Secco Recit

I was going to begin this blog post by complaining about the lyric "Up with which below can't compare with." It's a lyric that's bugged me since I first listened to  On A Clear Day You Can See Forever , not least because it's such an easy fix. Just get rid of the first "with." Well, it turns out that in the stage show, Mark Bruckner actually calls Daisy Gamble out on this line right after she sings it. I've checked this with the vocal score, and this is indeed what Alan Jay Lerner wrote. I'm not wholly convinced that Lerner didn't just like the rhythm of the line and added in the dialogue to justify, but justify it he has, so I can't reasonably complain. I  can  however, complain about how he rhymes "azalea" with "failure" in the very same song. (Pronouncing the latter "failya.") As far as I could tell, this lyric was rewritten for the movie to rhyme "least a" with "Easter," which ha...

Between 1869 and 1875, W.S. Gilbert wrote a the libretti for a series of six "musical entertainments" produced by Thomas German Reed. Four of them had music by Reed, and the other two had music by Frederic Clay. These entertainments were exactly that -- light, family-friendly theatrical productions, in which Reed and his wife Priscilla often performed. These entertainments are of historical interest if you're interested in the history of that sort of thing, but they are not frequently produced nowadays. This is partly out of obscurity, partly out of them not tending to be interesting or robust enough to hold an evening on their own (dinner theater might suit them), and the fact that the original scores of most of them are lost to history might have something to do with it as well. I'm not going to stand here and argue that the German Reed entertainments are hidden masterpieces, because they're not. They are frequently funny, and where music exists it is often plea...