last verse also comes very close to its ultimate setting, with only three variations.42

Lerner had started to move in the right direction with the number in the version contained in this copyist’s score. But he and Loewe then briefly changed track completely and shifted the focus of the number more onto national identity and less onto language. This third version of the song is the most surprising. Loewe took the first four pages (which contain the verse only) of the copyist’s score of the second version and appended to them a new six-page autograph. Following precedent, this contains the lyric in his hand and the music in a combination of his handwriting and Rittmann’s. On the front cover, Loewe crossed out the title and replaced it with “The English.”43 Here, Higgins rants about the way that the English “will go to any limit for the King,” “rally like a puppet on a string” and “fight without a whimper or a whine” but will not learn their language properly. Part of the refrain of the song is reproduced in example 5.6.

Ex. 5.6. “The English.”

Starting at bar 56, this version is almost completely different from the others, but it is inferior in most respects. The harmonically static first phrase is repeated note-for-note to form the second phrase; in itself, this is a redundant gesture. Bars 64–68 are more interesting, with minor-key inflections, but 72–80 are again repetitive and harmonically awkward. However, after a restatement of the opening material (80–95), from 96 to the first beat of bar 111 the music adopts almost the version that appears in the published score. The significant part is bars 102–111 (“The Scotch and Irish leave you close to tears”), in which both the music and lyric are practically in their final form for the first time.44 This helps to place the song roughly between the production of the copyist’s score and Loewe’s autograph for the final version.

Perhaps Harrison’s insistence that the number sounded like Coward had finally driven Lerner and Loewe almost to ditch the original premise of the song. Until the modulation at bar 96, there is not the slightest mention of a nation other than the English. Rather than setting the character of the English as an explanation for their sloppy linguistic habits in relief with the strict education of other nations, this lyric lists the positive aspects of the English, and in particular, how they display courage (“The English will fight without a whimper or a whine”) or rigor (“The English will go to any limit for the King”), in many respects other than language. This is not one of Lerner’s happier creations, however, and aside from the development of the middle section, Loewe’s setting diverges almost pedantically from the original music. Compared to the fluidity of “Why Can’t the English?” even in its initial form, “The English” has a choppy texture and the melodic line is constantly broken by rests.

The definitive version of the song exists not only in Loewe’s autograph, the published vocal scores, and full score, but there is also a copy of the same copyist’s score referred to earlier, annotated throughout to indicate the musical changes required to bring the score into line with the final version of the lyric (which is not, however, included).45 In addition, a lyric sheet dated January 27, 1956, gives almost the final version of the song, with the exception of the lines about the Americans (which is still sung rather than a spoken aside), the French (which is in the second person rather than the third, i.e., “The French never care what you do” rather than “… they do”), and the penultimate line of the song is sung (“Use decent English?”) rather than left up to the orchestra.46 The differences between Loewe’s score and the published edition are minimal, involving mainly some disagreements between the placing and type of articulative gestures (for instance, accents instead of staccato dots) and Italian terms (Loewe has “Vivace” at “Hear them down in Soho Square”; the published score has “Vivo”). A couple of bars also lack their final accompaniment pattern, but the score largely represents a version that could be put into print. Interestingly, the manuscript paper on which the joke about the Americans appears is of a different brand to the previous two pages (Chappell rather than Passantino), while the final syllable of the word “disappears”—which begins the new page and is followed in the next bar by the spoken line