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

by McHugh, Dominic

  Ooooo …’enry ’iggins!

  When the shoe is on the other foot, take care!

  You won’t think it such a farce

  When I kick your bloomin’ arse!

  This version appears on a lyric sheet in Levin’s papers and is also used in a copyist’s score held in the Warner-Chappell Collection.10 These sources also contain a small alteration in the lyric of the penultimate stanza of the song (the king’s imaginary lines): “All the people will celebrate all over the land; / And whatever you wish and want will be my command.” was modified to “All the people will celebrate the glory of you, / And whatever you wish and want I gladly will do.” Though the big change was made in the rehearsal script and Bennett’s orchestration, both contain the king’s couplet in its original form.

  However, the composer’s manuscript is again difficult to place. It is certainly not Loewe’s “original” score for the number, because Rittmann’s hand is unmistakable in the writing of the clefs, time and key signatures, and most of the piano part. Loewe wrote out the lyric, vocal line, and tempo markings, but since Rittmann did not join the team until late 1955 (whereas we know the song was conceived much earlier), the manuscript must be a fair copy prepared for the copyist and orchestrator. On the title page, Loewe wrote “Att. Franz [Allers, the conductor]: Julie may be E flat? Please try.” The copyist’s score follows Loewe in every respect including the use of the key of D minor and does not make this transposition, but a note at the top reads: “1 tone lower.” Since this score was intended for Bennett’s use, it is no surprise that the orchestrator’s full score is in the published key of C minor.11 It is curious that Loewe’s score contains the final version of the lyric throughout—unlike the original lyric used in the copyist’s score, which was undoubtedly created from Loewe’s manuscript—but there is some smudging around the lyric for the third stanza, suggesting a possible later amendment. In all other respects, the sources indicate very little in the way of musical changes to the song as time went on.

  The next number was much slower in coming. As noted previously, the song originally intended to fill the spot after “The Rain in Spain” was called “Shy.” A solo for Eliza, it speaks overtly of the character’s love for Higgins and was certainly in place by the early autumn of 1955. On Outline 4, it is named as both the “Third Song” of act 1, scene 5, and the piece of music intended to end the musical. It was eventually replaced, of course, by “I Could Have Danced All Night.” A musical synopsis of the second act of the show, kept in an envelope in the Warner-Chappell Collection, refers to the reprise of a song for Eliza called “The Story of My Life,” which is crossed out and replaced by “I Could Have Danced” in Loewe’s hand; presumably this was an intermediate replacement for “Shy” before “Danced” was composed.12

  Lerner admits the problems the collaborators had with this song in his autobiography. He says they had tried to give Eliza “a lyrical burst of triumph” after “The Rain in Spain,” which would also reveal “her unconscious feelings for Higgins.” But all their attempts “emerged with her true feelings on her sleeve.”13 Lerner goes on to explain how he managed to come up with the title of “I Could Have Danced All Night” during the final week before the start of rehearsals.14 He says that “Fritz set it in a day” and that he finished writing the words in twenty-four hours—“but not to my satisfaction.” He admired Loewe’s melody, but “blushed” when singing him the line: “‘And [sic] all at once my heart took flight’. I promised Fritz I would change it as soon as I could. As it turned out, I was never able to.”15 None of this confirms Marni Nixon’s claim that she first heard the song in “the early spring of 1954,” when it “was in 3/4 time with a very European operetta sound,”16 but it is true that the title of the song was at one point “I Want to Dance All Night.” Curiously, this was an afterthought rather than the original version. The rehearsal script, Loewe’s autograph, and Bennett’s full score all use the words “I Could Have Danced” as does a copyist’s score in Levin’s papers.17 However, a photocopy of this copyist’s score is headed “I Want to Dance All Night” in Loewe’s hand,18 and another typed script in Levin’s papers replaces “Could” with “Want” in the final scene (where “I Want to Dance” is heard in the orchestra).19 A further script also has this, and on both the list of musical numbers and the pages of the actual song (1-5-52 to 1-5-55) the title is shown as “I Want to Dance All Night.”20 Strangely, the lyric itself still reads “I could have danced.” The playbills for the tryouts in New Haven and Philadelphia use the word “Want,” as did early pressings of the show’s Original Cast Album (though Julie Andrews sings “could” throughout).21 It seems that Lerner briefly considered a change but finally decided to leave the lyric alone.22

