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Ivor Novello: British Music
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Ivor Novello, who died in 1951, is a name synonymous with the English musical play of between the Wars. The world of Novello is one of unrepentant romance from an age that was grim with poverty and depression and under the threat of war. Novello brought people into the theatre to forget the world outside and to lose themselves in luscious melody and in love stories that rang true despite plots and settings that had only a slight hold on reality.
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The name of Ivor Novello has become synonymous with the golden era of the British stage musical. In a remarkable career spanning some forty years from his acclamation as "the Welsh prodigy" when a school boy, to his untimely death in 1951 he covered virtually every aspect of the entertainment business. He distinguished himself as an actor-manager and the composer of some of the most memorable musicals ever to grace the British stage.
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Ivor Novello excelled as an actor, playwright, lyricist, and composer. He initially made his name as an uncommonly handsome matinee idol... immortality was ultimately won for Novello through his work as a composer of hit British musicals.
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Ivor Novello wrote popular songs such as Keep the Home Fires Burning (written during the First World War), as well as appearing on stage, in silent films and later in talkies! He wrote and starred in a number of his own ‘special formula’ musicals, such as The Dancing Years, and Glamorous Night, which made him the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his day.
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London waiting for the outbreak of war took Ivor Novello's operetta to its heart when it brightened the impending gloom at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane from March 1939. When the war interrupted the run, the show went on a protracted tour of England, returning in triumph to the Adelphi Theatre in March 1942 when it ran for 969 performances. This is Novello's 'serious' musical, its story more or less tripped of the Ruritarian fripperies that break in through much of his work. Here, Novello plays the Jewish composer Rudi Kleber who falls in love with the opera singer Maria Ziegler (Mary Ellis). The shadow of another romance and the Nazi oppression falls across their romance, but Maria gets him released from the Gestapo's clutches. Decorating the touching plot is a score of great charm, containing six of Novello's finest songs.
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For fifteen years Novello was a major film star, appearing in British, American, French and German films. In the 1920s he was a star of silent cinema in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and the film of Noël Coward’s The Vortex. Although he had been a boy chorister at Magdalen College, Oxford, Novello’s adult voice was not outstanding. So he created non-singing roles for himself, leaving the vocals to his leading ladies, notably Mary Ellis, who had begun her stage career in opera in New York.
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