~ Original Cast ~
Jesus Christ Superstar Overture
~ The Movie Soundtrack ~
In 1970 a musical event swept the English-speaking world, the release of a “rock concept opera” by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and librettist Tim Rice. Many thought they might just be a flash in the pan, but both men went on to distinguished musical careers.
The Libretto
A quick look at the libretto for this opera shows that Rice was attempting to write “The Passion According to Judas”. After all, why not? He’s the prime actor in the death of Yeshua ibn Yussef, Joshua Josephson in English, known to Christendom by his Greek name, Jesus Christ. Judas emerges from the Gospels as more of a symbol than a real person, so there was room to flesh out the details. Fulton Oursler had done much the same thing in The Greatest Story Ever Told, so there was ample precedent.
Rice conflates Mary Magdalene and “the woman taken in adultery”, a passage from the Gospel of John that some scholars, both current and early in Church history, considered to be of suspect provenance. This wasn’t anything new, for this conflation has survived almost two millennia. Nikos Kazantzakis, in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ, continued this tradition. Rice accepts it because it adds a layer to the story and provides room for a female singer, something an opera cannot do without. Consider it dramatic license.
The Music
“Good composers borrow, but great composers steal.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber steals from the basics of rock, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Stravinsky and Ray Charles, and he does it without shame. By definition, I suppose that makes him a Great Composer.
Andy’s output has parallels with Puccini. In “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “La Boheme”, the two composers are profligate with their melodic material. You can excerpt large chunks of these early operas and turn them into concert pieces. Each man later in his career became more parsimonious, and both men settled for writing operas with one big commercial hit and padding the remainder of the opera with lesser material. It’s a case of pacing yourself.
Andy knows how to use the basic building blocks of opera: recitative, aria, chorus and various ensemble pieces. He understands the concept of “flow”. He deploys unusual time signatures such 5/4 and 7/4. He steals a lot, but he steals ingeniously.
Reception
At the time, modernist Catholics and mainstream Protestants embraced the new work joyfully. Evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics looked at it with a jaundiced eye. Not much has changed since then.
What rankled was the use of non-biblical material by Rice. Bach’s two Passions, those of Matthew and John, used prose from the Gospels, as did Handel in Act 2 of “Messiah”, his contribution to the Passion repertory. In that era any other approach would have been considered blasphemous. Rice, with the very title, was thought to be questioning Jesus’ divinity. For two millennia theologians have attempted to grasp the exact nature of the God/Man balance in Jesus, and in the early Byzantine Era entire tankers of blood were spilled over that debate. However much some might have disagreed with Rice’s approach, no one suggesting skinning him and dragging him behind a horse-drawn chariot through the streets of London.
The English-speaking world was more biblically literate in that era. Today the opera prompts people to go to the original source, much like the History Channel’s series “The Bible”. That may be a good thing.
Staging
This became the greatest challenge. Hector Berlioz wrote a cantata, “The Damnation of Faust”, that was not an opera because it could not be staged in the theaters of the day. Berlioz used quick cuts, like a film director, something that can be done in the movies but not on stage. The kind of work done in the recording studio, in this case a “rock concept opera”, is difficult to translate to the stage. It took two years for producer Robert Stigwood and Andy to figure out how to do that.
Versions
Like Handel’s “Messiah”, “Jesus Christ Superstar” has undergone revisions over the years as the opera has been revived again and again. Numbers have been extended, a new number was written in the Nineties, and one number has been completely revised. I’m using the 2000 version.
Overture
In the days of Mozart and Beethoven, opera overtures were written in sonata format with two themes in contrasting keys, development and recapitulation. Later, light operas used overtures with excerpts from the themes used in the opera. In his overture to “Die Meistersinger”, Wagner combined both ideas brilliantly.
Andy, however, opts to use only one idea for his overture. He writes an instrumental version of the duet and mob chorus where Jesus and Pilate confront each other. His instrumentation is rock band and orchestra with just a hint of Shostakovich. At the end, he states the Superstar motif, and a choral introduction quiets everything down for a recitative and aria for Judas.
Wow...I had that album “back in the day” but I just noticed that the cover design is a combination of the Cherubim from the Ark of the Covenant (Old Testament) and a Chalice or Cup (New Testament).
How many years have I looked at that design, and I am just seeing that NOW?
Thanks again for this special Holy Week Music!
There was a lot more ROCK in Jesus Christ Superstar than in subsequent ALW musicals.
They sort of morphed into straight “Broadway”.
My favorite overtures are by either Rossini or Sir Arthur Sullivan.
Sullivan’s are a perfect example of the “Excerpt Type” of overture that you describe.