{"id":1374,"date":"2023-01-23T17:52:43","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T17:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.justsheetmusic.com\/blog\/?p=1374"},"modified":"2023-01-23T17:52:43","modified_gmt":"2023-01-23T17:52:43","slug":"les-miserables-two-schonberg-and-boublil-collaborations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.justsheetmusic.com\/blog\/movies\/les-miserables-two-schonberg-and-boublil-collaborations\/","title":{"rendered":"Les Mis\u00e9rables – Two Sch\u00f6nberg and Boublil Collaborations"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Les Misarables<\/p><\/div>\n

Hollywood’s take on the long-running Broadway musical Les Miserables<\/em><\/strong> opened in U.S. movie theatres in the U.S. on Christmas Day 2012. It stars Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and Amanda Seyfried as Cosette.<\/p>\n

This opening has us thinking about the history of the production, and about the phenomenally successful collaboration behind it all, that of Claude-Michel Sch\u00f6nberg and Alain Boubil.<\/p>\n

Music while reading this article<\/p>\n

Les Miserables (Musical London Cast) At the End of the Day
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Les Mis\u00e9rables (2012 Movie) Soundtrack – I Dreamed a Dream – Anne Hathaway <\/a><\/p>\n

Les Mis\u00e9rables (Musical London Cast) lovely ladies
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

Sch\u00f6nberg and Boubil<\/a> first worked together on a rock opera, the first ever <\/em>French rock opera, La R\u00e9volution Fran\u00e7aise<\/em>, (1973) something conceived by Boublil apparently while he was watching Jesus Christ, Superstar<\/em> on Broadway in New York.<\/p>\n

But their partnership really hit its stride with Les Mis,<\/em><\/a> first performed in Paris in 1980. It was in London five years later and in New York two years after that. They have kept busy since then, composing the music for Miss Saigon<\/a> (1989), Martin Guerre<\/a> (1996), The Pirate Queen<\/a> (2006), and Marguerite<\/a> (2008).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 1874 \u2013 13 July 1951)<\/p><\/div>\n

Sch\u00f6nberg is a distant relation of the Arnold Schoenberg<\/a> who epitomized modernist atonal music in the early 20th<\/sup> century. Pictured left.<\/p>\n

But there is no modernist atonality or experimentation for Michel. His musical style moves in a straight line from high Romanticism to post-modernism and in interviews he has candidly named his influences: Bizet<\/a>, Verdi<\/a>, Gounod. <\/a>\u00a0He might have mentioned Puccini, too \u2013 but we\u2019ll get to that!<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll say something today about each of the two best known of the Sch\u00f6nberg and Boublil musicals, Les Mis <\/em>itself, and Miss Saigon<\/em>.\u00a0 As with most of their collaborations, these two are through-sung, that is, there is no spoken dialog moving the plot along between songs. In this sense their creations are more like operas than are the canonical Broadway musicals of, say, Rodgers and Hammerstein.<\/p>\n

Through-singing aside, Sch\u00f6nberg and Boublil don\u2019t like the word \u201copera.\u201d As a label, it seems conservative to the point of staleness, and they\u2019ve certainly had such great success marketing their operas as \u201cmusicals\u201d one can hardly blame them for that choice! They may have helped reinvigorate both worlds.<\/p>\n

Les Mis<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Victor Hugo (26 February 1802 \u2013 22 May 1885)<\/p><\/div>\n

Les Mis<\/em> (as most music lovers by now know) follows the plot of Victor Hugo\u2019s sprawling novel of the same name.\u00a0 Like the novel, the musical begins in 1815 with the audience invited to follow a newly paroled prisoner named Jean Valjean, who has a back story that entails another twenty years. It is in 1815 that a holy man\u2019s generosity turns Valjean onto the path of righteousness. But nothing can secure the forgiveness of his implacable pursuer, Inspector Javert.<\/p>\n

