Lament Lyrics – Evita

Song Overview

Review and Highlights

I hear “Lament” as the exhale after a two-hour ascent. The orchestra steps back, letting classical guitar, harp and strings frame a confessional that sits between aria and folk prayer. Patti LuPone shapes the lines like last pages - clean diction, clipped consonants, no excess. Che and the Embalmers interrupt with cold ritual, and that tension - warm memory against public myth-making - is the point.

Highlights

1. Structure - a through-sung coda that pivots between Eva’s private reckoning and civic pageantry.
2. Motivic callback - the Embalmers’ chant flips the consumerist inventory of “Rainbow High” into mortuary inventory, turning style into specimen.
3. Performance detail - LuPone rides the low-to-mid register, saving lift for the final pleas, which hit harder because they’re rationed.
4. Key takeaway - the show ends not with roar but residue. Legacy is curated. So is memory.

Creation History

Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics) for Evita, the piece appears as the final track on the 1979 Evita: Premiere American Recording with LuPone, Mandy Patinkin and the Broadway company. The album was recorded in Los Angeles in July 1979 and remixed in London soon after. “Lament” returns in the 1996 film adaptation, reorchestrated as a whispered graveside farewell for Madonna and Antonio Banderas.

Song Meaning and Annotations

Plot

The funeral has happened. The crowds have gone home. Eva addresses whoever will listen - family, country, history - and tallies the bargain she struck: velocity over longevity, radiance over rest. Che surfaces with a dry historical footnote about the planned tomb and the vanishing of her body. The Embalmers, clinical and devout, prep her image for permanent display. Curtain.

Song Meaning

This is legacy audit. Eva imagines the long life she never wanted, then blesses the life she chose. The mood stays hushed, edged with irony whenever the world intrudes. Message-wise, it’s a final thesis on myth-making: if politics turned her into a brand, death will finish the job.

Annotations

“Remember I was very young then... So what use could fifty, sixty, seventy be?... And how I lived! How they shone! But how soon the lights were gone!”

Time elasticity as motive: young ambition collapses decades into a single spotlight. The annotation nails it - she preferred intensity to duration; the lyric reads like someone who knew the warranty would be short. The historical footnote matters too: Eva Perón died at 33, and the show leans into that fatal pace.

“Oh my daughter! Oh my son!”

No biological children - so the line widens to the nation. It’s maternal populism, a bit theatrical, but it tracks with how Peronism framed her - mother of the descamisados.

“Eyes, hair, face, image - All must be preserved...”

The Embalmers’ list echoes - and darkly parodies - the earlier “Rainbow High” makeover litany. What was once publicity becomes preservation. Genre-wise, that’s the show’s pop-rock language rubbing against liturgical chant, turning a fashion montage into a mortuary catalog.

“Money was raised to build a tomb... And Evita’s body disappeared for seventeen years.”

The factual tail on the song is stranger than fiction: exposition about the unbuilt monument and the body’s disappearance amplifies the theme. The musical compresses a decades-long custody battle with a single, almost throwaway aside - Che as chalkboard scribbler while the orchestra holds its breath.

Style and instrumentation

Rhythm sits on a slow, even pulse. Acoustic guitar and harp carry the weight, with strings warming the edges. It’s the opposite of the show’s brassier numbers - a chamber space where text leads and harmony sparsely underlines.

Emotional arc

It starts reflective, then turns supplicant. The temperature never boils; it thins. By the last lines, Eva speaks less to people than to posterity.

Cultural touchpoints

The mirrored ritual owes something to 20th century political funerals - Lenin’s tomb, the iconography of preserved leaders - and to mid-century media culture, where an image can outlive a person with unsettling ease.

Key Facts

• Artist: Patti LuPone with Mandy Patinkin and the Original Broadway Cast of Evita
• Composer: Andrew Lloyd Webber
• Lyricist: Tim Rice
• Producer: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice
• Release Date: July 1979
• Album: Evita: Premiere American Recording (Original Broadway Cast)
• Label: MCA Records
• Length: 2:56
• Track #: 23
• Language: English
• Genre: Pop musical - rock opera elements
• Instruments: voice, classical guitar, harp, strings, ensemble voices
• Music style: through-sung finale in lamento form, with choral interjections
• Featured: Mandy Patinkin (Che), Company/Embalmers
• Mood: reflective, austere, elegiac

Questions and Answers

Who produced “Lament” on the Original Broadway Cast album?

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

When was “Lament” released in this version?

July 1979, as part of the Evita: Premiere American Recording.

Who wrote it?

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice.

Was “Lament” ever released as a single?

No. Later Evita singles came from the 1996 film soundtrack, not this finale.

Where does it sit in the show?

It’s the closing number - the last track on the cast album and the film soundtrack.

Awards and Chart Positions

The 1979 Broadway cast album featuring “Lament” won the Grammy Award for Best Cast Show Album. In cinema, the 1996 soundtrack that includes “Lament” powered a major awards run - among them the Academy Award and Golden Globe for “You Must Love Me,” alongside strong soundtrack chart peaks worldwide.

Additional Info

• Historical backdrop: After Eva Perón’s death in 1952, her embalmed body was publicly displayed, then removed after the 1955 coup and hidden abroad under a false name before returning to Argentina in the 1970s. The song’s lines about a missing tomb and a vanished body draw from this saga.
• Covers and adaptations: The film version - Madonna with Antonio Banderas - reframes the number in a near-whisper over guitar and harp. Later productions in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese keep it as the final reckoning.
• Intertext in the score: The Embalmers’ list is a morbid mirror of Eva’s earlier self-styling in “Rainbow High.”