The classical touches in the Beatles canon are all over their work, and only increased and improved with time. A culmination can be seen, however, in one particular album.
Sgt. Pepper – called by Lennon biographer Albert Goldman “the Shout Heard ‘Round the World” - grabbed the attention, once and for all, of any stragglers who hadn’t yet noticed the Beatles; and, more specifically, the musical pundits in academia who hadn’t taken them seriously.
With Pepper, the Beatles truly graduated once and for all from pop school. They began not only to experiment with form and structure, but to invent; they took themes they had created and repurposed them; they extended their practice of using instruments in new ways, leveraging the studio itself as a sonic innovation; they began creating sonic portraits as evocative as their lyrical ones.
In short, they created pop symphony and opera.
Classical components and structures
Pepper has been immortalized as “the first concept album” for decades now – a designation that John rejected repeatedly, famously saying, “It doesn't go anywhere. All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band; but it works, because we said it worked.”
Even so, Pepper – as a “concept album” - does represent a new concept in popular music: the presentation of the album itself as an artistic format of popular music, apart from both its basic unit (the song) and its traditional medium (live performance).
The Beatles achieved this largely in the writing process, composing songs that put forth no overt thematic unity and which nonetheless tap into certain universal ideas: the escapism of dreaming (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, the transition from the middle section of “A Day in the Life”); the embrace of the mundane (“When I’m Sixty-Four”, “Good Morning Good Morning”, the John sections of “A Day in the Life”); reaching for more (“Getting Better”, “Fixing a Hole”, “She’s Leaving Home”); and celebration for its own sake ( the “Sgt. Pepper” theme). These ideas, easily relatable and stated both creatively and poignantly, make the album as seamless to the mind as its one-into-the-next track sequencing is to the ear.
They also achieved it by populating its broad and wandering narrative with characters spanning a breathtaking range of station and personality (that are nonetheless equally relatable) - from the superstar-next-door Billy Shears to the fantasy woman Lucy; from the suburban runaway and her clueless parents in “She’s Leaving Home” to the couch potatoes of “When I’m Sixty-Four" and “Good Morning Good Morning”; from the workaday Rita to the flamboyant Mr. Kite. This is either the cast of a Fellini film or the denizens of an undiscovered Mozart light opera for the Wiednertheater.
We can even, in operatic mode, split the album into distinct acts:
Act I:
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”
“With a Little Help from My Friends”
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
Act II:
“Getting Better”
“Fixing a Hole”
“She’s Leaving Home”
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
Act III:
“Within You Without You”
“When I’m Sixty-Four"
“Lovely Rita”
“Good Morning Good Morning”
Act IV:
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)”
“A Day in the Life”
Less this breakdown seem gratuitous or arbitrary, we can point out that while the song-to-song thematic continuity in any of these acts is virtually nonexistent, there is nonetheless a progression in each that moves forward across the album, from start to finish. The idea is that the main characters of this particular opera are not the players on the stage, but the members of the audience.
Act I can be viewed as a welcoming doorway beyond day-to-day existence. Few things are more escapist than a concert, and a rock concert in particular (though the inclusion of Sgt. Pepper’s horn players speaks to the universality of the rite); and the homebody demeanor of Billy Shears states clearly that this doorway is accessible to any and all. From there, the audience is transported into a land of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, there to acknowledge and indulge unexpressed longings.
Act II picks up this thread with a less rapturous thump-thump-thump thump that plops the audience back into day-to-day life, now charged with moving beyond mere existing into striving – “taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday,” and “I’m changing my scene, and I’m doing the best that I can”. This sort of thinking enables true escape, as the suburban teenager slipping out at 5 a.m. attempts when she departs her parents without leave. And where can that lead? To chaos and illusion, Mr. Kite implies.
Act III reboots reality with a moody rebuttal of Kite’s illusions and Lucy’s fantasia and a solemn call for a return to more centered emotional pursuits – pursuits taken up by the future grandparents of Vera, Chuck, and Dave as they ponder holiday on the Isle of Wight. Workaday Rita then brings the point home by presenting as every bit as desirable and unattainable as Lucy, emphasizing that “escape”, the audience is discovering, is really growth. And when that growth takes hold, “everyone you see is full of life.”
Act IV is launched by the recapitulation of the “Sgt. Pepper” theme (sans nostalgia this time around), dissolving into the surreal daily news, mournfully consumed. The opera’s finale is downright fractal – an operetta in itself – and blends the album’s real world and dream world into a disturbing, oscillating montage that rips out the barrier between the two: living and dreaming are not two opposing ends of a spectrum, this little opera is stating, but mutually-subsuming modes of existence.
And the stars of this opera – the audience – are forever changed by this hypnotic, compelling exposition.
