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

by McHugh, Dominic

  This is especially true of My Fair Lady. But in order to discuss the show’s score, it is essential first to understand the nature of the material available. Although studies of musicals typically use published piano reductions of orchestral scores as the basis for their analyses, these commercially available scores usually represent only a retrospective snapshot of what was performed on Broadway. Rarely are all the expressive aspects of a performance represented, nor is the complexity of the compositional process normally clear from a homogenized score. Typically, the composer would write either a simple piano-vocal score or a lead sheet with chord symbols (or even just create the piece at the keyboard in the case of composers who could not notate music). This would then be adapted and expanded by an arranger according to factors such as the number of verses that appeared in the final script or the need for dance music, before the orchestrators fleshed out the material and expanded the texture for a full complement of instruments. At best, published vocal scores might partly be based on the composer’s initial manuscripts, but taken as a whole they are normally extrapolated from either the full score or the conductor’s short score after the event, and therefore bear a comparatively remote relationship to the stage performances.

  In the case of My Fair Lady, the musical artifacts (mostly derived from the Frederick Loewe and Warner-Chappell Collections at the Library of Congress) can be divided into the following categories:

  • Untitled melodic sketches in Loewe’s hand, without lyrics, which can be identified as now-familiar songs;

  • Completed melodies in Loewe’s hand, without accompaniment, which may or may not have lyrics attached and may not ultimately have made it into the finished show;

  • Completed piano-vocal scores wholly or partly in Loewe’s hand for both familiar and cut songs; the verses may be absent or only one verse may appear, compared to multiple verses in the published vocal score;

  • Vocal and choral scores of intermediate and final versions of some of the songs in unknown copyists’ hands;

  • Piano scores (some of them representing intermediate versions) of dance music, incidental music, vocal reprises, and instrumental numbers in the handwriting of Trude Rittmann, the dance arranger;

  • Full orchestral scores in the hands of the credited orchestrators, Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J Lang, as well as the ghost orchestrator, Jack Mason;

  • Instrumental performing parts and conductor’s short scores in unknown copyists’ hands;

  • Two editions of the published vocal score: the original, edited by the show’s conductor, Franz Allers (1956), and a corrected revision (1969).

  In addition, lyric sheets containing versions of the texts of the songs not documented elsewhere are discussed where relevant. These come from two sources: a folder in Herman Levin’s papers, and an envelope marked “Franz Allers Lyrics” hidden in the middle of a pile of instrumental parts for the show in the Warner-Chappell Collection.

  No song or number is represented by a source or sources from all of these categories, nor should it be assumed that there ever were documents for each song in every category. For instance, songs such as “I Could Have Danced All Night” were created late in the compositional process and were probably written down as relatively complete numbers first time around, so there might never have been a simple melodic sketch. Others never made it past the drafting stage and were never orchestrated. In at least one case, a score has been mislaid or separated from the collection: “Say a Prayer for Me Tonight” was performed during the initial New Haven out-of-town tryouts and then cut, but although a copyist’s score and the full score have survived in the Warner-Chappell Collection, there is no autograph piano-vocal score for the song in the Loewe Collection. Nonetheless, the documents as a whole give a vivid overview of the process of creating the score of Fair Lady as a “performance” for Broadway.

  Initial Ideas and Cut Songs

  The manuscripts of the songs discussed in this section all derive from the Frederick Loewe Collection. Some of them are fully completed songs that could be performed, while others are in the form of melodic outlines and, interesting though they are, reveal little information other than the shape of the melody. There are six melodic sketches with titles but no lyrics that are known to have been intended for the show. Two of them, “What is a Woman?” and “Who is the Lady?,” are almost identical and are probably different attempts to write some kind of song for Henry Higgins; “Dear Little Fool” is headed “Higgins” and is therefore presumed to be for the same character; “Over Your Head” was the original version of Eliza’s “Show Me”; and “Limehouse” and “The Undeserving Poor” were planned for the original opening scenes of the show, the latter intended for Doolittle.1

