From an interview with Andrew Lloyd Webber...
Question: You love Puccini. Isn't "Memory" a song in that vein of romanticism?
ALW: I'd written the tune as a spoof Puccini item for something else, and as often happens, I hadn't actually used it anywhere. So when a song was needed for Grizabella, back it came again. When I first wrote the tune, I played it to my father and asked him if it sounded like Puccini. "No," he said, "it sounds like ten million dollars!"
Hehe.