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Andrew Lloyd Webber jokes that he has mixed feelings about becoming the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor this weekend.

“I’m delighted, absolutely delighted,” he says. “I’m overjoyed. It means a lot to have an American honor. Obviously, the British ones I’ve sort of had.” (The world’s most popular theater composer was made Baron Lloyd-Webber in 1997.)

But he adds, “You’re always worried when you receive something like this that your career’s over.”

One hopes Lord Lloyd-Webber is joking.

He’s speaking by phone from Las Vegas, where his biggest success, “The Phantom of the Opera,” was edited into “Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular” in a $40-million, custom-built theater in the Venetian earlier this year.

His London revival of “The Sound of Music” opened just over two weeks ago to both critical and public acclaim.

Even someone as successful as Mr. Lloyd Webber, it seems, can’t help but look to the past.

“I know I will never have anything in my career that’s as big as ‘Phantom.’ When something like that happens, it’s a phenomenon,” he says. “Frankly, ‘The Sound of Music’ in London is the biggest thing since ‘Phantom.’ ”

Luckily, the composer has neither rested on his laurels nor given up trying to do something new.

“I don’t think, I just enjoy writing,” he says. “Everyone’s got to be realistic.” Even if he had another huge hit, he notes, “I wouldn’t see it run as long as ‘Phantom.’ ”

“Phantom,” which premiered in 1988, is the highest-grossing entertainment event of all time and the longest-running show on Broadway. The second-longest-running show is also an Andrew Lloyd Webber creation: 1981’s “Cats,” based on a poem cycle by T.S. Eliot.

He’s composed two film scores, a song cycle, a set of variations and a Requiem Mass dedicated to his father, the composer William Lloyd Webber. But it’s his 13 musicals — including such collaborations with lyricist Tim Rice as “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita” — for which he’s best known.

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been in love with musical theater,” he recalls. “My generation, on the whole, certainly in Britain, wasn’t very interested in musicals. But I was.” He credits his start to being lucky enough to meet some of the greats, including “Sound of Music” composer Richard Rodgers.

But perhaps it was his embrace of all genres of music that made Mr. Lloyd Webber such an original. “I was also interested in what was going on in contemporary music at the time, things like the Beatles,” he says. “It never seemed to me that there was any problem bringing more contemporary music into the musical theater. It seemed a very good thing.”

Changing the musical grammar of musical theater was never something “purposeful,” Mr. Lloyd Webber says. “In the end, for something to work in theater, it has to be story driven,” he explains. “That’s the most important thing. You have to have the right idiom for the story you’re going to set.”

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