Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber returned to a New York federal court this week , played a song, and saw a jury clear him of claims of copyright infriengment. The nine-member jury found in Webber's favor on Tuesday.
On Monday, Federal District Court Judge Shirley Wohl Kram began her second hearing of Ray Repp's lawsuit against Lloyd Webber. Repp, a religious composer from Maryland, alleged that Lloyd Webber's "Phantom Song" from the hit Broadway musical "Phantom of the Opera" copies Repp's song "Till You."
Kram had dismissed the lawsuit in 1995, determining there were no similarities in the two compositions. However, on Dec. 30, 1997, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit of New York, reversed that decision, stating in its opinion, "there was considerable evidence that "Phantom Song' is so strikingly similar to "Till You' as to preclude the possibility of independent creation and to allow access to be inferred without direct proof." The appellate court also remanded the case back to Kram's court.
Lloyd Webber appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but this October the high court refused to hear the case without comment.
To sway the nine-member jury on Monday, Lloyd Webber actually sat at a piano in the courtroom, playing portions of "Phantom'' 's theme song, and commenting, "I have just always loved these chords,'' and that the song "started like that."
He also testified, according to the New York Times, that he wanted to compose a song for his then-wife, Sarah Brightman, who starred in "Phantom" 's original Broadway production. "I wanted to play around with what we could do with Sarah's voice, and I just came up with this," he told the court.
Repp's lawyers brought back two music professors from the first trial, James Mack and H. Wiley Hitchcock, who repeated their testimonies that both Lloyd Webber's and Repp's compositions were similar. The appeals court, in reversing Kram's earlier decision, had cited the two professors' testimonies.