Magician of The Musical

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Practically alone among present-day theater composers, Lloyd Webber repeatedly hits the Top Ten with his songs: I Don't Know How to Love Him from Superstar; Don't Cry for Me, Argentina from Evita; Memory, the instant standard from Cats. Four songs from Phantom have made the British charts. But despite his unique crossover appeal, his scores are far from cheap tunesmithery. In addition to their obvious debt to rock, Superstar, Evita and Cats also bristle with some hair-raising atonal passages, while Phantom's glorious credo, The Music of the Night, contains one of Lloyd Webber's most daring dissonant endings. Overt classical references abound: Cats has a fugue, the Dance section of Song & Dance is an extended set of variations on Paganini's 24th Caprice, and Phantom boasts an intricate sextet called Prima Donna that is reminiscent of Donizetti. (Song & Dance played for 13 months in New York City. It was cobbled together from Lloyd Webber's song cycle Tell Me on a Sunday and Variations, a piece for cello and rock ensemble originally written for Julian.) Eclectic it may be, but Lloyd Webber's best work has synthesized his disparate influences into the convincing, natural expression of a classically trained child of the rock revolution.

That child was born into a rambling, bohemian flat in London's South Kensington neighborhood. At three Andrew began studying the violin; later he took up the piano and horn. "It was extremely noisy around our house," remembers Brother Julian. "I'd be scraping away on the cello, and Andrew would be bashing away on the piano." Adding to the happy din was John Lill, now a well-known British concert pianist, who was a member of the Lloyd Webber household and, more than anyone else, steered Andrew toward concerts and operas.

Andrew wrote his first tune at nine, and three years later began mounting mock musicals in a toy theater whose stage was an old record turntable. At about this time, an aunt whetted his theatrical passion when she took the boy to see South Pacific, which remains his favorite musical. At 14 he won a scholarship to London's Westminster School and produced three now forgotten student shows.

Lloyd Webber attended Magdalen College at Oxford, in part because he had heard it harbored some of Britain's most promising lyricists. But the man who turned out to be the Oscar Hammerstein to his Rodgers came in the person of Tim Rice, a London law student with a penchant for pop music. Introduced by a London publisher, the pair hit it off at once, and Andrew promptly dropped out of Oxford. To hone his technique, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. His father, surprisingly, warned him not to let the school educate away his natural gifts, and Lloyd Webber left after one year.

He and his new partner were an odd match: Rice tall, affable, gregarious; Lloyd Webber slender, introspective, subdued. Rice's lyrics were hard-edged and cynical; Lloyd Webber's music lush and tuneful ("Tim can never write 'I love you,' " says Lloyd Webber. "It's always 'I love you, but . . .' "). Their first show, The Likes of Us, about a Victorian philanthropist named Dr. Bernardo, was never commercially produced; "square and dated," explained Rice. For their next try they took some really dated material: the Old Testament.