Something for Thursday

The other day I featured an instrumental medley of tunes from the Lerner-and-Loewe Broadway show Camelot, and since then I’ve had the music of Camelot on my brain, so I’ve been listening to the songs quite a bit–both from the movie soundtrack and from the Original Broadway Cast recording. As I noted, the songs are much better than the book (in Broadway lingo, “book” is basically the “screenplay”: all the spoken-word stuff that takes place around the songs and creates the dramatic settings for the songs). Some of these songs lodged in my brain as soon as I heard them way back when I first watched the film of Camelot, but a few others had to wait to work their magic. This is one of those.

If you’re familiar with the Arthurian legend, basically King Arthur forms a glorious realm centered on his castle of Camelot, from where he and his Knights of the Round Table keep the peace. But a truly great knight named Lancelot comes along, and Lancelot and Arthur become best friends immediately, forming what we might now call a “bromance”. All should be well, only…Lancelot falls in love with Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, and she with him. They try to keep from acting on it, but that turns to secret attraction which in turn becomes secret trysts and eventually they can’t hold back anymore, and the exposure of their affair becomes the event that drives a wedge into Camelot and destroys Arthur’s realm forever. (Depending on which version you read, there might be a Quest for the Holy Grail in there, and some stuff about Arthur having children slain, Herod-like, to avoid a prophecy, and evil sorceresses and…it can get complicated.)

In the show, there finally comes a deeply sad song as Guinevere sings to Lancelot about the love that should never have been allowed to flower. It is called “I Loved You Once In Silence”, and it is honestly a heartbreaker of a song. Secret and forbidden love can be ruinous…but that doesn’t mean that revealing the secret and forbidden love can be any the less ruinous, as this song demonstrates.

I’ve posted both the Original Broadway Cast album version of the song and the film version here. It may seem an unfair comparison at first: Broadway had Julie Andrews, after all, and it’s perhaps axiomatic that nobody can sing something better than Julie Andrews. Vanessa Redgrave is cast as Guinevere in the film, and she makes a game effort but nobody is going to confuse her with Julie Andrews, whose voice in her singing days was golden perfection.

But I’m not going to sell Redgrave’s work short. No, she’s not anywhere near the singer Andrews is…but I think she does capture more of Guinevere’s anguish and pain in this song. She genuinely sounds like someone trapped in a horrible emotional situation that offered nothing but suffering at each turn. Andrew’s performance, while gorgeous, sounds to me like a performance. (Now, that’s not to say she performed it like this on stage. Original Cast albums are hardly good vehicles by which to approximate the affect of an actual production.) I conclude that these are both excellent versions of a heartbreaking song, but in very different ways. 

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