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 agai ...

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