Is this true opera? Not really, of course; but it’s as transformative, if not more, as a new and emerging art form, as opera was in the years of its birth. In that sense, Pepper is uncontestably and unabashedly classical.
Classical elements
Whether or not we can reasonably call Pepper opera, we can certainly hold it up as a showcase of classical elements writ large in Beatlesong. Here are the most prominent ones...
“Fixing a Hole”
Brilliant enough that the song opens with the most baroque of instruments, the harpsichord (see “Priming the Partridge Family”, above); Paul’s “Fixing a Hole”, a wonderfully ordinary paean to self-reflection, achieves with great simplicity and directness the classical composer’s central gimmick – the presentation of its lyrical theme in musical form.
On its face, the tune and its message are both upbeat and positive, an anthem of reassurance; but even a passing examination reveals that it is built on a confrontation with unease and uncertainty. Inspired by Paul’s patching of the roof of his house on his remote Scottish farm, “Fixing a Hole” is a “subtly mysterious little song about the nature of identity,” according to Mellers. The singer’s identity is compromised, the song argues, by cracks in his life that need fixing. The subsequent repair job is a metaphor for self-help, of course, and the music becomes a mirror reflecting this effort.
Here’s where it gets classical. Those Victorian harpsichord pulses that open the tune (it’s George Martin playing them) present in stiff, staccato summary the chords that are the song’s backbone: F – C+ - Fm7-B♭9. That’s an opening major chord almost immediately bowing to its own minor, something we almost never see in pop music.18 It serves the lyric perfectly; the “indecisive major-minor intro,” in Tim Riley’s words, reflects the singer’s own shifting moods.19 His mind is wandering, and this inability of the music to settle in one place is a brilliant reflection of that wandering.20
Here’s where it gets seriously classical: Brahms used exactly this trick (even in the same key) to achieve precisely this effect in his “Rhine” Symphony No. 3, which opens with F-A♭-F - his "Frei aber froh" (free but happy).
The argument is made, however, that Brahms’ trick here is the A♭ sandwiched between the Fs, which in fact belongs to F minor, not F major (as in “Fixing a Hole”); which, per classical critic Calvin Dotsey, “imbues the opening with a sense of conflict and instability. Indeed, the conflict between F major and F minor will drive the entire symphony, only reaching resolution in its final pages.”
Why is Dotsey right, and “Frei aber froh” wrong? We find a clue in Brahms’ actual real-world; he was in love with Clara Schumann, wife of his colleague Robert Schumann, a distress so great it kept him from ever marrying. The “Frei aber froh” was in fact a defense of sorts against this distress – his own way of patching cracks in the roof.
“She’s Leaving Home”
Paul continues his demonstration of proficiency in musical metaphor in this subsequent Victorian melodrama, done in suitably corny waltz time, about a teenage girl slipping out the door of her parents’ home, in pursuit of a more fulfilling life.
Here, too, Paul lays down a melodic portrait with careening highs and lows that captures the wailing woes of his story’s protagonists, two self-important parents bemoaning their daughter’s departure; his narrative vocal sways and swoons, almost mocking his subjects, a perfect telling of the story.
He then cranks it all up a notch in the chorus, where his own voice goes into high falsetto - “She... is leaving... home...” - his voice peaking at a breathtaking B-just-below-high-C (the very height of melodrama).21
And John joins in, with very operatic counterpoint (reminiscent of Mozart in The Marriage of Figaro) taking up the cloying whining of the parents (“We gave her most of our lives... sacrificed most of our lives...”) in one of the most compelling and effective demonstrations of the technique in the entire Beatles canon.
And in steps orchestration, George Martin’s trusty ally, to make a great song perfect: no Beatle actually plays on the track. Paul and John are accompanied by a chamber octet-plus-three: four violins, two violas, three cellos, a double bass and a harp. This accompaniment is perfect for the song – and, though not a first for the Beatles (“Eleanor Rigby” had featured a string octet), certainly a unique sound, even for them.
It was not, however, Martin’s score; impatient to get on with recording the song when Martin was busy recording another artist, Paul commissioned Mike Leander to do the honors. The resulting score was the first, up to that point, to be composed by someone other than Martin. He was very hurt by this, but dutifully conducted the ensemble when it came time to lay down the track.
Leander isn’t Martin, but the instrumental track is sublime.22
Opening with just harpist Sheila Bromberg’s two stuttering arpeggiations of an E chord, the track begins sparsely, with waltz pulses from the harp alone, until the break where the first vocal phrase will end, at which point the cellos enter with a melodic counterpoint. The higher strings join in where the vocal will return, saturating the narrative in quaint drama, then drop away in the second half of the verse, where the bass joins in with low, groaning whole notes supporting the harp. The cellos and high strings return, moving toward one another and then receding, with the huff-and-puff of an accordion – and the verse ends, the chorus now erupting in melodramatic glory.
