ftp://ftp.jl.cninfo.net/pub/newmp3/foreign/eng/0201.mp3 至 0207.mp3
作者简介:
Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on March 22, 1948 and grew up in a home in South Kensington, England. The home was filled with music and he showed, from an early age, an extraordinary natural talent for it.
His father, William Southcombe Lloyd Webber, was professor of theory and composition at the Royal College of Music in England. His mother, Jean, was a singer and violinist at the same school. They married on 3rd of October 1942, six years before their first child, Andrew was born.
When Andrew was three years old, he started to play the violin. When he was six he composed his own songs and at the age of nine he had a piece of music published in the magazine Music Teacher. It was Andrew's aunt Vi, who turned him on the theatre and especially musical theatre. She took Andrew to the big musicals like My Fair Lady, and to the films like Gigi and South Pacific. Soon after, he built a small theatre at home and wrote musicals for it.
After Andrew had examined different school, he decided; he wanted to write music. On the 21 April 1965 Andrew got a letter:
Dear Andrew
I've been told you're looking for a "with it" writer of lyrics for your songs, and as I've been writing pop songs for a while and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics I wonder if you consider it worth your while meeting me.
Tim Rice
These two - Andrew 17 and Tim 21 years old started to cooperate and their first musical became "The likes of US".
The musical was never performed. Just one small, student theatre in Oxford wanted to have the show, but Andrew and Tim were dreaming of West End and answered no.
After had done a few unsuccessful songs together, they didn't know what to do. Rice wanted to write pop songs while Lloyd Webber wanted to write another musical. It was then they got a call from Alan Doggett.
Alan Doggett was head of music at Colet Court, a small preparatory school in west London. Alan and Andrew had known each other a long time and now Alan wanted something for an end term concert, something religious. Andrew and Tim opened the Bible and found the story about Jacob and his son Joseph.
After two months they had a fifteen - minute rock'n'roll version of the biblical story of Joseph and his coloured coat - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Now is the musical about two hours when it shows on stage.
On the 24th July 1972 he married 18-year-old Sara Hugill and bought their first real home, Summerlease Farm in Dorset.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice continued to work together. They created Jesus Christ Superstar (1969), a very big success. They started to write Jeeves (1975) but Rice thought that this wasn't anything for him and therefore Alan Ayckbourn wrote the lyrics. Andrew and Tim tried again with Evita (1976). Also a big success.
But then they needed time to recharge their batteries, as Rice said. Some time apart.
At this time Andrew started to work on a new idea. As a young boy he had read the book "Old possum's book of practical cats" by T.S. Eliot. This time all the lyrics were already written. But there wasn't any story in the songs and Andrew thought of making a concert on television. At the beginning of the summer of 1980 he performed some of the songs at his Sydmonton festival. After the performance Valery Eliot, T.S. Eliots spouse, gave him some unpublished poems about an unhappy cat called Grizabella. This was the story that he needed.
Andrew wrote the music but he needed help with the lyrics. Both Tim Rice and Trevor Nunn, a director who had helped him with his other musicals, gave him a proposal. He chose Trevor Nunn's. This caused a bigger gap between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, but now he could put the musical on a theatre and Cats was created (1981).
Next year in 1982 he combined two works he had done - Variations (which he had written to his cellist brother Julian 1978) and Tell Me on a Sunday (Don Black wrote the lyrics) - and Song & Dance was created.
His marriage with Sar |