  The autograph manuscript of the song follows precedent in being a fluently written fair copy of the published version. In two respects, the score postdates the initial composition of the score. First, the verse (“Bed! Bed! I couldn’t go to bed”) follows the published edition in indicating “Allegro molto” as the tempo, in putting mf for the introduction and p when the voice enters, and in writing the melody and accompaniment in quaver beats. By contrast, the copyist’s score (used in rehearsal) has two bars of quarter note beats for the introduction (rather than one bar of eights), has “Allegro” as the tempo, and indicates only mf by way of dynamic through the whole verse. Furthermore, “Bed! Bed! I couldn’t go to” (and so on) is set to quarter notes rather than eights; in other words, the copyist’s score of both verse and refrain is half the speed of Loewe’s score. The second difference between the scores involves the Maids’ countersubject during the second refrain. The rehearsal script and full score have a bridge passage (starting “Not one word more, dear”) and counterpoint for Mrs. Pearce (without the Maids). This was all replaced in the published version with a part for the Maids (who sing “It’s after three, now”). They follow the original counterpoint for Mrs. Pearce for the first four lines of the counterpoint thereafter, and also take up her final four lines, but the middle of their part was replaced. Mrs. Pearce’s only part in the definitive version of the show is to sing three brief lines to connect the second and third verses.23 Perhaps Philippa Bevans’s prowess as a singer was not sufficient to give her the whole of the countersubject; perhaps Lerner and Loewe wanted to make sure that the words of the countersubject could be heard by allotting more singers to it; or perhaps the intention was to create a feeling of bustle around Eliza as she continues to repeat the refrain. Whatever the case, the copy of the song in the Loewe Collection represents the final version of the lyric, rather than that shown in the rehearsal script and copyist’s score. Bennett’s full score confirms that the Loewe autograph was a late creation: although Bennett adopts the final version of the music in terms of rhythm (eighth notes rather than quarter notes), he uses the earlier lyric from the rehearsal script.24

  Loewe’s accomplishment in this much-heard song is easy to overlook. The verse is brief but functions brilliantly: after one bar of introduction, Eliza floats in, her notes all short in expression of her excitement. The refrain is in ABCA1 form, with the B section a scarcely modified transposition up a tone of the A section; we feel Eliza’s growing joy and her inability to contain herself. Thematically, the C part is strongly linked to A and B, too, with similar configurations of note lengths and melodic shapes, and in the first two refrains Eliza ascends to a high F before coming back down to earth to a B and C, re-energizing the music for the next refrain. Throughout, the melody floats with long notes, while the accompaniment provides the motion; in the second refrain, the maids add to this with their commonsensical counterpoint, which Eliza ignores, merely repeating the main melody. Then she is left alone, and sings a final refrain pianissimo, before rousing herself for the final ascent to a high G. The composer’s intentions are clear: to set Lerner’s gloriously overstated lyric to music that illustrates Eliza’s thrill at her sense of achievement. The song is also clever in giving her a new vocal character at this poi
nt; compared to the low tessitura of her previous solos, “I Could Have Danced” shows Eliza in full lyric flow.

  Musically, she goes silent at this point in the show, until her reprise of “Just You Wait” in Act 2.25 The number is sung up a tone in D minor this time, rather than in the darker key of C minor, and the mood is fragile. Eliza sings just over six bars before crying bitterly, and the mood is less martial: there’s no thudding trombone to lead into the singing this time, for instance, but lyrical clarinets and an appassionato violin solo instead. We then lose sight of Eliza for a couple of minutes, but the music continues straight into a reprise of Freddy’s “On the Street Where You Live.” His singing is interrupted upon Eliza’s appearance from Higgins’s house, but the music continues into the verse of “Show Me.” This is in two parts: first, Freddy maintains the lyric vein of “On the Street” with the words “Speak, and the world is full of singing,” then Eliza interrupts with the choppily textured “Words! Words! Words!” The emptiness of verbose language has become too much for her, be it from the adoring Freddy or the pedantic Higgins, and she cuts through Freddy’s waffling—two phrases, the second repeated higher than the first—with a furious Molto vivace in triple time.

