Jesus Christ Superstar

Before the curtain rises, it distills the work's entire sound world. In the film it plays over the actors arriving in the desert and preparing the performance.

• The short, sharp guitar figure at the opening (a riff, a brief repeated instrumental phrase) serves as the work's signature.
• Orchestra and synthesizer are layered one after another over the rock band, as if the classically trained Lloyd Webber were declaring an intent to bridge two worlds.
• Melodic fragments of the songs to come flash by in advance, so returning to the start after hearing the whole reveals much that sounds new.
• In the film version, André Previn's arrangement broadens the orchestra, lending it more of a film score's weight than the album version.

Judas steps forward as the first narrator, confessing his anxiety for his teacher and his political fears. The work's point of view is fixed in this song.

• A doggedly repeated guitar riff returns throughout the work like a marker of Judas's unease.
• Murray Head on the album sings rough and direct, while Carl Anderson in the film uses a soul singer's wide range, giving the same Judas a different grain.
• Judas sings of worry more than anger. The more we come to share that worry, the heavier the betrayal to come weighs on us.
• In the film, a distant shot of Judas standing alone on a desert hill heightens the song's sense of isolation.

A song in which Mary Magdalene soothes Jesus, with the quarrel between Judas and Jesus layered over it.

• It moves in five beats to the bar (time signature 5/4). Because it never divides neatly into fours or threes, a strange unsteadiness lingers beneath the words of comfort.
• Mary's gentle melody alternates with Judas's sharp interjections, revealing the relationship between the two within a single song.
• Late in Act One, after “The Temple,” the song is briefly sung again (a reprise), and this time it sounds closer to a lullaby lulling a weary Jesus to sleep.

After the commotion of the temple scene, Mary is left alone, bewildered, unsure what it is she feels for Jesus.

• Yvonne Elliman's album recording is documented as having been finished in a single take at Olympic Studios in June 1970. The unadorned voice suits the song's hesitant way of speaking.
• In 1971 Elliman's single and Helen Reddy's cover sat in the Billboard Hot 100 top 40 at the same time, a rare case of two recordings of one song charting together.
• This melody returns in Act Two, in “Judas' Death,” from Judas's own mouth. One character taking up another's melody to bind the two together is the leitmotif (leading motif) at work.
• Elliman played Mary on the album, on Broadway and in the film, and was nominated for a Golden Globe for the film version.

Left alone just before his arrest, Jesus argues with God and questions him, and in the end accepts. It is the emotional peak of the work.

• Its structure starts from a low, quiet monologue and bursts open as the pitch climbs and the orchestra thickens. A single song passes step by step through doubt, anger and resignation.
• The top-note cries of Ian Gillan on the album and Ted Neeley in the film became emblems of the role, and today's actors playing Jesus are still measured by this passage.
• The moment when the music suddenly falls away after the cry is crucial. In that space where the sound recedes, we hear the character's resolve.
• In the decades since the 1973 film, Neeley has taken up the role again on stage.

Breaking into the trials, King Herod mocks Jesus, daring him to work a miracle. It is a song that deliberately twists the course of the tragedy.

• Vaudeville-style piano and rhythm (vaudeville being popular entertainment that strings together song, dance and jokes), recalling the variety shows of old America, deliberately clash with the rock music on either side.
• The light, upbeat music lays bare the cruelty of the powerful. It sounds like a passage where laughter and terror sit side by side.
• The melody of this song was originally “Try It and See,” submitted to Britain's 1969 Eurovision Song Contest preliminaries and rejected. With new lyrics, it found its way here.
• In the film, Josh Mostel played Herod as a pleasure-seeking monarch.

The dead Judas returns and asks Jesus who he really is. Written first and released as a single, it is the song from which the whole work began.

• The refrain, backed by a female chorus, borrows the idiom of Black American church gospel and soul music. It feels as though a show stage suddenly opens at the end of the Passion story.
• Murray Head's single, recorded in October 1969 and released in November, was the trial run that introduced the whole work to the world.
• Judas only asks, and Jesus does not answer. A song built without an answer turns the question back on the audience.
• In the film, Carl Anderson appears in white as if descending from above, revealing the director's intent not to paint Judas only in dark tones.

A wordless piece for strings that plays after all the songs have ended. It is also the music that envelops the film's final scene.

• The title points to the Bible verse describing the garden tomb where Jesus was laid. The choice to leave only strings in place of words stands in for the stillness of that place.
• Because it follows the earlier tumult and the fragmentary sounds of “The Crucifixion,” even its simple flow of harmonies brings a deep sense of consolation.
• It first appeared on the B-side of the 1969 “Superstar” single, so the beginning and the end both lead back to the first record through which the work reached the world.
• In the film, the story returns to its framing device while this music plays, and that final image has drawn widely differing interpretations.