The Times©, Saturday June 17, 1978

‘The Music drama of Lloyd Webber,’ by John Higgins

Andrew Lloyd Webber is considering writing an opera set in the office of the music publisher Ricordi. There Puccini and Leoncavallo come face to face and squabble about who is to compose a work entitled La Boheme. It could turn out to be an unequal contest.

If Mr. Lloyd Webber wants to use substantial music quotations he will have to wait a year or two until the copyright expires. But Lloyd Webber, who is 34 this year, has time on his side and he will have written one opera already, which happens to be called Evita and opens at the Prince Edward Theatre on Wednesday.

If anyone questions the word ‘opera’ in connexion with Evita the composer answers reasonably enough that it contains virtually no dialogue and thus the description is a fair one. Musically, it is a very considerable advance on Jesus Christ Superstar, which is still running happily on the other side of Old Compton St. and for this some of the credit must go to the director of Evita, Hal Prince.

The first contact between Prince and Lloyd Webber came in a telegram still preserved in Lloyd Webber’s Belgravia home:

MR PRINCE IS INTERESTED IN RIGHTS TO SUPERSTAR. CALL OR HAVE YOUR AGENT CALL ME COLLECT IN NYC.

The second occurred after the flop of Jeeves, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn. Webber received a call from Prince advising him not to be depressed and ‘to bank the score.’ ‘We then met and talked seriously in July 1976. I told him that I was working on a musical play based on the life of Eva Peron and played him a little of the music. Hal then invited me to come to Majorca with Tim Rice, my partner. On the first evening Evita was not mentioned. On the second he went through the score in detail suggesting that I should get rid of all the rock and roll bits which harked back to Superstar. We immediately asked him to direct it and he replied that the summer of 1978 was the first available date. And that is why two years have elapsed between the issue of the Evita album and its appearance on stage.’

The interval is not regretted. ‘That record has become the working tape for revisions. We’ve axed on major number, ‘The Lady’s Got Potential.’ We’ve altered the character of Che considerably. [The use of Guevara, who watched the meteor flight of Eva Peron, stretches history somewhat.] He began by being aggressive, but he is now played in a much more beguiling way with more and more charm added to the personality by Hal. He is the man with the information, who reminds the audience that Argentina was very British at the time of Evita—lots of nannies and old Harrovians—and he has the words which close the show.

‘A composer must have time to rethink his own work. I’ve rewritten all the dance music and I think there is a great improvement. I’ve learned not to rush things straight onto the stage: that was the trouble with Jeeves. I never knew whether scenes were going to work or not. A little while ago the English National Opera offered me a commission and I turned it down because I was worried that there would be no opportunity to alter what I wrote. I’ve seen too many operas by contemporary composers produced in a half-finished state; they have qualities, but not enough to survive. And so they sink into oblivion.’

The ENO [English National Opera] suggestion was an astute one because any man capable of penning ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ has a strong feel for the theatre and a golden touch at the turnstiles. Webber feels no embarrassment about being popular.

‘I’m sad that serious music, or much of it, has shuffled off into a corner where it is being listened to by less and less people. Few composers have supporters who would gladly go to the stake for them, as say, Bartok’s friends would have done 50 years ago. There is a fear of writing an easily recognizable melody and the accompanying problem of what to do with it once you have composed it. Suppose Britten had invented ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ how would he have used it?’

How, indeed?

‘With Evita I wanted to set a big aria which is melodic and diatonic in the middle of the work. My solution is to make Evita herself a singer, a kind of Tosca figure, so that ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ is allowed to be a full-bodied song, a performance in itself.

‘The more I work in the musical theatre the more I realize that structure is everything. Hal appreciates that more than any director I know. When I was a kid I was given the scores of several musicals and used to play Oklahoma! When I should have been practicing Chopin, all the stage directions were included and they were a vital part of my education. This is where the Americans excel and it is why before long I shall have to go and work on Broadway for a spell. The great American musicals—Cabaret, West Side Story which perhaps has influenced the dance music in Evita, Gypsy—all have the most careful architecture. It was lack of structure which killed Jeeves. We’re not very good at it here, probably the last great piece of musical theatre to be composed in Britain was Peter Grimes.’

Andrew Lloyd Webber is laying out his orchestra equally carefully in Evita with woodwind and brass to the left, percussion and rhythm instruments (and that includes the harp) to the right and the strings directly in front of the conductor. Unlike most musicals heard in London there will be minimum amplification with microphones for the three principals alone which will operate only when they are at the back of the stage. There is, however, a brand new synthesizer, which has fired the Lloyd Webber imagination. It has 48 memory channels and is capable of reproducing the sound of unemphatic instruments, like the celeste and marimba, at rather more than their natural volume.

So will Andrew Lloyd Webber write that second opera after Evita and perhaps follow in the steps of his admired Prokofiev, ‘the best popular composer there has ever been’?

‘I don’t know. Maybe I can answer that after next Wednesday.’