  “Show Me” has a Latin flavor, a bit like the huapango that Bernstein was later to use for “America” in West Side Story but without any obvious intention of evoking the exotic.26 In “Show Me,” seven bars of 3/4 time are concluded with a bar of 6/8. The same procedure is followed a minor third higher, then in the bridge Loewe uses three groups of four eighths in the melody (on “Here we are to-/ ge-ther in the / mid-dle of the”) to undermine the bar line and make the two bars seem like three. Eliza’s fury is dazzlingly presented in this way: it is almost as if she is in such control of her world now that she can move through multiple meters without losing her way. Her fury also makes her seem to get ahead of herself. Part of this comes from the lyric, too: whereas the standard lines are only six or seven feet long, Lerner resorts to wordy, thirteen-syllable lines in the bridge, such as “Never do I ever want to hear another word.” These are also colloquial and irritable in tone. Overall, the tension and fury of the piece are matched in words and music by dense harmonies and the imperative tense (such as “Don’t,” “Read,” and “Tell”).

  There are no copies of the reprises of “Just You Wait” and “On the Street” in Loewe’s hand because, obviously, they required no new composition other than an introduction and linking material. This new music was provided by Rittmann, and her piano-vocal score survives in the Warner-Chappell Collection.27 “Just You Wait” is written out in full and presents the song exactly as it appears in the published score. Rittmann indicates that the first sixteen bars of “On the Street” are to be played by the orchestra, with Freddy joining in at “Are there lilac trees” and giving way to the underscoring again at “People stop and stare.” This was orchestrated by Bennett, and then discarded as the orchestral part was cut and Freddy sang from the beginning of “On the Street.”28 On a manuscript titled “Street Reprise,” Rittmann wrote out Freddy’s introductory verse to “Show Me” (“Speak, and the world is full of singing”).29 This was probably because Loewe’s autograph—which otherwise produces the song in full—does not contain the introduction to Freddy’s part. Still, it is intriguing that Bennett’s orchestration of this section follows Rittmann in writing the bass part as a D-flat major arpeggio (a false relation) rather than its enharmonic, C-sharp major, as in Loewe’s manuscript (again, probably a fair copy).30 The full score contains a certain amount of revision at this point alone, where Lang seems to have orchestrated an earlier version of Freddy’s opening line in F-sharp major rather than E major; this one-page score is crossed out and hidden beneath Bennett’s revision.

  Eliza’s final number, “Without You,” was partly revised during the rehearsal period—though not quite in the way Lerner later described. The lyricist claimed that during the last week of rehearsals in New York, “a major storm was gathering” because Rex Harrison refused to stand on the stage in silence while Julie Andrews sang “Without You” to his face. Lerner continues: “In preparation for the struggle over ‘Without You’, Fritz and I thought it might incorporate it more into the emotional action if Harrison interrupted the song at the climax with: ‘I did it. I did it. I said I’d make a woman and indeed I did.’”31 However, not only does the rehearsal script include the reprise of “You Did It,” but it is also included in Outline 4, which even specifies that it is only a “short reprise.” So while Harrison may well have complained about the song during rehearsals, the juxtaposition of “Without You” with a reprise of “You Did It” was planned long before then. However, the copyist’s piano-vocal score and Bennett’s autograph full score both contain different versions of the text to the definitive published one.32

  The lyrics to the draft versions are reproduced in Appendix 1. Put next to the published version, they show that the lyric was both refined and reduced in length. The number contains three key pieces of musical material: the jaunty main theme, concluding in “without you” each time (A); the smoother “You dear friend” theme on the flattened submediant (B); and the “Without your pulling it” theme—a kind of “slow tease” in which the tempo broadens before a sudden acceleration—in the subdominant (C). The first version follows the formal pattern ABACABA, with the second version foreshortening the penultimate return to the A melody and the final version dropping the second AB section. This excision left the song in a nicely rounded ABACA form (allowing for the fact that the later occurrences of A are not complete). It works particularly well because the most irate and harmonically twisted section (C) comes almost at the end, allowing Eliza’s anger to climax before being interrupted by Higgins; originally, the complete return to the A and B themes dissipated the anger.

