Andrew Lloyd Webber - Tim Rice

God made himself entirely man, but man to the point of infamy, man to the point of damnation and the abyss. To save us, he could have chosen any of the destinies that weave the perplexing web of history; he could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose the basest destiny of all: he was Judas.

(J. L. Borges, "Three Versions of Judas", "Fictions", 1944)

The subject matter was a sure bet. Two thousand years of proven effectiveness, more or less. The angle was compelling too: a rock retelling of the last days of Christ's life, shaped by hippie culture, by the mechanics of mass success, and by the new wave of spirituality taking shape on the horizon between the late Sixties and early Seventies. What seemed far less convincing was the creative team behind it: a duo of British youngsters, made up of twenty-two-year-old composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and twenty-six-year-old lyricist Tim Rice. Before long, they would become global musical-theatre superstars, the creators of bestsellers like "Cats" and "The Phantom Of The Opera" (Lloyd Webber), "Beauty And The Beast" and "The Lion King" (Rice), and "Evita" (the pair reunited). But on the eve of 1970, all they had to show on their resumes was a Bible-themed musical comedy staged at a London primary school (title: "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat"; total running time: a quarter of an hour).

Despite the endorsement of the Dean of St. Paul's - the first to suggest the pair create a musical centred on the Gospels - the duo couldn't find any producers willing to back the rock opera. So they decided to go it alone and, backed by Mca Records' financing and a cast of promising young English musicians, recorded a double LP. It was a studio trial run, a "musical radio play" aimed straight at the record market in the hope of sparking some reaction and, one day, bringing their creation to the stage.

Looking back today at the lineup on that first trial version is jaw-dropping: the voice of Jesus is Ian Gillan (Deep Purple), that of Judas Iscariot is Murray Head (later the star of Rice/Anderson/Ulvaeus's "Chess", in which he sings the famous "One Night In Bangkok"); guitars, bass and drums are handled by Joe Cocker's backing band (The Grease Band), joined where needed by most of Nucleus, future icon of European jazz trumpet Kenny Wheeler, keyboardists J. Peter Robinson (Quatermass) and Mike Vickers (Moog on "Abbey Road"), and many others.

Among the dozens of recordings of "Jesus Christ Superstar" released over the years, this is perhaps the one that best captures the explosive, hugely ambitious nature of a work that marked a genuine before-and-after in the history of the musical. Already preceded in 1969 by the release of the title track as a single, it didn't make much of a splash back home but climbed to the top of the Billboard Top 200 best-selling albums chart in the United States in February 1971.

In October '71, the first official Broadway production put a stop to the dozens of unauthorised stagings that had popped up all over the States. Filming for the movie adaptation began in 1972, shot in Israel and directed by Norman Jewison: released the following year, it grossed 24 million dollars at the box office, an estimated 600% return. Recordings exist of both stagings, unfortunately disappointing ones: only an incomplete compilation on a single LP was ever released from the original Broadway version, while the film's soundtrack is notoriously poor in audio quality. All the more reason to focus on that first, sensational recording - which, incidentally, is the only one of the three that the notoriously demanding Andrew Lloyd Webber hasn't more or less immediately disowned in disgust.

But did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?

Born from a priest's suggestion and a provocative question posed in Bob Dylan's "With God On Our Side", "Jesus Christ Superstar" celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of its stage debut this year. What still makes it so memorable today? One element is undoubtedly the characters, which Rice reinterprets through an original, secular lens, while Lloyd Webber matches them with brilliant musical characterization.

One striking figure is Mary Magdalene, played on the album, in the film, and later on stage by a very young Yvonne Elliman (born in late 1951): the musical casts her both as the redeemed sinner and as the (unrequited?) lover of Jesus. To accompany this devoted young woman, who always manages to keep a positive outlook despite hardship and the hostility of the other disciples, Andrew Lloyd Webber opts for easy-listening tones with folk shadings. Her songs are few but incisive: she sings much of one of the show's most iconic numbers, "Everything's Alright", among the most famous 5/4 passages in pop history; her signature song, though, is "I Don't Know How To Love Him", one of the melodically brightest moments in the whole work, aided by the fluty tones of the chamber organ.

The other disciples too - whether the apostles or the wider community of followers - play an important musical role. Indeed, one of the musical's distinctive features is its sheer number of choral scenes, in which groups and crowds act as a single character. These passages, which in some cases take the form of standalone songs, are generally where the music turns most openly eucharistic: "Hosanna", "Poor Jerusalem" and the acoustic sections of "The Last Supper" combine liturgical radiance with Motown flourishes. Very different in mood are the outbursts of the frenzied crowds who, after Christ's arrest, first demand the judgment of the prefect Pontius Pilate and then his crucifixion, set to jagged rhythms and impetuous orchestral whirlwinds.

