Andrew Lloyd Webber Books

might reconsider if you want this e-book within the 1 hour they say it will show up in your e-mail. so far it's been 3 1/2 hours and no download link yet. just a warning to those looking to get an e-book in an expeditious manner.

With a term paper coming up in a college seminar on Jesus Christ Superstar, I had searched our college libraries and the Internet for resources. I was a bit sceptical when I came across this e-book, but it has blown me away. It has tons of information about the unique origins of JCS, great plot and character descriptions, helpful background/context info, and insightful analysis of aspects of the musical. If you have a paper to write about Superstar, or just love the rock opera, this would be a great resource. Well worth the money.

I originally got this book, back in 96, and I loved it! But when the old copy got worn out, I couldn't find another (because it went out of print for a short time). Fortunately I found another copy. Its an amazing book, with some accurate material on the composer, the shows, and the people who worked with him. The pictures from the shows are gorgeous! And its worth for that alone. Some of the pictures are very rare too, not seen anywhere else. :) A great book!

This book has excellent pictures from lloyd webber's shows. The text is just adequate, with no new information. I liked michael walsh's book better, and I'm glad it's being updated.

Very good piano book for intermediate level.

I used this book to audition for a certain show (which can not be named) but i got the lead. I think any broadway lover will enjoy the contence of this book. I enjoy to sing out of this book the most. And who can beat this faboulous price. This is the only place I could find this book. I looked every where. Where did it end up at none other than amazon.com.

The music itself is very wll written, and easy to understand; however, the cello part sometimes goes into treble clef and back to bass, which is confusing when you're sightreading notes.

I ordered this book after using one similar to it at my sister's house during the holidays. It was good to brush up on my piano skills at an easier pace and I enjoyed reliving my experience of attending the play in London over the summer.

I just bought this, very nice book and perfect for beginners. There are two books available and it is easy to get them confused because the covers and the names are almost identical. This is the easy book. The more advanced book is The Phantom of the Opera - piano vocal selections (ISBN: 0634099094).

Obviously the music is beautiful, but I wish the description had said that it was for easy piano because it is very easy, and I was diappointed with that. It does have nice black and white pictures of the movie.

I bought this version thinking it would an easy to play version for the piano (with notes for both hands.) It actually only has a single note at a time for the right hand and no notes at all for the left. It has the chord names listed above. On the bright side, it's forcing me to finally memorize my chords (at least some of the basic ones- I found a chord chart to help me). I can play the songs easily, I'm just not really creative at ad-libing the left hand. It might be useful for guitar I suppose...

It was very easy to play along to because it is large print and it has the name of the note written inside of the note (if that makes sense)
It is only the melody, so there is no harmony.
It comes with the guitar tabs written in (it doesn't say how to play the tabs).
It comes with 12 songs
Think of me, Angel of Music, The Phantom of the Opera, Music of the Night, Prima Donna, All I ask of You, Masquerade, The Fairground, Journy to the Cemetery, Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again, The Point of no Return and Learn to be Lonely.
The book is 64 pages long and comes with some pictures.
The only downfall to this book is that each song lasts 3-4 pages.
(So you have to kept turning the pages)

This could have been a really interesting comparison, and there are some nice touches in this book, but ultimately the author skirts the most interesting questions in favor of some tired cliches.

Other reviewers on this page have carped about Lloyd Webber's name. If they're referring to the hyphen, they should have read a little more carefully. He explains his use of the hyphen in a footnote on the bottom of page 49.

On the positive side, Citron solves the task of the dual biography pretty well. One of the big problems in writing a book comparing two composers born 18 years apart is the use of time. Obviously, you have to tell the stories chronologically, you can't spend too much time on one of them without switching to the other, and then at some point, the issue of what each of them is working on simultaneously becomes interesting, so a constant 18 year delay would be off-putting. Somehow Citron manages to bring their narratives together around Harold Prince, and chronologically ties the two stories around the time when Prince went from Sondheim's Sweeney to Lloyd Webber's Evita. Before that, we're hearing about the shows on a weird time warp, and after that, it's fairly chronological. This is a neat touch, and Hal Prince is actually the main thing the two have in common.

I found a pretty egregious example of plagiarism in the book, around a topic that gets short shrift in the book; musical analysis. On page 360, Citron cribs an 88 word passage from Joseph Swain's book The Broadway Musical, A Critical And Musical Survey (Oxford, 1990) Incredibly, even though the book he's borrowing from is by the same publisher, Citron doesn't credit the idea to its originator, nor does Swain's book even appear in the Bibliography. It's an unlikely and original idea he's stealing; comparing Lloyd Webber's dramatically random repeats of melody to Renaissance Contrafacta, which he wrongly pluralizes contrafactums later in the chapter. It doesn't call into question Citron's research, which appears to be fairly exhaustive, but it makes one wonder whether the book isn't just a collection of anecdotes, ideas and stories from other sources, hepfully cobbled into a collection for the curious.