  “Dear Little Fool” is a simple melody in E-flat major with very few accidentals or chromatic inflections; its many long, sustained notes suggest that it was an attempt at a love song of the kind that Higgins does not sing in the finished show. It is difficult to tell whether “Limehouse” was intended as a solo or choral number, and indeed what its message might have been. However, there is some chromatic movement in the melody, which was probably an attempt to evoke the Chinese atmosphere of the projected opening scene at Limehouse in Outline 1 (see table 3.1). Similarly, the melody of “The Undeserving Poor” is simple, and since it was intended for Doolittle and his cronies it is probably reasonable to assume that it might have made a rousing song of the same ilk as “Get Me to the Church on Time” and “With a Little Bit of Luck.”

  In addition to these songs with a documented connection to Fair Lady, there are a few other manuscripts in the Loewe Collection, which may also be related to it. The title of “What’s To Become of Me?” mirrors so closely Eliza’s tortured speech after the ball—“Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?”—that it is highly probable that it was a song for this position in the show.2 Underneath the short melody is a note, “There’s Always One,” which probably refers to another sketch, “There’s Always One You Can’t Forget.”3 The latter is characterized by dotted rhythms and melodic leaps, but again it is difficult to infer much information from it; the same goes for “Say Hello For Me,” which is on the reverse of “What’s to Become of Me?” and has only a brief melodic sketch and a few chords to indicate a possible accompaniment pattern at the bottom. There is also another page of sketches for “What’s to Become of Me?,” the first four bars of which contain an outline harmonization.

  Fascinating though these manuscripts are, they tell us only a little about the finished songs or the composer and lyricist’s intentions for the characters who were to sing them. Nevertheless, some observations can be made. In the extract of “What Is a Woman?” in example 4.1,4 for instance, we can see that part of the melody is familiar from a song that eventually made it into the show: bars 17–19 (and the similar patterns in 21–22 and 25–27) resemble the melodic line of Pickering’s words “You should get a medal, / Or be even made a knight” in the second-act opener, “You Did It” (ex. 4.2). On this evidence alone, the resemblance seems curious rather than significant. All it really tells us is that when Loewe had created music that was not ultimately put to use, he thought nothing of recycling it later in a different form—a reminder of how little, sometimes, the melody of a song is bound in meaning to its lyric.

  More obviously illuminating are three draft melodies with both titles and lyrics, known as “lead sheets.” This time, the function, meaning, and content of all three is far more obvious here, though Loewe’s exact harmonization is unknown. Lerner sheds light on one of the songs in The Street Where I Live: “Our first attempt to dramatize Higgins’ misogyny resulted in a song called ‘Please Don’t Marry Me.’”5 The song was the precursor to “I’m an Ordinary Man,” but with a slightly different context (see Outlines 1 and 2 in chap. 3). The original version of the scene had Higgins responding negatively to the suggestion that he should marry someone far from his liking, so the title “Please Don’t Marry Me” re
ferred specifically to Miss Eynsford Hill as well as being Higgins’s general credo (see ex. 4.3).6 By contrast, the replacement, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” comes in response to Pickering’s question, “Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?”7 The focus in this song is on the perceived consequences of the repeated line, “Let a woman in your life”; although marriage is mentioned briefly, the lyric is more about relationships between men and women in general than Eliza specifically. In addition to this lead sheet, a lyric sheet in Herman Levin’s papers contains the words to the second refrain, suggesting that the song was fully worked upon before Lerner and Loewe discarded it.8

  Ex. 4.1. Extract from a melody “What Is a Woman?”

  Ex. 4.2. Extract from “You Did It.”

  Ex. 4.3. Extract from the refrain of Higgins’s “Please Don’t Marry Me.”