Schoenberg treats of this opening expository material in less than five minutes.\u00a0 You can see many takes on these opening minutes at YouTube. Here is one of them.<\/a>\u00a0 (This is from Take-One Theatre, an art academy at Ronkonkoma, New York.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The bishop of Digne takes Jean in from the streets at 1:47 in that clip. \u201cFor you are weary, and the night is cold out there\/ Though our lives are very humble, what we have we have to share.\u201d<\/p>\n

Again referencing the above clip, Jean is in trouble with the gendarmes by 3:20. The real act of generosity follows<\/em> from that, when they take him back to the Bishop to check on his claim that he was gifted the silver (we in fact have seen him steal it). The Bishop\u2019s lies get Jean out of trouble. He then says, \u201cYou must use the precious silver to become an honest man, by the witness of the martyrs\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boublil had assistance from Jean-Marc Natel in creating the original French lyrics, and they were re-worked into the English language by a South African, Herbert Kretzmer<\/a>, pictured below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Herbert Kretzmer<\/p><\/div>\n

Let us pause here and observe that Les Mis<\/em> would seem to be inherently resistant to the sort of condensation that makes a staged or filmed version possible \u2013 or successful. We have no less of an authority than Victor Hugo himself for this. A biographer of Hugo\u2019s, Victor Brombert, has paraphrased Hugo\u2019s view thus: \u201cAt the end of his career, surveying his own works, he was more than ever convinced that the novel, his kind of novel, was a drama too big to be performed on any stage.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a common story that Giaccomo Puccini toyed with the idea of writing an operatic version of Les Mis<\/em>, but passed on it.\u00a0 If this is so, then Sch\u00f6nberg and Boublil deserve some credit for daring to take on the task that Puccini would not!<\/p>\n

Indeed, when he received his Tony Award in 1987, Sch\u00f6nberg posthumously thanked Puccini for leaving this one undone.
\n\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re Welcome,\u201d Puccini Says<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Giacomo Puccini (22 December 1858 \u2013 29 November 1924)<\/p><\/div>\n

Boublil and <\/strong>Sch\u00f6nberg soon thereafter began work on a project that Puccini hadn\u2019t left undone \u2013 he was their source material for it.\u00a0 Puccini in effect reached out from the grave to assist them in taking on Vietnam, still largely a taboo subject in musical theatre in the U.S. in the mid-1980s.<\/p>\n

Richard Maltby Jr., who assisted Boublil with the lyrics for this musical, told an interviewer flatly that every prior Vietnam-related dramatization \u201chad died at the box office.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Boublil and Sch\u00f6nberg broke such inhibitions by in essence taking over the plot of Puccini\u2019s Madama Butterfly<\/em> and setting it in 1970s \u2018Nam. A U.S. marine sergeant, Chris Scott, falls in love with a prostitute, Kim, as the Viet Cong are closing in on the city of Saigon. But we see him three years later, in bed with his American wife, Ellen, in Atlanta, Georgia; and we see Kim at that same time, still believing that Chris will come back for her, as the communist government of a now united Vietnam stages its three-year anniversary victory celebration.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a performance of I Still Believe<\/a>, the duet sung by the two women on opposite sides of the world that conveys that moment in the plot.<\/p>\n

And here we may fittingly end with the (roughly) equivalent point in the source material, Madama Butterfly:<\/em><\/p>\n

Un bel di, vedremo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Congrats.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So we at JustSheetMusic send a hearty Congratulations to Boublil and <\/strong>Sch\u00f6nberg as the mass audience available to the cinema discovers their work on Les Mis<\/em>, and we offer congratulations too, to the members of that mass audience who may be seeing and hearing it all for the first time.<\/p>\n

Enjoy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hollywood’s take on the long-running Broadway musical Les Miserables opened in U.S. movie theatres in the U.S. on Christmas Day 2012. It stars Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean, Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert, Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and Amanda Seyfried as Cosette. This opening has us thinking about the history of the production, and about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[40],"tags":[41,54],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n