Theatre fans have often put these two giants of music theatre against one another, a position neither has publicly taken. The conventional wisdom about the two is that Lloyd Webber is the consummate melodist, and that his detractors really only envy his popularity from the comfort of their ivory towers, and that Sondheim is an abstruse intellectual whose music is mired in boring repetitive structures that are incomprehensible to the public, but which are feted and admired by pointy heads who want to feel smart. Citron falls into these old cliches time and time again, missing the far more interesting issues to be probed.

For example, the portrait Citron paints of Lloyd Webber is one of a man utterly at the mercy of his lyricists and librettists for what happens on the stage, and there are a number of swipes (deservedly) taken at Sir Andrew's compositional technique, his supposed plagiarism (which is ironic, considering the source), and his orchestrational deficiencies. Any examination of Lloyd Webber's work must ask questions of how these qualities play into his work as a whole. The best Citron can come up with is to compare him to Richard Rodgers, which is an attractive thought until one remembers that Rodgers was not at the mercy of any lyricist or librettist, although he could usually command the best. In fact, Rodgers wrote music and lyrics for No Strings. And Rodgers knew harmony, melody, and the power of a reprise to do dramatic work, not just to sell a tune. It would be foolish to say that Lloyd Webber doesn't know what he's doing, but a full picture needs to address his foibles as craft issues, not merely as the carping of the intellectuals. Can you be a great musical theatre composer without caring which lyrics your tune gets assigned to? Maybe so.

Sondheim doesn't fare much better. Citron says at the end of the book that Sondheim started in the Hammerstein "heart-on-the-sleeve tradition", then abandoned it for the "honesty of ambivalence" I'm not sure what he means by "heart-on-the-sleeve" Is he referring to West Side? or Gypsy? or Saturday Night? None of those seem sentimental. (except for lyrics that Lenny probably wrote) What Sondheim got from Hammerstein was not treacly Americana, but the integration of material and story, and he learned it so well that he wrote what the story and his methodology demanded, whether the audience liked it or not. This question of whether the structural and dramatic integrity is enough to make a masterpiece without popularity is an important issue Citron isn't bothering with.

This reader would like to see somebody tackle the Sondheim/Lloyd Webber duality along more serious lines, because the answer to the questions these men pose writes the next 25 years of musical theatre. Sadly, we won't find it here.

The book helped me greatly with a paper I had to write. Very interesting insight into the two great's minds!

I found the book fascinating, as it is filled with interesting details and tidbits about these two men and their shows. It is especially useful because it focuses on the music, often showing musical examples and shedding light on things like melodic teeming and form. The other two reviews stated that Lloyd Webber's name was misspelled. Apparently, they didn't read carefully enough because it explains the reasoning for this deliberate decision is because when Lloyd Webber was knighted he chose to hyphenate his name. The book tends to favor Sondheim, but is full of interesting information about both of them and each of their shows. I can't promise that is 100% free of factual errors, but it is still a must have for anyone looking for in-depth information on these two great men.

What a terrible book this is. As with Citron's other books, this is LOADED with factual errors and misunderstandings of the shows he discusses. The first big clue is that he misspells Andrew Lloyd Webber's name throughout the entire book -- where were his editors? And he says that the period between the 1920s and 1960s was "a time when plot was secondary" in musicals. Oh really? Like in Carousel, West Side Story, Show Boat, Pal Joey, South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Gypsy, The King and I...? I feel sorry for anyone who wastes their money on this the way I did. Stay away from books by this guy -- there are so many GOOD books on muiscal theatre out there...

Citron's book is an embarrassment to any serious student of musical theater. Many of Citron's facts are erroneous (beginning with Lloyd Webber's last name which is NOT hyphenated, but appears hyphenated in every instance throughout this book). His approach to this material is very condescending. For example, he implies that A Little Night Music and Passion only won Tony Awards because there were no other decent shows that opened those years, thereby dismissing other good shows and offering backhanded compliments to Sondheim. Rumors are that the Really Useful Group is extremely embarrassed by the Lloyd Webber sections. Wait for the forthcoming Yale series on Broadway composers.

This isn't a guitar recorded version, it's all piano solos. It's not a guitar book unless I'm just a total idiot.

I REALLY enjoy this book. Unfortunately, at the present time, Amazon has this book mislabeled as a guitar recorded version. It is very definately a piano book (which is what I wanted...)!
I was impressed with this version. It surprised me a little. The book includes a short, one page lesson before each song. The lessons include rhythm patterns, technique practice and expressive considerations that are applicable to the song you are playing. There are no words in the book, which would've been nice, but they are easy enough to get if you like to sing. The arrangements are easy to play (I'm at the intermediate level), but not boring. Nicely put together I thought!

When I picked up this title, I was so excited! Andrew Lloyd Webber is literally my hero. His music is the only kind I listen to! (I'm only exaggerating a little bit) BUT,this book was so, so, so, BORING! I expected to hear about how Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice came up with the ideas for Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita! But, all I got was boring lecture on recording booths, and status on some sort of ratings chart! In short, Andrew Lloyd Webber is still my favorite artist, but, his life must be too boring to bother with