The Best Andrew Lloyd Webber Ballad

I was recently challenged to name what I thought the best Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad was. This is a difficult question to answer because, as everyone even remotely aware of musical theater knows, Andrew Lloyd Webber has, over the course of his career, written an imperial buttload of ballads. (I'm using imperial measures rather than metric because the UK just cannot make up its mind.) Any given Andrew Lloyd Webber musical will contain at least one memorable ballad, often more. Evita alone contains at least three, depending on how you count, all of which became popular enough outside the context of the musical to merit their own individual Wikipedia pages. In fact, more than a dozen Andrew Lloyd Webber ballads have their own Wikipedia pages, and that's just the popular ones.

The first song I thought to rank was "Memory" from Cats, which I have always found to be somewhat overrated. I think the popular rating of "Memory" is perhaps somewhat skewed because a lot of people really don't like Cats. When giving a negative review, it's generally good form to try and find at least one thing you did like about the thing you're reviewing, and in the case of Cats, the big power ballad is as good an element as any to elevate above the rest as the best thing in an otherwise meh musical. Personally, I like many of the songs from Cats, as well as the musical as a whole, and so "Memory" in particular doesn't especially stand out above, say "Gus The Theater Cat," to pick another ballad. There's also a point to be made that Andrew Lloyd Webber did not originally write the melody of "Memory" for Cats. It was originally for a one-act musical about Puccini and Leoncavallo that was intended to be a companion piece to Tell Me On A Sunday. When that never came to fruition, the tune was repurposed in Cats. Adding to it the fact that Cats is pretty thin on plot, and, in context, "Memory" comes across as a pretty generic ballad for an art form that tends to prize situation-specific songs. This doesn't mean it's a bad song, but it doesn't stick out in my mind as "Andrew Lloyd Webber's best ballad."

(Sidebar: This is the reason I think I artificially inflate "Anything But Lonely" from Aspects Of Love. In context, the song seems amazing because it's the best part of a musical I otherwise can't stand (also it's very near the end) and so when talking about the show, I tend to praise that one song more than I probably should. But in a vacuum, I don't know that it's appreciably better or worse than "Memory.")

The ballads of Evita ("Another Suitcase In Another Hall," "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," and "You Must Love Me", the latter from the movie but subsequently added to stage productions) fare better. To use "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" as a prime example, it is likewise a fairly generic (albeit very pretty) tune, but it's one that's been played before in the musical, so we're familiar with it, and the lyric is more specific to the situation. At the same time, this is supposed to be Andrew Lloyd Webber's best ballad, not Tim Rice's. And though Evita may easily be Tim Rice's best work, I don't know that it's Andrew Lloyd Webber's. Which raises the deeper concern: If I'm to rate the ballads of Andrew Lloyd Webber, I need to focus on the music. But it's harder to talk about music than lyrics. It's difficult to articulate what makes a good melody, especially when the very concept of a good melody is nebulous and subject to taste.

But Andrew Lloyd Webber doesn't just write songs, he write musicals. And a song in a musical is written with a specific purpose, whether that be to advance the story, develop character, or what have you. And so, in the interest of actually coming to some sort of conclusion, my question shifts from the vague and subjective "what is the best Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad" to the more specific and marginally-less-but-still-rather subjective "what Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad best conveys its contextual purpose through music."

"Tell Me On A Sunday" from the musical of the same name (I refuse to acknowledge Song And Dance as an actual musical -- you don't get to take a musical you've already written, tack on a ballet set to other music you've already written, and call it a new musical) was another standout in my mind, and it does have a fair claim for the music actually conveying something about the plot. The first verse runs thus:

Don't write a letter

When you want to leave

Don't call me at three A.M.

From a friends apartment

I'd like to choose

How I hear the news

Take me to a park that's covered with trees

Tell me on a Sunday please

Don Black, the lyricist, leaves the first half of the verse entirely unrhymed, and Lloyd Webber follows suit, by not allowing the melody any resolution until the final couplet. In the context of the musical, the singer has just found out that her boyfriend is cheating on her, and is processing her thoughts. The lyrics and music both have a stream-of-consciousness feel to them that befits the situation.

That is a simple example of how musical storytelling can work. But "Tell Me On A Sunday" is a small song in a small (albeit highly underrated) show. We can do better.

