It’s been sung by everyone from Patti LuPone and Neil Diamond to Aretha Franklin (at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993) and Josh Grobin.
It turned an unemployed, frumpy lady from Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland — one Susan Boyle — into an international singing sensation.
And it’s almost certain to win Anne Hathaway an Oscar.
All this from a song that was conceived at a gas station on the way to a chic seaside resort in the north of France.
Claude-Michel Shönberg and Alain Boublil, who wrote “Les Miz,” came up with the idea for “I Dreamed a Dream,” Fantine’s soaring first-act lament, in 1980.
The assignment, says Boublil, “was to take 50 pages of [Victor Hugo’s] novel and turn them into a three-minute song.” Shönberg wrote the tune, which charts the descent of Fantine into prostitution, fairly quickly, but Boublil struggled to find the right words. Then, while on his way for a holiday in Le Tourquet, he stopped at a station to fill up his car. Standing at the pump, he began to sing (in French, bien sur!) the lyrics that would become “I Dreamed a Dream.”
A literal translation of Boublil’s first, rather vivid verse would go something like this (here I must thank Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli, a Corsican, for her translating skills):
I dreamed of another life
But life killed my dreams
Like you smother the last cries
Of an animal you finish off
It’s very effective in French, I assure you, but I’m not sure it would have won Boyle a spot on “Britain’s Got Talent.”
When producer Cameron Mackintosh picked up “Les Misérables” for London, he hired journalist Herbert Kretzmer to do the English lyrics (Boublil writes in French).
Kretzmer took a five-month leave from the Daily Mail, where he was a television critic and, in what he describes as a “mad, dream-like life,” locked himself in his apartment on Basil Street near Harrod’s and went to work on the English lyrics.
Early one morning, about 2 or 3, he recalls, he was standing at his desk working on “I Dreamed a Dream” when, out of nowhere, came the song’s most powerful verse, the verse that made Boyle an instant celebrity when she hit those last five ascending notes:
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame
“I love the first two lines, but I’ve never been asked to explain them because I don’t know how to explain them,” says Kretzmer. “I remember once Tom Stoppard was talking about words that come to him — or whole sentences or images — and he said when that happens, he drops the pencil on the desk, puts his hands together and says, ‘Thank you.’ ”
The song, first performed by LuPone in the London production of “Les Misérables,” became an instant musical-theater standard.
It’s even more effective in the film because Boublil altered its location. In the musical, it comes after Fantine is thrown out of the factory. In the movie, she sings it after she’s been raped.
“You really feel you are digging inside her head, inside her soul,” Boublil says.