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

by McHugh, Dominic

  However, he expanded on the subject of the song in a letter to Harrison on November 29, 1955. After promising to “rewrite it completely in a way that will be not only simpatico with you, but with the character of Higgins,” he explained his general attitude to musical theater songs:

  There are “song songs” and “character songs.” A “character song,” which is basically free and is accompanied by an emotion or emotions, as in the case in “I’m An Ordinary Man,” must pretty much stay within the bounds of reason. In a “song song,” certain extravagances are not only permissible, but desirable. “Why Can’t the English,” written as it was, was definitely a “song song” and therefore contained a certain amount of satiric extravagance. The minute the same idea is written in a freer way, so that it almost seems like normal conversation set to music, those extravagances would seem definitely out of place.36

  This reveals that he was happy to change the song because he felt it was not in keeping with Higgins’s character; the lyricist himself saw the need for a transition of style—from a “song song” full of “satiric extravagance” to a “character song” with “broader scope and a longer line musically.”

  This fits in well with the sources for the song’s four versions. The first is an early setting, with the music written out jointly by Loewe and Rittmann (mainly the latter) and the lyric by Loewe (see exx. 5.2 and 5.3 for extracts).37 Since Rittmann’s handwriting is present, this manuscript must date from late 1955 at the earliest. All the clefs, key and time signatures, dynamics, and expressive markings are in Rittmann’s hand, as well as most of the notation.38 The main piece of information to be gleaned from this is the rough date of the manuscript, rather than its authorship; it is not clear whether this is a fair copy of a previous Loewe autograph or the first time the composition was written down.

  The original lyric is reproduced in Appendix 2. It is easy to see Harrison’s point about its supposed resemblance to “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” which similarly contrasts the characteristics of the English with other nations. For instance:

  Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

  The Japanese don’t care to,

  The Chinese wouldn’t dare to.

  However, it is also surely true that the revised lyric is not dramatically different in this respect. Nor does Lerner’s reasoning fit all of the revisions. For example, changing the couplet “Daily her barbaric tribe increases, / Grinding our language into pieces” into “This is what the British population / Calls an elementary education” surely defines Higgins’s character more directly by giving his statement substance, rather than obliterating a Cowardesque element. If anything, one can sense Shaw’s socialist outlook in the new couplet, which attacks the institution of elementary education as the reason behind Eliza’s woeful accent and use of the English language, and by extension her meager lifestyle. The change from “Hear a Yorkshireman converse, / Cornishmen are even worse” to “Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse, / Hear a Cornishman converse” is another example of an enhancement process: the original is adequate, but the change propels the song forward more effectively because the “or” tells us that the next phrase will add something to the initial thought. The use of anaphora (“Hear” to start both lines) is also a stylistic improvement. Similarly, the change from “A national ensemble singing flat” to “I’d rather hear a choir singing flat!” clarifies the motivation of the line (flat singing is not Higgins’s focus, even though he detests it).

  Ex. 5.2. “Why Can’t the English?” version 1 (excerpt).

  Ex. 5.3. “Why Can’t the English?” version 1 (excerpt).

  The refrain is more obviously similar to “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” In particular, Lerner’s “Canadians pulverise it / In Ireland they despise it” has an air of Coward’s “The Japanese don’t care to / The Chinese wouldn’t dare to.” Yet the couplet cited by Lerner to explain why the original version was too similar to Coward’s song in truth seems only loosely related to it: “In Norway there are legions / Of literate Norwegians.”39 So aside from a few similarities, there is little to link the songs.

  Ex. 5.4. “Why Can’t the English?” early version.

  Ex. 5.5. “Why Can’t the English?” published version.

  Ultimately, the main reason for the revisions was Lerner and Loewe’s ambition to make the number as effective as possible. To this end, both the lyric and the music were changed for the final version. The musical adjustments were small but significant, and suggest that the reason for the rejection of the early version was that the verse form did not suit the form of the music. Whereas the opening line of the refrain (“Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?”) did not rhyme with the ensuing line (“In Norway there are legions”), in the revised version it makes a couplet with the second line (“This verbal class distinction by now should be antique”). This is much more coherent with the construction of the music. As example 5.4 shows, the antecedent-consequent phrase structure of the music is at odds with the original lyric. Three lines of text are set to two well-balanced musical phrases—the first arriving on the dominant, the second returning to the tonic. The first line of text is twice the length of the other two, which are set to the second phrase of music. The word “speak” does not rhyme with the word “pronunciation,” even though they are related musically by their appearances at the ends of the two phrases. Stylistically, the original lyric is awkward, and the rhyme of “In every other nation, they stress pronunciation” is laborious.

  The final version (ex. 5.5) overcomes these problems: rhyming the first two lines makes them reflect the musical structure more neatly, and the replacement second line again intensifies the social aspect of Higgins’s argument with the reference to a “verbal class distinction.” The music is also strengthened by having one less syllable in the replacement second line, resulting in a quarter note at the end of the phrase rather than two eighth notes; and “[pronunci-]a-tion” is undoubtedly weaker than “antique.” In all, the issue is not whether the song resembled “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” but rather one of 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 pre
cedent, 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 about the Americans—is not in fact written down. Furthermore, the two bars of accompaniment that follow the musical tacet have clearly been erased and rewritten, and there is also evidence of the joke about the French (squeezed into the last bar on the page) having being rubbed out and replaced (though Loewe omits the word “actually” from the revised version—probably due to a lack of space on the page). This all fits in with the evidence about final revisions to the song and shows that Loewe revised his personal manuscript to document the changes.

