TWO SONGS—SAME MELODY.

TWO SONGS—SAME MELODY. Chrisdenman’s post that I linked to yesterday has a comment thread with interesting analyses of the songs and the book. One comment by Vanessa 20 refers to the “…interview with Herbert Kretzmer that someone posted a link to a long time ago, where he explained that: “‘Lovely Ladies’ and ‘Turning’ have the same tune because they’re both about women’s social suffering- prostitution in the one song, bereavement by war/revolution in the other”. Google found me the Kretzmer interview (link here). In the interview, Herbert Kretzmer (who wrote or translated most of the lyrics in Les Mis) says that “the trick of reprising key melodies with different lyrics is not new in musicals.” He gives the example of Meredith Willson’s musical The Music Man with two songs which have the same melody –Seventy Six Trombones, a march, and Good Night My Someone, a ballad. Kretzmer says that reprising key melodies on a large scale is “one of the things that defines [Les Mis]”; and that: “It gives the show its ‘spine’ and is, I think, one of the reasons for its hold over audiences.”