So better late than never I've been listening to Comedy Thos over at Musical Talk. Fascinating episode, well worth a listen. He's talking about Ivor Novello and comes up with this thought:
"Andrew Lloyd Webber is, in some ways, the modern operettist"
The specific pitch here is that, had Novello lived a little longer and continued his success into the 1960s, we would see a much clearer line from him to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Instead the Broadway shows took over and the British operetta tradition was broken. But there is a tradition there if you only join the dots.
Well I'm not so sure. First of all Lord Andy doesn't usually cite Novello as any kind of influence. Yes there are lush melodies but, in truth, his music lies far from Novello's. It lies in a strange and lonely place somewhere between Richard Rogers, Puccini and the Everly Brothers. For all the accusations that Lloyd Webber's music sounds like other people's, nobody else's music tends to sound like his.
OK but what about form and content? The romance, the spectacle, the earnest lack of any funny dialogue? Surely that's operetta-ish? Yes it is, but that's putting too much on Phantom of the Opera. Lord Andy has written in a whole variety of forms - album musical, dance musical, song cycle, roller skate-orama musical - as if he was making it up as he went along. I think he was.
The main point about Lord Andy is not that he continued any kind of British operetta tradition but that he broke from the dominant Broadway tradition. Less a Novello fellow and more an antidote to Jerry Herman.
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