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The Secret Garden, a Broadway award-winning musical of the children's classic, opens here tomorrow. Lucy Simon, the composer of its haunting score, talks to Edward Seckerson
The song was called 'Lily's Eyes' and its unique quality was hard to define. Nearly a decade has passed since I first heard it, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway towards Los Angeles unaware of what it was and where it had originated. A musical play, clearly. But nothing I'd ever heard before. There were two male voices chiming as one. A duet for one. From the lyric it was plain that they were brothers, both still in love with the same woman, both stirred again by a striking resemblance in the eyes of another - a young girl.
But it was the melody which conveyed their passion. It was possessed of the strangest quality - like a folksong transfigured. Transfigured almost operatically. Soaring string counterpoints swept it towards the climax where a sudden and ecstatic modulation - cleverly disguised so as not to signal its arrival - almost put me through the sunroof. 'Lily's Eyes', I later discovered, was from a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel The Secret Garden - book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, music by Lucy Simon. It has finally come home, so to speak, in a new Adrian Noble production for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
It is strange that it should have been that number from Lucy Simon's beautiful score that first alerted me to her talent. Strange because it's a duet for brothers, and Lucy's story begins with a duet for sisters. She and her famous sister Carly sang duets. They were the Simon Sisters. They, too, chimed as one. A folk duo. Matching dresses, matching shoes, matching hair - but just one guitar. Lucy played it.
Theirs was a musical family. Mother was an amateur singer, father was a pianist, founder of the publishing house Simon & Schuster. One of the first things they published was the Schnabel Edition of the Beethoven Sonatas. Actually, there were three sisters. Joanna was an opera singer. She took the middle voice with Lucy on top and Carly below when they sang three-part harmony. There was a lot of three-part harmony at home. There's quite a lot in The Secret Garden.
To some extent, this is a piece about a melodist. What makes a great one, how they function, why there are so few. Lucy Simon believes it's genetic, that it's there or it isn't. The natural melodist - be it Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Richard Rodgers, or Paul McCartney - would not be able to tell you how or why memorable melodies come to them when they do. They might be able to identify the phrases or turns that make them memorable, but not why. A great melody - be it simple or complex - leads you on, keeps you guessing. The next phrase seems inevitable the second after you've heard it. Invariably they are the melodies you don't go out humming. They take a little longer to filter into your musical consciousness.
Simon grew up saying it with a song. A family friend, Arthur Schwartz - the Broadway composer of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (the gorgeous score that gave us 'Make the Man Love Me') - would come to the house and play. Even without the words, the melodies spoke. Or rather sang. Simon sings everything. She sings in order to speak. Time and again during our conversations both here and in New York, she would break into song, better to be able to express herself. Her voice is her instrument. How a melody sits in her voice determines whether it works or not.
A couple of weeks back, I watched her at work with Philip Quast who plays Archie in The Secret Garden. They were looking at the song 'Race You to the Top of the Morning' in which a child's bedtime story becomes a metaphor for a father's deepest fears. An extraordinary song given added poignancy by the fact that Archie can only ever bring himself to visit his son when the boy is asleep. Simon and Quast communicated largely through the song. The old maxim held true, when in doubt about how something should go, sing it.
There was a telling moment where Simon was concerned that the melody was being obscured in the piano harmonies. One was put in mind of Richard Rodgers' observation: "a great melody implies its own harmony".
It is interesting that at one time - long before the Simon Sisters came into being - Lucy thought of singing opera. She even studied it for a year or two until it became apparent that her voice was not best suited. Her father's favourite opera was Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, which is where she first became fascinated by the whole concept of leitmotifs - tiny melodic kernels which could act as emotional triggers in the musical narrative. She likes playing with songs in the same way, maybe dropping a premonition into the orchestra before you actually hear the song, or highlighting the internal relationships by using one song melody in the accompaniment to another.
The process of writing is unlaborious because she doesn't write anything until she feels the motivation to do so. She took down Marsha Norman's lyric for 'How Could I Ever Know' (the key number from The Secret Garden) over the phone; she was singing the melody back over the phone an hour later. One line of lyric is maybe all she needs. An idea, an emotion, a feeling. The unpredictability of her tunes comes in part, she believes, from being an intuitive, untrained musician. Untrained as in no formal conservatory training. So no rules. She doesn't know any. The tunes go the way they go and only when the notation is set are they governed by anything other than feeling.
Tapes exist of everything she has written - all her "first drafts". And it is amazing how fully formed they are, and how little they change from the first time she feels her way through at the piano, adding her own funny lyrics should none yet exist. Mostly they come first, but not always. Another song from the show - 'A Bit of Earth' - sounded like a fully-fledged folk/rock song in its first draft. Only the middle-eight (inspired by the Brahms song 'Von ewiger Liebe') changed significantly. The melody now rides with the wind to the words, "Why can't she ask for a treasure? Something that money can buy." The key to uplift is a melodic phrase that money can't buy.
So what's been happening in the decade since The Secret Garden? Two new shows are imminent. The Legend of Wuthering Heights (due next year at the Old Globe Theatre in New York, pre-Broadway) and Fanny Hackabout Jones - the Erica Jong novel (scheduled for the Manhattan Theatre Club). And then there is the little matter of Doctor Zhivago. She acquired the rights to Boris Pasternak's great novel shortly after completing The Secret Garden. One theme was common to both: the survival of the spirit. It has already awakened many melodies in her. It has taken her to the very heart of Russia's musical heritage, there to await the right collaborators. Watch this very large space.
© Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
