In the midst of furious preparation for the fifth print edition of ArtsPaper, out last week, and for the Tony Awards, which I admit to watching every year, I have been thinking about the life and work of Frederick Loewe.
I even checked out a copy of the movie version of Brigadoon from the library, and it doesn’t hold up very well; the only really good scene for me is the one in New York in which all those gray-flannel suit types are yakking away in some high-powered restaurant before Gene Kelly decides to return to Scotland.
That’s the only scene that has any interesting energy or life. The scenes in Brigadoon itself are wooden and hopelessly corny, and the dialogue (especially the Van Johnson cynic role) is dreadful. Some of the dancing is nice, particularly the Kelly-Cyd Charisse pas de deux, but other than that, all it has is a good score, which in the end is the most important thing.
But every time I hear Loewe’s score, it makes me wonder why someone with such a huge talent for operetta wrote so little, and the reason appears to be success: You make a great deal of money and the leisurely life starts talking in soothing tones to you until you answer back, Yeah, you’re right, I think a nap would be a good idea. (Gene Lees has written a book about Lerner and Loewe which he says is much more Lerner than Loewe, because the composer retired early.)
From all the available evidence, and I’m sure there’s more out there to be found, Loewe’s story of his early life is heavily fictional, but we do know that he was a published songwriter while still in his teens, and that it took him some knocking-around time before he was able to find a good partner in Alan Jay Lerner. In addition to Brigadoon (1947), the two men wrote Paint Your Wagon (1951, which has some good songs), Gigi (1958, for film), Camelot (1960) and of course, My Fair Lady (1956).
All of these scores have a certain amount of formula, including the big choral number that fills in the dramatic action (Go and Stop Him, etc.) But they all have absolutely lovely songs, especially some of the lesser numbers in Camelot, such as Before I Gaze at You Again, and I Loved You Once in Silence. Unlike Richard Rodgers and the other composers of the Broadway mainstream, Loewe was essentially an operetta writer, not a writer of musical comedy, and he is the true heir of Romberg, Friml and Herbert; most of Broadway went in a far jazzier direction.
It seems to me that much of the music Loewe wrote would sound far better, and would be much more appreciated, if it got the overhaul treatment, and in particular were reorchestrated in a light, classical manner, rather than the glitzy, boffo horn-driven sound of the charts that now accompany the music. This is delicate writing, and it needs a sensitive approach, and most of the way his music has been presented is in very dated instrumental garb.
I, for one, would like to see these scores revisited, reworked (a longer madrigal by Lancelot, for instance) and represented, perhaps with book alterations, too. I think a lot of this music deserves to be listened to again with an ear toward its classicism, and I think we’d find that it fits quite well into the operetta tradition, and further we would find that Loewe’s melodies have more shape and less cliche than some of his predecessors (I heard a suite from Herbert’s The Red Mill the other day, and found it ghastly).
And these are scores in which some editing could still be done, getting rid of dance interpolations that aren’t needed, or extending, as I noted, some other ideas that get short shrift: if you can stretch out a piece of one of the songs for a big dance number, you can expand them in other ways for other purposes. Maybe a few more years have to pass before the classic musicals of the 20th century get the scholarly musicological treatment, but I think it’s an idea whose time has come.