The antagonists are given styles from the past: rhythm'n'blues and Stravinsky-esque modernism for the high priest Caiaphas and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate; vaudeville for Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Judea. The former, a power-hungry manipulator, is portrayed as the one who orders Jesus's killing: he's played by bass Victor Brox, a white bluesman revered even by Jimi Hendrix and Tina Turner. Together with the Pharisees, presented as his henchmen, he carries one of the most recurring musical themes in the show, that of "This Jesus Must Die"/"Blood Money"/"Judas' Death". In the film and in some stage versions, Caiaphas and the Pharisees are given an additional number: "Then We Are Decided".

Herod's only song, "King Herod's Song", caricatures him as a wealthy hedonist interested only in mocking Christ's supposed miracles. The song is, in fact, the only point in the entire musical where these miracles are even mentioned - as well as the only song to have been released before the album was even written, under a different title ("Try It And See") and with a surprising performer: Rita Pavone! Pilate's role is more multifaceted, emerging as one of the most complex characters both psychologically and musically: while later Gospels portray him as reluctant to hand down the crucifixion sentence, in Tim Rice's narrative his role is to actively oppose it, ultimately accepting it only to go along with what he sees as Jesus's self-destructive will. He's almost a tool within a larger design, critical of the part he's been assigned. The role is played by Barry Dennen, who, like Mary Magdalene/Yvonne Elliman, would go on to reprise the part on Broadway and in the film. His is a bass-baritone register, able to move both within the range of the lead characters and into the dark tones of the low notes: a fitting confirmation of the character's amphibious nature, also notable for the nasal timbres he deploys when needed and the exaggerated non-melodicism of his sharpest outbursts (culminating in the voice breaking at the end of "Trial Before Pilate").

Jesus is obviously at the center of events, but his characterization emerges more from how others act around him than from his actual vocal parts. The choice here is to highlight how the character looks different through different eyes: to Caiaphas and the Pharisees he's a threat, to Herod a buffoon, to some disciples the spiritual son of God, to others the potential leader of an uprising, to the adoring crowds a celebrity to whom they can entrust their salvation. To Pontius Pilate he's a madman who perhaps believes himself the rightful king of the Jews, to Mary Magdalene the horizon, so close yet unreachable, of a platonic love. To Judas, he's at once a guide, a traitor, an inconsistency, the divine messenger, someone worth dying for, the wrong man at the right time, the right man at the wrong time. As the chorus of the hit "Superstar" puts it: "Jesus Christ superstar, who are you? What have you sacrificed?", "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, do you think you are what they say you are?". The musical seems to offer an unexpected answer to questions that have long gripped theologians and believers alike: the character of Jesus is all his faces at once, and what the man Jesus thinks of himself matters far less to his myth than what others see in him. A true superstar.

And yet, the moments Lloyd Webber and Rice carve out for Jesus's own voice are all devoted to exploring his psychology. The conflict between his missionary spirit and his inner turmoil emerges not only in the lyrics but also in the musical choices: his exchanges with the disciples are melodically crystalline, but his stream of consciousness systematically veers into rougher territory. His only solo number, "Gethsemane (I Only Want To Say)", pairs the dramatic epicness of the Andalusian cadence typical of flamenco with the two highest notes in the whole musical ("Why should I die?" and "Alright, I'll die", both a G in the fifth octave of the piano). Neither note was written into Lloyd Webber's score - they were improvised by Ian Gillan and captured on the record; ever since, they've been the benchmark against which a singer's suitability for the role is measured. Many performers, however excellent their technique and however staggering their range, tackle them in falsetto or via belting; Gillan, by contrast, approaches them as a scream, achieving an expressive power that's simply stunning. That chilling, sky-high shriek - still bone-freezing today, and utterly unheard-of for its time - conveys the full uniqueness of the character's inner tearing: on one hand, it expresses a viscerally human anguish; on the other, it spills into sounds that scarcely seem human at all. A desperate mix of closeness to and distance from common experience, condensing in secular form the enigma of a dual nature, here seen as the clash between the necessity of one's own death and the inability to understand its reasons.