The bass bottoms out on held-over E, bookending-the stratospheric B Paul will be adding vocally. This opens up a huge, cavernous space in the song, as the other strings settle for unobtrusive on-the-beat-pulses to leave room for John’s upcoming plaintiff self-torture. The harp lays out until just before the point where Paul will drop out of falsetto and return to his narrative tenor, adding appropriate transitional color.
The chorus ends abruptly, after 19 bars, and it turns out that this is because Leander had inserted a measure of single-cello connecting tissue between chorus and verse, which Paul had excised. The resulting asymmetry, per Mellers, underscores the tension of the story.
This is the basic structure of this lovely ensemble music, which is as emotionally stirring as the song itself (with just the right amount of over-the-top). But two other wonderful bits emerge.
In the final verse, where we will learn where the girl headed after running away, the high strings flail into tremolo on the B chord, underscoring the anxious anticipation we are feeling over the girl’s fate. Martin would likely not have indulged himself so, but Paul undoubtedly loved this. And finally, in the last chorus, which changes tone (“She... is having... fun!”) the violins snag a 7th note on the second phrase – reminiscent of the 7th Paul shoehorned into the cello part on “Yesterday”.
The result is brimming with emotion, authenticity, and – in the brief space provided – invention. Classical to the core, a perfect piece of musical storytelling.
“A critic in the Village Voice disparaged ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as an imitation of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. But if one must compare them, the songs are independent and incomparable – the point, as I wrote at the time, is that ‘Eleanor Rigby’ though set to a poem of touchingly original and quasi-surrealist winsomeness is a tune as predictable and banal as the average Kentucky carol. ‘She’s Leaving Home’, while set to less interesting verse, is a mazurka equal in melancholy and melodic distinction to those of Chopin.”
~Ned Rorem
“Within You Without You”
George’s unusual Pepper offering is itself a classical music showcase – but an Eastern one, not Western. For more details, see “Classical, Eastern-style", below).
“A Day in the Life”
For the first time in a Beatles song, a full orchestra appears – or half an orchestra, recorded several times, which amounts to the same thing.
The 24-bar gap in “A Day in the Life” that occurs between John’s half of the song and Paul’s (“I read the news today, o boy” to “Woke up, fell out of bed”) needed filling, and they famously chose to fill it with the “musical orgasm” of an orchestra climbing from low notes to high notes randomly, culminating on the E that keys Paul’s song fragment.
Definitively orchestral, but classical in the most modern sense: the move, jointly concocted by Paul and John with Martin’s curious acquiescence, was distinctly avant-garde – in keeping with Paul’s recent explorations of the music of Karl Stockhausen and Luciano Berio (see “Beatles Avant-Garde", below).
The result, described by Everett as “Penderecki-like aleatoric counterpoint,” is augmented by John’s “trilling” vocal, which does a single-step bounce between B and C as Martin’s scored strings keep a tight quarter-note pulse going as the orchestral crescendo slowly launches and builds.
“It was decided that this approach would serve as the song’s conclusion as well as transition,” Everett wrote. “The progression from G to E is ultimately nonfunctional, and as in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’, neither tonal center can claim total authority. Transcendence, the orchestra’s goal, is much more to the point than structural harmonic cohesion.”
Pepper Musicology
One musicologist who took very serious notice of all this was Wilfred Mellers, Professor of Music at the University of York.
“Sgt. Pepper makes the climatic point in the Beatles career, their definite breach with the pop music industry,” he writes in his 1973 book, Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles.
“Henceforth,” he continues, “the world they’ve created is sui generis, bringing its own criteria.”
Mellers gets technical as he analyzes the music, but not before looking at the album from a literary perspective:
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band explores the perennial as well as current problems of adolescence,” he writes, “loneliness, friendship, sex, the generation gap, alienation, fear, nightmare; and perhaps could do so because the Beatles’ early ‘corporate identity’ was always a synthesis of four separate individualities. Yet if Pepper is, in this relatively traditional sense, art, it is also a ritual involving the young – through its electronic extension of musical sounds into the environment of the external world – in a ceremonial togetherness, without the prop of church or state. This two-way function as art and ritual remains valid, even though the Beatles, in common with most pop groups, disclaim both moral responsibility and artistic technique: for that responsibility and technique may be intuitively independent of conscious volition is the heart of the matter.”
Mellers gets right down to it with the title track.
