I wonder if it isn’t time to put in a kind word for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I stand second to none in the buckets of ordure I’ve dumped on him over the years, but, reading the casual swipes he’s taken in these pages from both Roger Scruton and Roger Kimball, I find myself suddenly warming to the old boy. For one thing, in the increasing tension between economic conservatism and social conservatism, Lloyd Webber represents one of the more benign examples of cultural capitalism unleashed, lacking even the shallow, dreary progressive moralizing of Disney. More importantly, the fact of Lloyd Webber’s immense popularity suggests a widespread public demand for the kind of bourgeois musical culture whose loss Dr. Scruton rightly mourns and whose absence is proving increasingly catastrophic.

Moreover, unlike the patrons of Gilbert and Sullivan or Rogers and Hammerstein, today’s Lloyd Webber fans have had to maintain their devotion against a barrage of contempt from all sides. Everyone despises Lloyd Webber: highbrows, lowbrows, even the Broadway middlebrows he’s supplanted. “I wouldn’t mind,” one distinguished “serious” composer said, “but bloody hell, he thinks he’s Mozart.” The old Broadway saw might have been invented for him: “Nobody likes him but the public.” There is no cachet to owning a Lloyd Webber cast album—quite the opposite, since both the elite and the mass media have agreed between them that what’s of value in popular culture is “dangerous,” “on the edge,” etc. Yet the highlights CD of the PhantomLondon cast has