Read Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber for Free Online Page B

considerable debate continues to rage over what constitutes an authentic text for this work. Charles Hamm has argued that the cuts made by the creators in its original Theatre Guild production are justifiable for artistic as well as for commercial reasons and that the current urge to restore these cuts creates a historically and aesthetically untenable reconstruction. 10 With the purpose of shedding some light on this heated subject, the chapter on
Porgy and Bess
will treat at length the historical background and aesthetic problems posed by one such cut, the “Buzzard Song.”
    The starting point for contemplating the “text” of a musical is almost invariably a vocal score rather than a full orchestral score, and later—after the release of
Oklahoma!
in 1943—the cast recording in various states of completion. It is therefore not surprising that Broadway musicals as a genre have been unusually susceptible to identity crises. Although some musicals after
Oklahoma!
were considerably reworked in future productions, musicalsprior to this landmark show typically have been treated as less fixed and therefore more subject to revision and interpolation. The first part of this survey will trace how several shows have evolved in response to the competing interests of accessibility or authenticity and what these responses tell us about changing social and aesthetic tastes and values.
Analytical Issues
     
    The principal analytical question raised in this survey is how music and lyrics serve, ignore, or contradict dramatic themes and ideas, both in specific scenes and in the shows as a whole. Although this study will only infrequently treat music autonomously, a major factor behind the selection of the shows surveyed is the widely appreciated musical richness and enduring appeal of their scores. In contrast to most previous surveys, in which music is neglected beyond unhelpful generalities about its power to convey mood, music in this study will emerge as an equal (and occasionally more than equal) partner to the other components of a show, including lyrics, librettos, choreography, and stage direction.
    Even when a musical is seemingly distinguished more by self-contained rather than integrated songs, the relationship of music and lyrics and music’s power to express dramatic themes will be a central aesthetic issue for each musical. While some admiration will be reserved for those musicals that approximate Joseph Kerman’s criteria for European operatic excellence, using music to define character and generate action as espoused in his
Opera as Drama
, other musicals considered with equal favor here do not accomplish this at all. 11
    The philosophical distinctions regarding text setting expressed by Peter Kivy apply also to the disparate approaches of Broadway musicals. As noted in the Preface to the First Edition, Kivy contrasts “the
principle of textual realism
,” in which the meanings of words are “interpreted” musically, “with another approach to the setting of texts … the
principle of opulent adornment
,” in which texts are set like precious jewels “hindered neither by the meaning nor the intelligibility of what he [the composer] ‘sets.’” 12 The contrasting careers of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein represent these different approaches. Comparisons might suggest that something was lost as well as gained by the abandonment of cleverness, wit, and autonomous memorable tunes (Kivy’s “opulent adornment” of words) in favor of integrated and more operatically constructed musicals filled with such techniques such as leitmotivs, foreshadowing, thematic transformation, and classical borrowings, however convincingly employed for various dramatic purposes (Kivy’s “textual realism”).
    The language of the analysis is intended to be accessible to readers unversed in musical vocabulary. For this reason harmonic details will receive less emphasis than melodic and rhythmic aspects. Some of the