  As before, the full score of the number is a complicated document rather than a consecutively written, neatly produced manuscript. It is the work of both Lang and Bennett and contains numerous modifications. Broadly speaking, bars 1–95 (up to “Oh, why can’t the English learn to”) are Bennett’s orchestration, and 96 (from the key change at “set a good example”) to the end are by Lang. The introduction seems to have caused a few problems: the original orchestration consisted of a solo clarinet giving Higgins his opening pitch (A) and the harp playing a D-major scale from A to A to strengthen the lead-in. This was rejected, and instead Bennett wrote a short A-major chord on all the instruments, perhaps to act as a more assertive introduction for Higgins. That in turn was crossed out, however, and the two-bar bassoon introduction that appears in the published score was added. Curiously, this, too, was crossed out, but was later reinstated for the published show. The first three pages of score contain significant alterations, usually with lines being taken away from one instrument and given to another or the harmony being filled out. There are also places where changes were indicated but went unused in the definitive version. An example is in bars 14 and 15, where Bennett added trumpet parts to accompany Eliza’s cry of “Aooow,” but the final orchestration does not include them. Another case is in bars 34–39, where the original orchestration was saturated with busy sixteenth notes in the flute and oboe parts; Bennett replaced them with a eighth-note motif on the trumpets’ staves, indicating with arrows that they are for flute and oboe. Such examples are to be found throughout the score. Lang’s part of the orchestration can be dated fairly accurately, because he clearly orchestrated the version shown on the lyric sheet from January 27 (i.e., almost the final version, but not quite). The line about the Americans is written in its sung version but crossed out and changed to allow for the new spoken line; the comment about the French is spoken but in the second person rather than the third; and the line “Use decent English” still appears. Aside from this, the final two bars have been crossed out and replaced with a new version on the subsequent page, proving that, no less than Lerner and Loewe, the meticulousness of the orchestrators knew no bounds.

  In his autobiography, Lerner describes how the composition of both “Why Can’t the English?” and “I’m an Ordinary Man” was the result of having met Harrison and evolved a style of music for him. Supposedly, the two songs took “about six weeks in all to complete.”47 “I’m an Ordinary Man” replaced “the totally inadequate” “Please Don’t Marry Me” and was greeted with enthusiasm by Hart and Harrison.48 The few surviving sources for the song uphold this image of a smooth creative process. Levin’s papers contain the earliest version of the lyric, both as a loose lyric sheet and as part of the rehearsal script. The words are almost the same as in the published version, with a few minor edits.49 Lerner’s only substantial change improved one of his images: “I’m a quiet living man / Who’s contented when he’s reading / By the fire in his room” became “I’m a quiet living man / Who prefers to spend his evenings / In the silence of his room.” Whereas the original picture merely portrayed Higgins as bookish, the replacement promotes the stony “silence of his room”; the point was not to show his scholastic side but his solitary, unsociable nature.50

  Not surprisingly, the autograph score of “I’m an Ordinary Man” in the Loewe Collection is a fair copy. Although it does not match the published vocal score, it contains only one major difference.51 The passage “Let them buy their wedding bands / For those anxious little hands” was originally punctuated by two imitative gestures in the music. These are crossed out but are still legible. The material in the second half of the song that repeats the earlier music is written out in shorthand with the melody alone; Loewe indicated with numbers where the piano part was to be copied from the first half of the song, suggesting the score was written for the use of the copyist. This is co
rroborated by the fact that Bennett’s autograph full score uses the same earlier version of the lyric as Loewe’s autograph. The orchestration is largely free of corrections and modifications: the one-bar flute melody following the line “free of humanity’s mad inhuman noise” was cut, as was the nine-bar harp part after the thrice-repeated “Let a woman in your life” near the end, and there are some small additions of expressive markings and string bowings in pencil. Otherwise, the number does indeed seem to have been written with ease, as Lerner suggested.52

  Like Eliza’s “Just You Wait,” Higgins’s “Ordinary Man” is constructed with a freedom that helped to portray the two sides of Higgins—charm and arrogance—within the same number. The verse is roughly twelve bars long, and the gracefulness of the dotted rhythms, gently descending harmonic lines and flexed, rather than strict, triplets add to Higgins’s charm, even if he is arrogant in his idealized description of himself. With the refrain comes a shift to the subdominant, E-flat major. A typical rising-and-falling Broadway thumb-line creates unrest while Higgins sings “But let a woman in your life,” and many of his lines are punctuated by chromatic scales in the woodwinds. A sinister edge is added by the use of the subdominant minor on the lines “Then get on to the enthralling / fun of overhauling you.” The larger gesture is that Loewe paints Higgins’s description of himself in a tranquil light and his description of life with a woman as—literally—a nightmare: everything about the verses is relaxed, but the refrains are uneasy throughout, complete with howling high woodwind scales. This contrast is brought to a head at the end of the song, when Higgins turns on several phonographs with “gibberish voices” playing on them, while the music whips itself into a frenzy until Higgins suddenly turns them off and makes his final statement: “I shall never let a woman in my life.” No less than in the Soliloquy from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which has long been held up as the outstanding example of a musical monologue in loose form, Loewe is capable of tying together disparate musical strands to create an insight into a character’s psyche.