“...if the brisk rhythm, the jaunty fanfares and the military scoring of this first song suggest simple solidarity, the music is far from being what it superficially seems,” he writes. “In tonality it is curiously ambiguous: for while it gravitates toward a smiling G major, the introduction wobbles between dominant sevenths of D and F, and when we reach the tune itself and the Band, having been introduced, plays and sings, the rhythms of the tootling arpeggiated tune are tipsily displaced by cross accents (three against two) and the ‘open’ tonality is clouded by blue false relations. So this public show-piece hides beneath its zest a certain jitteriness. The cosy world of Pepper may embody a truth; but it’s one that is dubiously relevant to the young today.”
In “Lucy”, Meller sees a musical portrait as vivid as the one painted by Lennon’s psychedelic lyric:
“If the lovely opening lines - ‘Picture yourself in a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies’ - recall the imagery of Bob Dylan’s hallucinatory songs, they also evoke a childhood world quintessentially Beatle-like, and the vivid colours are those of a poetically recreated kids’ comic. The music, too, preserves its innocence: a lazily wafting waltz tune undulates around the third of the scale (with dreamy flat sixths and sevenths in the accompaniment), and the fairy-tale scoring, tinklingly plangent, helps us to see and hear the lovely landscape as larger than life, the flowers ‘incredibly high’, the girl’s eyes ‘kaleideoscopic’. The vague tonality, shifting from a modal A up to B flat, helps to float us away on the water, in our ‘newspaper taxi’, looking for ‘the girl with the sun in her eyes’; at which point the Beatles characteristically bring us back to earth with an abrupt change from slow waltz time to a rapid 4/4. The refrain yells, in hammering repeated tones, Lucy (whose name means light) in the sky with diamonds, in what looks like G major, counteracting the B flat key signature, but is perhaps equivocal in effect. The re-statement of this brusque refrain as coda requires three sharps as key signature, though the G sharp never appears, no more than in the original waltz. This time the D major triad forms a plagal cadence to A, but without any sense of finality; and the fade-out carries us back from trip, childhood and dream-girl to reality, though again with equivocal irony.”
Finally, Mellers frames up Pepper as a turning point that serves to define the phases of the Beatles’ career – and likens that career to Beethoven’s:
“The pattern of their young lives seems clear,” he writes at the end of his Pepper analysis. “In their boyhood they discovered a lost Eden, creating a danced music of which the euphoria was valid because newborn. Their first period ends with their hard day’s night’s discovery of human relationships and responsibilities; and this second period consummated in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. If Pepper, however, is the apotheosis of the second period, he also initiates the third: much in the same way as A Hard Day’s Night had one foot in the first period, the other in the second. For whereas many songs in Pepper are concerned with the young mind and senses in relationship to the external world, others follow “Tomorrow Never Knows” (from Revolver) in re-entering the world of dream. This preoccupation with the life ‘within you’ is no longer child-like and innocent, for it absorbs the experience of the Beatles’ middle years. So their three periods have a genuine analogy with Beethoven’s: though this is not to equate their briefly adolescent experience with that of Beethoven’s Promethean lifetime!”
Symphonic structure
Everett argues for a symphonic “structural coherence” in Pepper, citing references of others to “a large-scale harmonic/contrapuntal plan for the album as a whole.”
SONG KEY(S) Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band G
With a Little Help from My Friends E
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds A / B♭ / G
Getting Better C
Fixing a Hole F / Fm
She’s Leaving Home E
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite C / Dm
Within You Without You C#
When I’m Sixty-Four C
Lovely Rita E♭
Good Morning Good Morning A
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise) F/G
A Day in the Life G / E
Acknowledging the lack of consistent thematic unity or musical development beyond the variations in the two “Sgt. Pepper” tracks, he outlines “motivic relationships between key areas, particularly involving C, E, and G. The album begins in G major (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”), then segues into E (“With a Little Help from My Friends”) - not a harmonic relationship, but one that is replicated with the closing song (“A Day in the Life”). Each side ends with a song that begins elsewhere but closes in E. Side 2 begins in C (“Within You Without You”), featuring the motive E - (F) - G in its various melodies, not unlike the C – D – E – C – D – E motive formed by the tonal areas in the closing song of Side 1 (“Mr. Kite”), which also refers to the C – D – E segue from the first into the second song.
“The key areas of the first three songs of Side 2, C (“Within You”) - Db (“When I’m Sixty-Four") - Eb (“Lovely Rita”), might be heard as an altered version of the same motive, and it has already been noted that the reprise changes key from F to G to prepare the final song in a manner that reflects the preparation of “With a Little Help”.
“So there seem to be some motive connections among the openings and closings of the two sides. Additionally, progressive tonality, a previous issue for the Beatles only recently, beginning with Revolver, is heard in “Lucy in the Sky”, “Mr. Kite”, and the reprise, while “Lucy in the Sky”, “Mr. Kite”, and “With a Little Help” begin in areas other than tonic. There is a strong sense that the album is greater than the sum of its parts...”
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