Perhaps less gripping, but just as extreme, are the musical shores touched by "The Crucifixion", an avant-jazz episode packed with dissonance and ghostly choruses, providing the backdrop to what is essentially the only genuinely spoken section in the entire narrative arc. It's with the crucifixion, precisely, that the story ends: there's no trace of the resurrection, a fact that at the time sparked outrage among some believers, along with the absence of any statement on Christ's possible divine nature. Yet it's precisely in this choice that Lloyd Webber and Rice's construction proves so effective: by portraying Jesus purely as a man (without openly denying other interpretations), they manage to bring his symbol closer and make it relevant even to a non-believing audience; striking a remarkable balance between reverence and provocation, the work has nonetheless gone on to be embraced by a great many practicing Christians as well.

But the character most beloved by fans - and, one can safely bet, by the authors too - is unquestionably Judas. He has the greatest number of songs; his is the first piece sung in the entire musical; his personality is the one most thoroughly explored in Rice's lyrics. To Judas, moreover, Lloyd Webber dedicates his boldest stylistic choice. From the very first electric guitar notes of "Heaven On Their Minds", Judas is rock.

The theme that identifies Judas, and by extension the whole musical, is an ostinato built on three notes: D, C, E-flat. Over this, the voice launches into an introduction in D Dorian, the mode obtained from the C major scale using D as the tonic: it's a hybrid setting, carrying the gravity of D minor but also elements of brightness shared with major modes - the perfect musical counterpart to the character's ambivalence. Moving more decisively toward D minor in the verse, Judas raises doubts about the effectiveness of Jesus's preaching and his premature glorification; with an abrupt shift to 7/8 time, in the bridge those doubts turn into open polemic:

Nazareth your famous son should have stayed a great unknown

Like his father carving wood, he’d have made good

The return to the verse only amplifies the sense of fear and disillusionment felt by a disciple who seems to care about Christ's mission even more than Christ himself does:

I am frightened by the crowd

For we are getting much too loud […]

All your followers are blind

Too much heaven on their minds

It was beautiful but now it's sour

Yes it's all gone sour…

Judas returns in the following song ("What's The Buzz/Strange Thing Mystifying"), criticizing the compromising relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and unveiling two more tricks that underscore his ambiguity: the shadowy minor-to-major shift on the fourth scale degree, and the very rock use of a flattened seventh chord "borrowed" from another key:

G (I) C (IV) Cm (iv)

It seems to me a strange thing mystifying

SOL (I)               DO (IV)                              SOL (I)

That a man like you can waste his time on women of her kind! […]

FA (VIIb)    DO (IV)              SOL (I)

It’s not that I object to her profession

FA (VIIb)              DO (IV)          FA (VIIb)                 SOL (I)

But she doesn’t fit in well with what you teach and say

In "Everything's Alright", nominally a number for Mary Magdalene, Judas gets his part too, marked by the shift from major to minor in the key:

Woman your fine ointment, brand new and expensive

Could have been saved for the poor

Why has it been wasted, we could have raised maybe

Three hundred silver pieces or more

People who are hungry, people who are starving

Matter more than your feet and hair

And again: Judas returns in "Damned For All Time/Blood Money", this time paired with Caiaphas and the Pharisees, then again in "The Last Supper", (obviously) in "Judas' Death" and... in "Superstar". Indeed: the musical's signature song is sung by Judas, who reappears on stage after his death: Christ's resurrection is never shown, but as if to compensate, it's precisely his nemesis who "comes back to life", if only as a spirit!

The piece is composed in "the most rock of all modes", the Mixolydian (the one used, say, in "Sympathy For The Devil"), which for the occasion is made even more rock by the chord equivalent to the flat seventh of "Strange Thing Mystifying":

MI (I)                        SOL7 (IIIb)

Everytime I look at you I don't understand

LA7 (IV)                                  MI7 (I)

Why you let the things you did get so out of hand

The close association between the musical style and the character is made explicit by the refrain, entrusted to the Trinidad Singers gospel choir: over these lines, the offending chord disappears and is replaced by one that requires no "borrowing" from other keys:

MI (I)             LA (IV)

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ

D (VII)             A (IV)             E (I)

Who are you?  What have you sacrificed?

It wouldn't be accurate to say that Judas steals the scene from Jesus. In the musical, the two characters are presented as a duality: each is necessary to the other, and each dies for the other; both sacrifice themselves for God and for the plan they attribute to Him. But glory goes to Jesus, and damnation to Judas.

