In an age when the musical was no longer a hit machine, Lloyd Webber returned the form to its origins in operetta. Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.

Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.

But he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows; one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all.

Rising from the English upper crust—that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one—he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). Indeed, his memoir is written in a sort of Bertie Wooster pastiche, a little disconcertingly given that its material is the very un-Woosterish one of drive and success. At one point, Lloyd Webber even recycles a Wodehouse joke in a way that may puzzle outsiders to the Wodehouse cult, calling people “gruntled.” (It’s from “The Code of the Woosters”: “If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”)

His father, perhaps most significant of all, was a composer of a distinctly English variety—happily obscure, making a living writing old-fashioned organ and choral music for amateur church choirs. He was one of a group of British composers for whom it was still possible to write straight, melodic music that wasn’t pop and somehow make a living. It was his parents who introduced him to Puccini, and then one day his father played “Some Enchanted Evening,” the ballad from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” saying, “If you ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall be very, very proud of you.” Ah! If only Dad had played “The Lady Is a Tramp” or “Where or When” or another angular and elegant Rodgers and Hart ballad, the history of musical theatre might have been different, and better. (To be fair, whenever Lloyd Webber does write at his best, he writes at Rodgers’s best; the influence flows in and then out, as in the genuinely beautiful “All I Ask of You,” from “The Phantom of the Opera.”)

A kind of admirably defensive attitude got embedded in him from his youth: old things could be nice things, and the tastes of awkward schoolboys might be made into entertainment. Those tastes were always what the Brits call “naff”—lame, tacky, uncool. But he knew that naff could be beautiful. The basic formula that lit up the pop cantatas that first made him famous was apparent early on: something old, something new, something borrowed, nothing blue. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (1968), which in some ways remains the most vivid thing Lloyd Webber ever wrote, was pushed along by a music master at a prestigious junior school who wanted “something for the whole school to sing.” Using Tim Rice’s words, which had, instead of sixties piety, a jaunty Python playfulness, he managed to write a school play from Scripture which no one had to take too seriously. Its famous follow-up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970), was a rock album, played on progressive FM before it was a show. Those of us with snobby tastes in Hendrix and the Dead thought it was a terrible rock album, but a rock album is what it was.

So, though his music isn’t often grouped with the “prog rock” of the early seventies—the highly tutored, self-consciously arty music of Yes and early Genesis and Procol Harum and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and so on—the spirit is very much the same: educated British musicians with classical training, inherited rock rhythm sections, minimal blues feeling, and a taste for the grandiose and bombastic. The famous “Phantom of the Opera” theme, with the organ’s quaver accompanied by funereal electric bass and foreboding percussion, is pure prog rock, almost to the point of “Spinal Tap”-style parody. What Lloyd Webber added to the mix was a feeling for pathos and melody—putting Puccini rather than Bach into the prog-rock cauldron. (These connections prove to be fairly direct: the first Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the lead singer of Deep Purple, and a subsequent Jesus tried out for Black Sabbath, both groups slightly demented children of prog rock.)

Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing. You wince as you read the opening chapters, knowing that, with the fateful inevitability of Greek tragedy, the composer-songwriter-singer is going to sign a deal with a rapacious music publisher as a dewy-eyed youngster and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. Springsteen, the Beatles, most notoriously John Fogerty—the story varies only in the details.