Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер
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My mother had a big hand in the school’s birth pangs. In those days parents from most walks of life wanted their kids to learn the piano. My mother’s brilliance and patience in that department assured the Wetherby’s swift ascendancy. Anyone who has ever sat beside a child while it plonks away at ghastly ditties with titles like “El Wiggly” or “Honk That Horn” will bear out that to do so you either need to be a saint or tone deaf, or most probably both. Mum’s patience might well redefine canonization. I reckon she must have given at least 100,000 piano lessons to beginners in her lifetime. Further, she really cared about her charges. There was a time when this confirmed, yet confused, socialist claimed to have taught a fair wedge of the Tory party.
I confess that her piano lessons gave me a head start in the basics of music. The trouble was that there were so many of them. And there was that wretched violin. Mum’s general idea was that I would emerge on the international concert stage as some Yehudi Menuhin-style violin toting child prodigy. Her hopes didn’t last long.
The next instrument out of the closet was the french horn. I was rather better at blowing than scratching. Indeed I rather enjoyed playing this overdeveloped hunting instrument until I was twelve. It was then that a crisis occurred. Mum’s quest to have me garner serious music grades brought me full frontal with Hindemith’s horn sonata. I have read somewhere that Hindemith developed a load of theories about the importance of amateurs to music. My theory is that some of his compositions were designed to make average instrumentalists like me abandon music for once and for all. He achieved a resounding success in my case. After attempting to play his epic I chucked my french horn in its case where it remains to this day.
Clearly Mum was transferring her ambitions from my father to me but to grasp why you have to know something about him. Billy Lloyd Webber was a mild man who feared authority in any form. He once hid in a cupboard because he had mistakenly called out the fire brigade. It transpired that Granny had left a chicken in the oven and smoked the flat out. He was convinced he was going to get a stretch in the slammer for abusing the emergency services.
Billy’s family was solid working class. His father was a plumber by trade but also a keen amateur musician. Like so many of my grandfather’s contemporaries, Billy’s father had sung in various church choirs. So Dad was steeped in the late High Church nineteenth-century choral tradition beloved by the Anglo-Catholic “smells and bells” establishments where Grandpa exercised the larynx. As a child Dad got music scholarships all over the shop. At an unprecedentedly youthful age he won a gong to the Royal College of Music. He also became the youngest person ever to become organist and choirmaster at St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate, a splendid “Arts and Crafts” church by Sir Ninian Comper. But for all his talent Dad wouldn’t say boo to a goose. All he wanted was a nice quiet routine.
By the time I was ten, Dad was increasingly content in his academic roles such as Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. In 1959 he became boss of the London College of Music which seemingly sealed the end of his composing aspirations. He felt his writing was out of step with its time and increasingly wrote “light music” under pen names or music for amateur church choirs. Mum found his lack of ambition infuriating. Still, she was very particular about taking me to listen to his cantatas and anthems, especially first performances. Even Julian, who was barely old enough, was dragged along to hear them but soon new compositions seemed to dry up – or so we all thought. After my father’s death, Julian discovered a cache of compositions that had never been performed. Some of them were as good as anything he ever wrote.
The three great passions that were to shape my life – art, musical theatre and architecture – surfaced early. My love of architecture kicked off with a weird romantic obsession with ruined castles and abbeys which began as early as I can remember. By my teens this led to a full-blown love of architecture of all sorts. Quite where this came from is a mystery; the visual arts don’t feature in the Lloyd Webber family DNA.
In the case of theatre and pop music, it is easy to explain why. My family had an annual Christmas outing to the London Palladium pantomime.1 Everything captivated me. In those days the Palladium was synonymous with popular variety theatre. All the big names played there. The pantomime was a combination of big names, big sets and contemporary pop songs that must have been a heady mix to this five-year- old. One such pantomime, Aladdin, contained a line that I still cherish:
Aladdin rubs lamp. Up pops genie.
“What is your wish, sir?”
“To hear Alma Cogan singing ‘Sugar in the Morning.’ ”
Curtain parts to reveal Alma Cogan singing “Sugar in the Morning.”
Very soon I had built my first toy theatre. This was first a well loved adapted version of a Pollock’s toy theatre but eventually became a vast construction made out of play bricks baptized the Harrington Pavilion. Over the years its technical ambitions grew to such an extent that its stage acquired a revolve made from an old gramophone turntable. That revolve was a direct result of my aping the famous closing scene of TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. All the stars used to line up on the legendary Palladium revolve waving good night to millions in Britain for whom that show was the television show of the late 1950s and early ’60s. To Britain it was as big as The Ed Sullivan Show in the USA. I pinch myself every morning knowing that today I own the theatre that turned me on to theatre.
London Palladium inspired pantomime and variety seasons at the Harrington Pavilion were short lived. Christmas holidays 1958 brought me full frontal with musicals for the first time. It was a baptism and a half. I saw My Fair Lady and West Side Story plus the movies of Gigi and South Pacific all in the space of four game-changing weeks. 1958 also coincided with the arrival of Harrington Court’s first long-playing gramophone. With it came an LP of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Unfortunately for Dad the other side was Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges Suite whose gloriously dissonant chaotic start much appealed to Julian and me. The famous march had us dancing on our bed with joy. Thus started my lifelong love of Prokofiev, in my opinion one of the greatest melodists of the twentieth century.
My Fair Lady was the talk of London throughout 1958. The legendary musical based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion had opened on Broadway two years earlier to ecstatic reviews, apart from one Alan Jay Lerner told me about in Variety that said there were no memorable songs. The producers did a brilliant hyping job in Britain by banning the music from being heard or performed until just before the London production opened with the result that the Broadway cast album was the ultimate in chic contraband. Naturally Auntie Vi had one so by the time I saw the show I knew the score backwards and had long pondered whether Rex Harrison’s semi-spoken song delivery had a place at the Harrington Pavilion. London’s lather foamed even further as the three Broadway leads, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway, repeated their starring roles at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and I was lucky enough to have a ticket to see all three – actually two because Stanley Holloway was off. It’s funny how a disappointment like that stays with you forever. In my case that and the rustling front cloth depicting the exterior of Wimpole Street as Freddy Eynsford-Hill warbled “On the Street Where You Live” are what I remember most about that December Saturday matinee – apart from my showing off by singing along with the songs to show I knew them.
My love of the score took me to the movie of Gigi, the now impossibly un-PC story about a girl being groomed as a courtesan. Can you imagine what would happen if you pitched a Hollywood studio today a song sung by an old man entitled СКАЧАТЬ