It's only natural that audiences empathize more with Judas. While Jesus is portrayed, even musically, as somewhat removed from lived experience, Judas is given the most contemporary sounds and the most compelling contradictions. The score, however, does everything it can to suggest that the two figures should be overlaid rather than seen as mutually exclusive. Jesus and Judas are the only members of the main cast written as tenors. In numbers like "Everything Is Alright" and "The Last Supper" the two share keys and melodies, and Judas's guitar theme, which returns at the moment of his hanging, also reappears during the flagellation of Jesus. Like Jesus, Judas makes highly expressive use of his voice, often pushing it to the breaking point (the only other character to do so is Pontius Pilate), and even allows himself a cracked note during the reprise of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" in "Judas' Death". In place of Jesus's human/divine duality, Rice and Lloyd Webber choose to substitute another one: that between the Messiah and his betrayer, seen as two faces of the same enigma.

The record-breaking musical

Surprising even in 2021, "Jesus Christ Superstar" was nothing short of revolutionary back in 1970. It was neither the first rock musical (the most famous predecessor, "Hair", dates from 1967) nor the first religious-themed rock musical (Peter Link's "Salvation" had debuted off-Broadway the year before). In terms of reaching the stage, it was in fact beaten by a few months by Stephen Schwartz's "Godspell", another gospel-themed production offering a "hippie" retelling of the story of Christ, which likewise omitted the resurrection just as "Jesus Christ Superstar" did. But the possible comparisons end there, on the surface.

"Jesus Christ Superstar" is unique for the prominence of its electric component, for the expressionistic use of voice by Jesus, Judas and Pilate, for the centrality of its choral elements, for its abundance of compound time signatures, and for its pioneering use of the synthesizer. The latter (specifically a Moog modular) is the very first instrument heard in the "Overture", and immediately carves out a disturbing, menacing role for itself; in the tracks where it appears, it doesn't merely add color to a keyboard palette that already includes acoustic and electric pianos (most likely a Hohner Pianet or an Electra Piano — though the credits don't specify), but pushes toward its most avant-garde possibilities. In musicals to come, the synthesizer would become a fixture in the orchestra pit, serving as a kind of orchestral enhancement that allowed productions to cut costs by replacing certain acoustic instruments with their sampled equivalents: far from that technological horizon, Lloyd Webber's ambition here is to add to the electric and acoustic ranges a whole new, still unexplored world of expressive possibility. In "Trial Before Pilate" the use of oscillator detuning is evident: the synth's three audio generators are slightly out of tune with one another, making the sound more alienating and tactile. In "The Crucifixion" the synth is used to produce almost alien-sounding noises and gurgles.

As for the compound time signatures, the already-mentioned 5/4 and 7/8 of "Everything's Alright" and "Heaven On Their Minds" are just one example. For 1970, "Jesus Christ Superstar" boasts an extraordinary amount of metrical complexity, which would remain an exception within musical theatre, even as it became increasingly common in rock in the years immediately following, with the rise of progressive rock. As Lloyd Webber explains in his autobiography ("Unmasked", 2018): "The unusual, irregular time signatures are a vital part of the fabric of 'Jesus Christ Superstar'. They give the music a propulsive energy, and with it the words and the narrative drive."

"The Temple" is in 7/4; "Strange Thing Mystifying", "Gethsemane", "The Arrest" and "Trial Before Pilate" all shift into 5/4 at their respective climaxes to heighten their disorienting, sinister atmosphere. Elsewhere, without formally leaving 4/4, the meters are broken up, fragmented into multiple parts with differing accents juxtaposed against one another: 5+3 in "The Arrest" ("Now we have him, now we've got him!"), 3+3+2 in "Gethsemane" ("I have to know/ I have to know/ My Lord!") and in "Strange Thing Mystifying". (Working out the exact scansion of Pilate's first speech in "Trial Before Pilate" is left as an exercise for the enterprising reader.)

"Jesus Christ Superstar" also paved the way for a new form of musical theatre, responsible for hits successful enough to become almost synonymous with the genre itself: the sung-through musical. Anticipated in 1964 by Jacques Demy's film "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" and in 1968/1969 by Lloyd Webber and Rice's own "Joseph", the approach borrows from Italian opera buffa the principle that all the text should be sung, whether through fully-fledged songs or through recitative — sections where singing shades into speech, with an essentially syllabic delivery that nonetheless distinguishes between different pitches. Spoken interludes, the so-called libretto, are effectively done away with.

The move was partly born of practical necessity: since the aim was to go straight to an album format, an entirely sung-through approach seemed more promising. Eight years of unbroken performances at London's Palace Theatre (a record for a West End musical until "Cats" came along) nonetheless seem to confirm the effectiveness of the approach on stage too. Many of Andrew Lloyd Webber's triumphs in the following decades belong to the same sung-through category: "Evita" (1976), "Cats" (1981), "The Phantom Of The Opera" (1986).

