Working with the poet James Fenton (on a roll after an acclaimed translation of Rigoletto for the English National Opera, directed by Jonathan Miller in 1982), they devised a new prologue of sorts, beginning with the prisoner chain-gang and Valjean’s release on licence. They were also tempted, initially, to strip Hugo’s story of its religious aspect but, Caird says: “The more we tried to do that, the harder it became. Hugo was a passionate socialist, but he also couldn’t escape his belief in Roman Catholicism.”
Instead, Caird and Sir Trevor ended up embracing the novel’s spiritual dimension; the former, inspired by his recently deceased father’s theological writings, even shaped the show’s final line: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
He now believes that emphatic element is crucial to the show’s success: “There’s a God-shaped hole in our culture that Les Misérables fills. Trevor’s idea of bringing on Fantine and Éponine as ghosts at the end was inspired,” he adds. “Those two unfortunate women couldn’t have happy endings, but they could be subsumed within a sense of destiny.”
‘A show reborn’
In early 1985, though, that final line was still some way off. Having read the novel while on a trip to Borneo, south-east Asia, Fenton toiled at the lyrics but made slow headway – there remained huge gaps just five months before the show was due to open at the Barbican.
Bidding Fenton adieu wasn’t a “testy” meeting, Caird insists, “but Cameron was becoming impatient, rightly, because he felt we didn’t have a script yet”. Caird continues: “James [Fenton] was working very slowly, and a lot of the lyrics weren’t singable in the required musical idiom.”
His seemingly unlikely replacement was Herbert Kretzmer, the journalist and television critic, whom Sir Cameron remembered had form in translating the songs of Charles Aznavour. He instantly brought a different sensibility to the English lyrics for Les Misérables, less philosophical and more emotionally accessible than the French originals.
Kretzmer’s archive, donated to Cambridge University Library this week, includes a letter from the late lyricist to Sir Cameron expressing his dismay at being regarded by many as a mere “translator” of the French version. “Les Misérables is not a show translated or re-written,” he insists, “but a show reborn.”
Schönberg concurs: “One third is a straight translation of the French, one third a kind of adaptation from the French, and the rest was totally brand new.” Kretzmer died in 2020 and, whatever disagreements may have occurred in the past, everyone is now singing from the same hymn sheet. “We were lucky and blessed that Herbert Kretzmer came into the picture,” says Boublil. Schönberg adds: “The collaboration worked because we didn’t have one parcel of ego. Herbert had to work like a slave, 18 hours a day. He was exhausted, but he wrote the show in less than five months.”
The final cut
Caird recalls first clapping eyes on the lyrics for I Dreamed a Dream, a rewrite of J’avais rêvé d’une autre vie in the French original: “I remember going to Herbie’s apartment and him presenting it to me. It was simply incredible. The line that stuck out was ‘But the tigers come at night, with their voices soft as thunder’. He conjures a child’s nightmare in a phrase.”
