Written By: Andrew Lloyd Webber

EVITA was Tim Rice's idea. He was very intrigued by the fact that she was mentioned in the context of a whole load of fifties figures who were very successful, including people like James Dean, and I think he was curious to find out why she became this kind of cult figure, this huge figure in Argentina. And I think he became very attracted to the story.

The biggest problem for me as the composer of it is that of course I could have let the whole thing go as a high romance. I could make everybody cry their eyes out at the end of all this, but that was not the point of the piece. In a way, the piece had to keep this slightly Brechtian approach to the whole thing, where you have the Ché character able to commentate on the quite grisly things that she did. And to turn her into some sort of great romantic figure would have been really quite easy. But no, I never fell in love with the woman—very much the reverse. When Tim talked to me about the idea of doing the piece, I thought that if I could crack the moment where she did some piece which indeed did turn into an anthem, then I would have done it. This is a very interesting dramatic thing, because here you have a song that represents Eva Perón at her very height and at her most manipulative—when she's speaking on the Casa Rosada balcony—and yet the song eventually turns on her. When she does the final broadcast, it becomes something which is really pathetic. And I thought, if I could crack that, then I've got a dramatic line through the piece from which most other things would follow. And so, in fact, "Don't Cry for Me" was the first thing I wrote. And if that hadn't happened, I don't think we would have gone on to do EVITA. It's very hard, because I just know that we had to have one central thing like that. It was the gangplank of the whole thing. But, in fact, the song that would carry the show or would carry the person playing Eva Perón in the theater was "Rainbow High." If the artist cracked that, then the show was theirs.