(Note: I chose "Tell Me On A Sunday" as a fairly simple example of this sort of thing. "Gethsemane" from Jesus Christ Superstar is a more complete example of the same thing with delayed resolution and rhyme. Both melody and lyric are fragmented as Jesus struggles with his impending death. Midway through his breakdown is viscerally characterized by a syncopated rhythm that sounds like it's probably in some weird time signature but actually isn't. The music also employs a highly effective orchestral build throughout. At the same time, much of "Gethsemane"s effectiveness relies on the singer, who is encouraged to ad lib and riff during the song, which even contains in the score a marking reading: "Ad lib hysterical sobbing." I rate "Gethsemane" very highly. Just not quite as highly as the next one I'm going to mention.)

Throughout all my ruminations, I realized there was one show I was avoiding taking seriously, because I thought it seemed too cliche, too obvious an answer. But that should have been my first clue to look there, because if so many people have loved this musical for so long, there must be a good reason. And the truth is that I really love The Phantom Of The Opera. I think it is, dramatically, one of the strongest shows Andrew Lloyd Webber has set, alongside Evita and Sunset Boulevard, despite some uneven lyrics. But I have held off on calling it one of Lloyd Webber's strongest musical scores. But the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to one particular song from it, and the musical reasons for it are more than compelling. "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again," sung by Christine in the second act of The Phantom Of The Opera, is, I contend, a master class in musical storytelling on Broadway, and easily Andrew Lloyd Webber's best ballad.

We're actually going to go a little outside the song itself, because when looking at what ballad best achieves its goal in a dramatic work, we need to look at the context in which the ballad appears.

The scene leading into the song begins with a repeating ostinato figure played by a solo violin:

There are already two things going on here that convey information to the audience through music. There is the figure itself, which is a variation on a theme we have heard twice before. First as a counterpoint to the main "Phantom Of The Opera" theme, and then in the Don Juan rehearsal scene that this scene immediately follows. The melody is associated, therefore, with not just the character of the Phantom himself, but the Phantom as a predator. It is heard when he is actively abducting Christine, and in the context of his Don Juan opera, which is itself a trap for Christine. It is a danger motif.

The second thing is that the instrument playing it is a solo violin. That instrument is associated in the score with Christine's late father, who was a violinist. The first time a solo violin is heard in the musical is in Act I, introducing the song "Angel Of Music":

Christine believes that her father has sent the Angel of Music to watch over her, and believes the Angel to be the disembodied voice who has been giving her singing lessons. When the voice turns out to belong to the very real Phantom who kidnaps her, terrorizes the opera house, and murders people, Christine has a bit of an emotional crisis, trying to reconcile the duality of the benign Angel her father promised her, and the villainous Phantom who is actively terrorizing her. This duality is embodied throughout the musical using this "Angel Of Music" motif, which, though first heard on a solo violin as Christine tells Meg about her father, is quickly hijacked by the Phantom in "The Mirror," who uses the melody to lure Christine into his lair. He combines the motif with one of his own, singing "I am your angel of music" to the same melody with which other characters sing "He's there, the Phantom of the opera," which is also used in his title song.

Okay, so in the introduction to the scene, we are already thoroughly in the mindset of Christine's emotional crisis, as the score combines the instrument associated with her father with the musical theme associated with the Phantom-as-predator. The scene proceeds with a short reprise of "Little Lotte," which is more a lyrical motif than a musical one, and so does not bear analyzing here. And then the song proper begins.

"Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" is made up of two main melodies, one in G minor, and one in G major. They are as follows:

The minor melody is used when Christine is singing about gloomy things, like "bells and sculpted angels, cold and monumental" and the major when she's singing the refrain, "wishing you were somehow here again," but there's something more interesting going on in the music here.

G major and G minor are what's known as "parallel keys," which means they have the same tonic or root, in this case, G. Both melodies also tend to stay away from the note G itself, preferring to stay unresolved. Instead of resolving to a G, both melodies end on D, with a D major chord in the accompaniment. (Actually, in the first instance minor theme, the accompaniment is an open fifth, D and A, which leaves the quality of the chord ambiguous.) D major is the dominant chord in the key of G, meaning that it wants to resolve back to G. The neat thing is that D major is the same dominant chord whether you're in G major or G minor. (That is assuming either harmonic or melodic minor, which were invented in the first place specifically to make sure that the dominant chord was major.) .In a usual song, Andrew Lloyd Webber would use this dominant chord to resolve to the same key we were just in before and end there. Instead, he uses this ambiguous chord to go from G minor into G major and vice versa, never starting or ending a phrase on the tonic, with no final resolution in sight. This constant shifting of quality gives the song a sense of perpetual unease, and effectively reflects Christine's internal conflict. This is not complex music theory, but it is effective.