  It is also amusing to see Lerner’s alternative suggestions for all the things that Eliza could do without Higgins. As ever, the journey to the published version involved strong self-criticism; in most cases, the original lyric could easily have stayed in the show without anyone thinking amiss of it. Still, one can see why “I can thrill to a play without you” was deemed uncompelling, and “I can still have a dream / and it’s liable to seem / even more like a dream without you” is weakened by the repetition of the word “dream.” Likewise, “The world without your smiling face” does not have the impact of the equivalent section in the published version (starting “You dear friend”), because the melody is drawn out into half notes rather than quarter and eighth notes, thereby slowing down the progress of the melody.

  By contrast, the “You dear friend” part works brilliantly because it is topped off by a quotation from Eliza’s lesson about “Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire,” a strong rejection of Higgins and his methods. This little stanza was also in the original version, where it appeared much later on. Some of the wording was modified, again to the enhancement of the overall effect. The original has “You, dear friend, can jolly well / Plumb go straight to…” but the final version makes both lines start with the same word, a strong verse technique known as anaphora. It is also significant that Lerner worked the issue of language into the published version—“You … who talk so well”—and it was an undeniable improvement to remove the rather antiquated “Plumb” from the lyric. The part about “fog” was weak merely because it was not particularly funny, while “niche” and “itch” make a glaring half-rhyme. Conversely, most of the stanza dealing with “laughing till it hurts” is fine and was probably removed simply to shorten the song. But the excision of “[I can] Be the mother of five without you” is surely significant. Here again there is irrefutable evidence of Lerner removing a reference to Eliza as Higgins’s lover—in this case, the bearer of his children, too—and therefore pushing the relationship in a deliberately ambiguous direction.

  HIGGINS’S CHARM, HIGGINS’S ARROGANCE

  Higgins’s four solo songs also portray different aspects of his character. Yet his songs often seem more lay
ered and ambiguous than hers, largely because he can be both charming and dislikeable at the same time. For instance, “An Ordinary Man” and “A Hymn to Him” are repulsively misogynistic but also have a charismatic element to them, perhaps because it is difficult to resist feeling amused by Higgins’s unquestioning faith in himself.33 His position is so extreme that we assume he cannot quite mean it. Loewe’s musical portrayal of Higgins inclines to the elegant, too, especially in contrast to the earthier music associated with Eliza’s fury or Doolittle’s drunkenness. Apparently, this complexity was hard to come by. For example, no song from the show underwent as much modification during the compositional period as “Why Can’t the English?” At least four distinct versions survive, offering us an unusual insight into Lerner and Loewe’s thought processes, for instance, the use of a “loose” form in the verse to convey Higgins’s message, the depiction of several key aspects of Higgins’s character, the use of stylistic gestures to suggest location and mood, and, finally, the way in which this was achieved with relative brevity.

  It comes as no surprise to learn that the song was extensively rewritten. In The Street Where I Live, Lerner describes how Rex Harrison was not happy with the original version, because “he said he felt he sounded like an inferior Noël Coward.” Lerner put the problem down to the rhyme scheme.34 Harrison confirms the story and specifies that it was “too reminiscent of ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’; it needed breaking down and changing, it had a too familiar tang. Well, that song was worked on and worked on. Right through rehearsal Fritz was still playing with it.”35 The sources confirm this description of the composition period, but Lerner’s explanation of the modification of the rhyme scheme does not account for several intermediate versions; nor does he mention the musical changes alluded to by Harrison.