King needed coronation song, so he tapped ‘Cats’ composer
Lloyd Webber decided to set melody to Psalm 98 for U.K. royal’s May 6 ceremony
NEW YORK — Call it the Music of the Knight.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, a.k.a. Lord Lloyd-Webber Kt (as in Knight-Bachelor), was pressed into service by his king, HRH Charles III. The kind of service the composer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera and Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar knows best.
His Majesty wanted a song. Or not so much a song as a composition — of a sort fit for, well, a king. For the day of his coronation, in Westminster Abbey, on May 6 in the year of our Lord 2023.
So it came to pass that Lloyd Webber set down a melody to Psalm 98, the one that goes, aptly enough, “O sing to the Lord a new song.” Then he gathered together his flock — “half the kids in my office,” he said — and with them the Lord he madeth a demo; the Lord in this case being Lloyd Webber.
To a Yank’s way of thinking, it is quite the thing for a Broadway composer to turn court composer, to have one’s notes ring out in the storied nave where the royal British line has been consecrated for a thousand years. And hearing them in an Anglican service along with music by the likes of George Handel and Edward Elgar.
Lloyd Webber has a more businesslike attitude about the whole thing. Sitting in an otherwise empty dining room in the Lambs Club on West 44th Street recently — he was in New York for the opening
Thursday of his latest musical, Bad Cinderella — Lloyd Webber talked rather matter-of-factly about the assignment.
“I have written quite a lot of choral music,” he said. “My father was a very distinguished church organist and choirmaster, and the choral tradition is not something that is new to me in a way, because it’s been there all my life.”
It’s unfair to conclude Lloyd Webber is not excited by this opportunity. He’s so even-keeled and obliging in conversation, in an English let’s-keepour-wits-about-us sort of way, that you can’t really tell how much of a charge he gets out of this. It’s not as if Lloyd Webber is a close confidant of the king or anything — although this is not the composer’s first go-round with Charles III on matters of serious musicianship.
“The great thing about Charles is that he has a great love of really quite a lot of causes that are a little bit unfashionable,” Lloyd Webber said, in a flagrant understatement. “He cares very deeply about all sorts of quite interesting things. I mean, like, three or four years before lockdown, I got a call from him saying could I come around to meet him at Lancaster House quite urgently, because he’d had an idea. What it was that he was worried about was the fact that there wasn’t enough access for young people to go and learn how to play the church organ.”
Likewise, there are quite a few quite interesting things going on in the life of Lloyd Webber, who turns 75 on Wednesday and is in another turnstile moment of his career. The end of the Broadway line approaches for Phantom, which opened here a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and has already logged 13,941 performances. Its last day will be April 16, and
Lloyd Webber is not sanguine about it.
“The truth of the matter is Phantom does not need to close in New York at all,” Lloyd Webber said, suddenly allowing his pique to surface. Though his company, Really Useful Group, has in the past produced a number of his musicals — and owns six theaters in London’s West End, including the highly prized Theatre Royal Drury Lane — Phantom is the purview of producer Cameron Mackintosh. Lloyd Webber claims the marketing of the show had become old hat and allowed interest to atrophy.
“My boys work in the music business and they said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to wake up to what’s really going on and it’s called, obviously, social media,’ ” he said, referencing sons Nicholas, 43, Alastair, 30, and William, 29. The proof for him, Lloyd Webber asserted, came after a remix of a Phantom song went viral on TikTok on Halloween and then spurred ticket sales among younger fans. “The young have discovered it, which is why it’s going through the roof,” the composer said, noting that the planned closure of the show had to be postponed until April to accommodate the last-minute surge.
“There was a whole missing generation of Phantom people,” he claimed. “And now suddenly the young again, now they’re saying that they want to bring their friends.”