  The verse (not included in ex. 4.3) shows Loewe’s freedom of form: after the simple lines of the first eight bars, the time signature briefly changes to 6/8 while he quotes the traditional song “Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes,” the romantic lyric of which Higgins mocks (“I hate that optical brew”). But again, the song is of interest because it contains material, which would later become familiar in another context. The melody in bars 36–43 is similar to that of bars 8–16 of the song “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Camelot (1960), as shown in example 4.4. The wittiness of some of the lyric writing is not entirely foreign to the way the Professor’s character was ultimately sketched, for instance the couplet: “That someday you’d abhor me would torture me with fears, / But having you adore me would bore me to tears.” But given the upbeat, comic character of the lyric, it seems likely that the accompaniment was quite jolly and that the tempo was fast, making “Please Don’t Marry Me” a glossy Broadway number that would have been incoherent with Higgins’s other songs.

  Ex. 4.4. Extract from “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” from Camelot.

  Similarly, the next unused song, “There’s a Thing Called Love,” is uncharacteristic of Eliza’s completed numbers. The lyric alone tells us that this is a typical love song:

  There’s a thing called love

  In the twinkling of an eye you know the meaning of.

  There’s a thing called love—

  By the count of one

  The lovely deed is done!

  A precious thing called love—

  When it’s yours you know how much it’s worth.

  You can tell despair

  Farewell, despair,

  Love came in time,

  And made me glad that I’m

  On earth!9

  The number was probably intended for the position later taken by “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Eliza’s sentiments make sense in the context of having succeeded in pronouncing “The Rain in Spain” correctly and gained a new warmth from Higgins, with whom she now fancies herself to be in love.10 Again, such an expression of love was probably too overt for Lerner’s overall plan for the show, so it is not surprising that it was cut. However, the melody later resurfaced as “In this Wide, Wide, World” in the 1973 stage version of Gigi.

  The next song also contains material that was subsequently reused. In his first memoir, Rex Harrison says that when Lerner and Loewe first came to talk to him about doing the show, “There was a number called ‘Lady Liza’, a very pushy sort of Broadway tune which Fritz later turned into a waltz and used in the ballroom scene.”11 Curiously, in his second autobiography, the actor contradicts himself and says that the song “was skillfully turned into ‘The Ascot Gavotte,’” but he was correct the first time.12 As with “Please Don’t Marry Me,” the intended context of “Lady Liza” is apparent from Outlines 1 and 2 (see chap. 3). After Eliza’s debacle at Ascot, Higgins and Pickering discover her crying on a park bench, convinced she cannot succeed. But “the men persuade her she can. They do it in a song, which they sing together to her: ‘Lady Liza.’”13

  Ex. 4.5. “Lady Liza.”

  The manuscript for the song is in two parts. On the front cover is the melody, with “Higgins/Pickering” marked to the left of the title. Inside the folded manuscript is another title, “Liza—Counter,” while on two bracketed systems are the same Higgins/Pickering melody plus a counterpoint for “Jane” and “Math,” presumably the maids. The start of this combined version of the piece is shown in example 4.5. As Harrison says, the melody of the first four bars was transformed into the beginning of “The Embassy Waltz,” but the rest of it is different. The version of the song with the counterpoint was probably intended for a reprise after Ascot mentioned in Outlines 1 and 2, to conclude Eliza’s second series of lessons (“At the end of the sequence Liza is doing everything beautifully and the chorus sings, ‘Lady Liza’”).14

  Although the melody is unremarkable and the lyric full of clichés—such as “gray above once again blue”—the servants’ counterpoint is notable for its wit. “Is it malaria? Or something scarier?” they ask, on seeing Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering jubilant after her transformation. In essence, this reaction was eventually replaced by two earlier reactions: first, Mrs. Pearce’s lines after she has been awoken by the pounding noise made by the trio when they sing “The Rain in Spain” (“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Higgins?”); and second, the maids’ interjections in Eliza’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” which similarly provide a contrasting viewpoint on the main theme being heard (“You’re up too late, miss, / And sure as fate, miss, / You’ll catch a cold”). In the published show, of course, this material is shown before the Ascot scene rather than after it, because the final part of Eliza’s transformation happens offstage and we see only the result, not the process. The words for the remaining verses of the song are provided in the collection of lyrics in Levin’s papers. This lyric sheet shows that the last line of every verse is changed from the indefinite to the personal article: “You’ll be a lady” becomes “You’ll be my lady” in the first two verses and “One day my lady will Liza be!” in the final one. This is yet another example of the far more explicit positing of Higgins as Eliza’s lover in Lerner and Loewe’s early ideas for the show.

