Bring Back Eleanor Rigby

By Michael Walsh

There is something about church music that attracts even the most agnostic British composer whenever a major statement is called for. The choristers decked out in liturgical robes, the angelic, sexless piping of boy sopranos, the hovering vicars, the culturally resonant majesty of the cathedral setting -- the whole High Church atmosphere has consistently evoked a corresponding High Seriousness in composers as disparate as Handel, John Stainer, Elgar and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The latest Englishman to have a go is Paul McCartney, the erstwhile "cute" Beatle and Wings captain, whose quasi-autobiographical Liverpool Oratorio is soaring on the classical charts (Angel/EMI Classics has shipped 350,000 copies of the two-CD album worldwide). Commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, the 97-minute work for soloists, chorus and orchestra was first performed in McCartney's native city last July and recently got its U.S. premiere at New York City's Carnegie Hall.

Since the death of Irving Berlin, McCartney is probably the world's most famous musical illiterate. He freely admits that his repeated attempts to learn to read music have failed, and this is often seized on as proof that he is somehow not a "real" musician. Yet McCartney's reason -- "The marks on the page failed to match up to what I was hearing, so I eventually made up the music and someone else wrote it down" -- is perfectly valid.

For the oratorio, the someone else was Carl Davis, an American-born film composer and accomplished pastiche artist. After McCartney wrote the text and invented the tunes, Davis arranged them slickly for soprano (Kiri Te Kanawa at the Liverpool premiere and on the recording), mezzo (Sally Burgess), tenor (Jerry Hadley), bass (Willard White), boy soprano, chorus, cathedral choir and full orchestra.

The result is a big, sprawling, high-minded and honorably intended work that never quite comes into focus. The story concerns a Liverpool boy named Shanty (no doubt a nod to the high percentage of Irish Liverpudlians as well as to McCartney's own ethnic background), born during the air raids of 1942 (Part 1, War). The second, third and fourth sections (School, Crypt and Father) detail typical adolescent angst, including the death of Shanty's dad. In the oratorio's second half, the hero meets Mary Dee, marries her (Wedding), impregnates her (Work), fights with her (Crises) and finally, after a traffic accident that almost claims her life and that of their unborn child, reconciles with her (Peace). "So on and on the story goes/ From day to day throughout our lives," sings Shanty in the work's closing pages, to which Mary Dee replies, "What can we do, that's how it grows/ I am with you/ Our love survives."

Shanty's wedding music stands out as a luminous love song, but overall the oratorio is rambling and generic; there is nothing to match the economy and effect of such "classical" McCartney tunes as Eleanor Rigby and Yesterday, and you certainly can't dance to it. Indeed, the piece emerges as a curious cross between Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius and the Who's Quadrophenia, but it lacks either the former's ecstatic fervor or the latter's nose-in-the-dirt realism. One waits in vain for the real McCartney to loosen his tie and do something a little rude, but the composer seems overwhelmed by the cassocks and surplices. His vital rock roots remain very much a band on the run.