Loverly:The Life and Times of My Fair Lady (Broadway Legacies) by McHugh, Dominic (best ereader for pc .TXT) 📗

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.3 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