  Like “Please Don’t Marry Me” and “There’s a Thing Called Love,” “Lady Liza” was probably dropped from the score because it simply does not fit either the style of the piece or the characterization of the main protagonists as they were ultimately evolved. These three manuscripts provide us with a window into the composer’s workshop, showing how Loewe dealt with both microlevel details such as word-setting and macrolevel issues such as refitting a melody with a new lyric or developing a musical style for a character.

  Advanced Ideas

  In all probability, the three songs discussed in the previous section were “fully composed” in the sense that we can assume Loewe must have played them with accompaniments rather than just the melodies: Lerner reports that Loewe always composed complete songs at the piano with the lyricist in the room, and that he paid attention to the harmonic and accompaniment material.15 But only one unused song in the Loewe and Warner-Chappell Collections exists in a completely written out piano-vocal score: “Shy.” It is mentioned by Julie Andrews in her autobiography as “a very pretty song,” and she adds that “originally Eliza sang it to show her feelings for Higgins. Alan Lerner realized that in Shaw’s original play, the main characters never once speak of love. Therefore, he and Fritz created another song, the famous ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’, which conveys all the affection and emotion Eliza feels, yet never once mentions the word.”16 Andrews’s explanation of the position of the song in the show is corroborated by Outline 4 (see chap. 3), which has “Shy” at the end of the montage of lessons instead of “I Could Have Danced.”17

  Two manuscripts of the song exist. The first is entirely in Loewe’s hand, with the complete lyric, on three sides of the standard Chappell manuscript paper that the composer used for most of his work; there are no dynamic or expressive markings. The second document is the work of two separate parties, and
the accompaniment is completely different in style.18 The melody, title, and lyric are in Loewe’s handwriting, but the clefs, key signatures, piano lines, cover title, tempo, and expressive markings are all in the hand of Trude Rittmann, the dance arranger. Of course, this does not necessarily prove divided authorship—especially since years later Rittmann confirmed that Loewe did not like to write things down but was concerned to have overall control of his scores—but it is striking that the accompaniment for Rittmann’s version is much more fluent than Loewe’s original.19 The beginning of both versions is reproduced in examples 4.6 and 4.7.

  Musically the song is particularly interesting for its employment of harmonically complex (and sometimes ambiguous) maneuvers. The tonic chord does not appear unmodified in root position until the final two bars, for example, and the song both launches on a surprising seventh chord (though there might have been an introduction, had the song made it into the show) and avoids sounding the tonic at various points where it could be expected. The minor seventh at the beginning of bar 9 is typical of Loewe’s ability to create an unforeseen harmonization of a straightforward melody; he sidesteps harmonic stability. Similarly, the accompaniment flows strongly for the first two phrases and breaks at bar 8 before continuing again in a similar vein. At bars 14–16 (not shown) Loewe employs a stepwise resolution of a strong dissonance over a vocal pedal note which is not unlike his treatment of the words “I only know [when he began to dance with me]” from “I Could Have Danced All Night”—ironically so, given that this song replaced “Shy.” In both cases, the momentum of the music is stopped while the ensuing section restarts with three emphatic chords that each harmonize the repeated melody note in a different way, giving dramatic release. The two songs also share another similarity in terms of lyrics: “Why can’t I open my heart and let them fly?” (“Shy”) is not unlike “Why all at once my heart took flight” (“I Could Have Danced”). Amusingly, the latter line is the subject of a piece of self-criticism in Lerner’s autobiography.20