Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]
Novello, Ivor [Davies, David Ivor]
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Novello, Ivor [Davies, David Ivor](b Cardiff, 15 Jan 1893; d London, 6 March 1951). British composer, lyricist, librettist and actor. His career as a composer was determined for him by his mother, Clara Novello Davies, an internationally known voice coach and choir leader. She had ambitions for her son to be a composer of operas; however, the nearest he came to this was in The Dancing Years (1939), when he played an Austrian composer who conducts his own work at the Vienna Opera House. His early natural aptitude for writing attractive melodies was developed during a childhood at the centre of Cardiff’s musical world, and was given more shape and discipline by several years as a scholar at Magdalen College Choir School, Oxford, and a brief spell as a pupil of Dr Herbert Brewer. Brewer dismissed his pupil with the assertion that he would have no career in music, but in 1914 Novello wrote Keep the home fires burning, which became an anthem of World War I, bringing him wealth and fame at the age of 21. During the rest of the war he wrote West End musical revues, but then concentrated on acting, spending the 1920s and early 30s as a silent movie star (including in Hitchcock’s The Lodger, 1926), and as a popular matinée idol on stage, usually in plays he had written himself. In 1935 he returned to composition with Glamorous Night, the first of a series of enormously popular musicals with which he was to save the fortunes of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Dominating the British musical theatre from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, his shows were heavily influenced by the operettas that he had grown up with (he saw Die lustige Witwe 27 times), but had a highly individual style of their own. Blending musicals with opera, operetta and both modern and classical dance, these shows were considered something of an anachronism in their own time, but that was part of their appeal. His last full-scale production in this style, King’s Rhapsody (1949), was a selfconsciously romantic counter-blast to the modern musical: crown princes, ballrooms, royal yachts, beautiful princesses and a full-scale coronation combined to produce an evening of escapism that broke box-office records in a London tired of austerity. The huge casts and expensive sets that characterized Novello’s shows have increasingly made them commercially unviable, as does the absence of their creator and star, whose stage presence was an essential part of their success. The songs, however, have retained their popularity and are frequently heard on the radio or in concert performances. Best remembered for lush and attractive melodies like ‘We’ll gather lilacs’ from Perchance to Dream (1945), his body of work tends to be categorized as ‘romantic’, just as his shows are invariably described as ‘Ruritanian’. In reality, the shows combined foreign courts and romantic settings with the latest technology and references to current political events: the hero of Glamorous Night was a television inventor, while The Dancing Years deals, in part, with the Nazi Anschluss. His music was far more varied than his current reputation suggests. Romantic hits such as ‘Someday my heart will awake’, ‘Shine through my dreams’ and ‘Fold your wings of love around me’ were complemented by rousing operetta choruses like ‘Uniform’ and jazz age numbers that instantly evoke the inter-war years, such as ‘Wait for me’ and ‘Why isn’t it you?’. ‘Rose of England’ is a stately patriotic piece that stands comparison with Elgar or Walton, while ‘If only he’d looked my way’ is an exquisite anthem to unrequited love. Novello’s versatility extended to comedy: one of his most popular songs was ‘And her mother came too’, written for the Charlot revue A to Z. One reason for the song’s success was that Novello crafted it exactly to suit the character and delivery of its singer, Jack Buchanan. Throughout his career he wrote with singers, or actresses, in mind, creating roles and melodies to suit their individual style. For Mary Ellis, who had sung at the New York Metropolitan Opera, he wrote ‘My Dearest Dear’ which fully utilized the range and purity of her voice, while for Elizabeth Welch, who started her career in cabaret, he wrote ‘Shanty Town’ and ‘Dark Music’, both of which would have been at home in a night club revue. His last leading lady was Cicely Courtneidge, for whom he wrote Gay’s the Word (1951), whose ‘Vitality’ became her theme song, describing her own exuberant personality as much as the Edwardian musical stars about which her character was singing. It was not just a well-made and well-placed song within the context of a particular show, but was Novello’s tribute to the operettas of his youth. A bridge between the Edwardian and the postwar musical worlds, and between the English theatre and Broadway (several of his leading ladies were American), Novello was, until the advent of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the 20th-century’s most consistently successful composer of British musicals. WORKS(selective list) stageunless otherwise stated, music and lyrics by Novello and dates those of first London performance; where different, writers shown as (lyricist; book author)
book and music by Novello and lyrics by C. Hassall, unless otherwise stated
other songs
BIBLIOGRAPHYC.N. Davies: The Life I have Loved (London, 1940) P. Noble: Ivor Novello: Man of the Theatre (London, 1951/R) W. Macqueen-Pope: Ivor (London, 1952) R. Rose: Perchance to Dream (London, 1974) S. Wilson: Ivor (London, 1987) J. Harding: Ivor (London, 1987) P. Webb: Ivor Novello: a Portrait of a Star (London, 1999) PAUL WEBB Yüklə 10,2 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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