But the song has to end somewhere. And in true Andrew Lloyd Webber fashion, it modulates. From one iteration of the major theme, the major theme repeats, but now starting on the D the last iteration ended on, thus forcing us up a minor third into Bb major. Bb major is not only the relative major of G minor (thus placing the conclusion of the song in a sort of "compromise key" between G minor and G major), but is also the key in which the "Angel Of Music" theme is first introduced -- see above -- and sure enough, no sooner does Christine enter the new key than she sings:

A variation on the same "Angel Of Music" theme, with a slight rhythmic change to accommodate the new song's meter.

In addition to recapitulating with the familiar "Angel Of Music" motif, which is the musical symbol for Christine's emotional conflict, this conclusion also sets up what immediately follows the song. It re-establishes the melody just in time for the Phantom to hijack it in "Wandering Child" just as he did in "The Mirror" in Act I. In this direct scene parallel, he uses the "Angel Of Music" motif to try and reassert himself as a father figure to Christine, and lure her back to him. But this time, he fails, thus breaking the symmetry in a dramatically effective fashion. All this combined, the harmonic unease, the strategic deployment of leitmotives, the dramatic symmetry, is what makes this scene and song pack such an emotional punch.

A lot of musical theater writers are under the impression that "leitmotif" simply means repeating a melody. Les Miserables is a particularly popular offender, repeating tunes with reckless abandon, seemingly unconcerned with what those tunes could symbolize. "Fantine's Death," for instance, shares its melody with "On My Own." And not just the main theme. The entire song is the same, despite there being no compelling dramatic reason to link these two situations or characters. Similarly with the Bishop, whose melody in the first act is used as "Empty Chairs At Empty Tables" in the second. In some fringe cases, such as "Valjean's Soliloquy" using the same tune as "Javert's Suicide," a thematic link could be argued, but there are so many seemingly random examples that I can't feel sure that wasn't a fluke. While repeating melodies does help them stick in an audience's mind, and can thus make an audience like a score more than they would otherwise, the simple act of repetition does not an effective leitmotif make. Thus, no scene in Les Miserables can effectively convey itself in the music alone.

Ironically, this is something I see Andrew Lloyd Webber accused of fairly frequently. That all of his scores are just the same three or four tunes repeated ad nauseam. And while sometimes I do see him repeating themes in ways I can't make sense of (Evita has some examples), just as often he shows, in a very cut-and-dry way, how to effectively tell a story through music. The "Angel Of Music" motif is established in a song. It gets hijacked by another character, and then fragmented and distorted in various ways reflecting the progressing situation until it comes back together in the final resolution. Versions of the sixteenth-note ostinato are used multiple times throughout the musical, but only in the most specific scenarios to be associated not just with the Phantom, but with one particular aspect of the Phantom's character. "Prima Donna," first used by the managers to talk Carlotta into reluctantly singing the lead in Il Muto, is later used by Raoul to talk Christine into reluctantly singing the lead in Don Juan Triumphant -- the melody is used only at those two points in the score. Despite being the most the popular song from the musical, "Music Of The Night" is only used three other times in the score (not counting the Entr'acte), and only in fragments. When Christine is describing her experience in the Phantom's lair, when the Phantom kidnaps her again in the second act, and then at the very end when the Phantom declares it over. In fact, every instance of "The Music Of The Night" in the score is used to describe the Phantom's prison, whether literal or self-imposed. The only musical themes in the score that are repeated regularly without concern for the situation are the fairly dissonant recitative sections -- not the parts the audience leaves humming. This is not a musical which repeats its tunes ad nauseam in a frivolous attempt to get the audience to remember them. The fact that it is so tightly plotted and the musical themes so effectively mapped together only makes it seem that way.

As if to drive the point home, "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again," a song late in Act II (well past the point where Les Miserables all but entirely gives up on introducing any new melodies) is itself an entirely new melody, thus further putting the audience on shaky ground, up until it resolves into the "Angel Of Music" theme -- the repetition of which, as it grows out of the song quite naturally in a variation, might even be missed by the audience except unconsciously.

Encapsulated in a single scene, "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" expertly develops its plot and conflict through the use of music. By attaching specific and clear associations to instruments, themes, and accompaniment patterns, and then deploying them economically and effectively, "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" represents how well music can be used to tell a story. And so, in my estimation, "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" takes the title of Best Andrew Lloyd Webber Ballad.