Another distinctive trait of the composer's style is his almost Wagnerian use of recurring musical themes: from the "Overture" right through to the finale, melodic and rhythmic leitmotifs tied to the narrative chase one another, building the musical episodes. Despite the impressive wealth of iconic ideas, the musical actually contains relatively few standalone showstoppers that work as songs in their own right: most of the numbers are assemblages of these themes, which anticipate one another, pass between characters, and resurface, clearer or murkier, depending on the dramatic situation.

From the First Century to popular culture

The success of "Jesus Christ Superstar" was enormous, and still is: more than forty theatrical productions, two film adaptations (besides the 1973 one, there was a distinctly poor one in 2000), a television version (2018, with John Legend as Jesus, Sara Bareilles as Mary Magdalene, and Alice Cooper as Herod), and dozens upon dozens of album recordings. Its presence within mass culture is just as significant as the presence of mass culture within the musical itself. The very idea of a "rock retelling" of the Gospel story, brought to the stage, could obviously only have been born within a society built on recorded, electrified music, on the rapid circulation of information, on entertainment and youth culture. But Lloyd Webber and Rice's project absorbs contemporary social realities and their mechanisms far more deeply than mere circumstance would dictate, and its lasting impact lies above all in its ability to cast a critical eye not only on events of two thousand years ago, but on contemporary ones as well.

The very desire to overturn the usual narrative surrounding the roles of Christ, Judas and the other characters is itself the product of a cultural context — that of the late 1960s — which had opened the door to reexamining the pillars of Christian faith. While a direct influence from the Second Vatican Council is unlikely (the work, after all, originated in an Anglican context), the backdrop to the authors' work certainly includes the by-then not purely academic debate over the apocryphal gospels and the historical-cultural context of Christ's ministry. The 1945 discovery in Egypt, at Nag Hammadi, of a vast corpus of Gnostic gospel writings was followed in 1947 by the find, in the caves of Qumran in Mandatory Palestine, of the now-famous "Dead Sea Scrolls", a collection of religious writings believed to date back to the Essene sect, roughly contemporary with early Christianity. This reignited debate over the origins of Christianity: by the late 1960s, awareness of the limits of the canonical account had fully entered the cultural and musical climate (as evidenced, in Italy, by De André's own work on the apocrypha, which culminated in 1970 in the album "La buona novella").

Across the musical's nearly two-hour running time, ironic and deliberately anachronistic touches recur constantly throughout Rice's lyrics. Caiaphas's exchange with his underlings in "This Jesus Must Die" is emblematic: "One thing I'll say for him: Jesus is cool", "But how can we stop him? His glamour increases/ By leaps every minute: he's top of the poll". Here, as elsewhere, the focus is above all on the vision of Jesus as a superstar ante litteram (today we might say influencer?), at once close to and distant from his followers. The theme recurs often in the crowd scenes: in "Hosanna" Jesus Christ becomes "JC", while in "Simon Zealotes/Poor Jerusalem" the craving for intimacy turns physical ("Jesus I am with you, touch me touch me Jesus!/ Jesus I am on your side, kiss me kiss me Jesus!").

The sharpest lines, however, are concentrated in "Superstar", where Judas sings: "Why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?/ If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation/ Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication". He goes on to plant doubts that extend well beyond the Christian faith specifically: "Could Mohammed move a mountain or was that just PR?", "Did you know your messy death would be a record-breaker?".

The provocative, postmodern spirit of the work is further underscored in the 1973 film, which portrays the characters as extras who arrive in the middle of the desert aboard a van, and repeatedly employs freeze-frames and extradiegetic elements (particularly effective is the flood of crucifixion paintings that accompanies the instrumental section of "Crucifixion").

Half a century after its release, "Jesus Christ Superstar" still hasn't finished commenting on society through its ongoing reinterpretations: while the '73 film stood out for its anti-militarist undertones and the bold choice of an African-American Judas (the unforgettable Carl Anderson, who would go on to return in numerous productions), the years since have brought dystopian/urban versions (the controversial 2000 film), heavy metal renditions (Chile, 2004), productions directed by and starring prison inmates (Peru, 2014), a lead chosen through a talent show (United Kingdom, 2012), punk-style stagings, and an all-Black cast production (United States, 2017). Just this year came Stefano Bollani's jazz reworking, a heartfelt tribute from the eclectic pianist to a work that deeply influenced him in his youth. And it's likely that, thanks to these endless reinventions, it will keep telling the eternal relevance of a two-thousand-year-old story for a long time to come. Here's to another fifty years of "Jesus Christ Superstar"!

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25/12/2021