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Sondheim\u2019s most prolific, and ambitious, period began with the concept musical \u201cCompany\u201d (1970) and his collaborations with the eminent producer and director Hal Prince. Gemignani said that, together, they \u201cnever compromised on bringing their ideas to life.\u201d It was during this period that Sondheim emerged as a postmodernist in the vein of John Adams, with a deep well of references presented with a wink or sincerity, but above all with dramaturgical purpose.<\/p>\n
That might be why \u201cFollies,\u201d from 1971, has been called a \u201cpost-musical musical.\u201d Its score abounds in pastiche \u2014 what is \u201cLosing My Mind\u201d if not a Gershwin tune from an alternate universe? \u2014 and artful irony, such as dissonances that betray the darker truth of \u201cThe Road You Didn\u2019t Take.\u201d<\/p>\n
For \u201cPacific Overtures\u201d (1976), Sondheim took a similar approach to Puccini in \u201cTurandot,\u201d by putting authentic sounds \u2014 in this case, Kabuki music \u2014 through his own idiomatic prism. But, like Puccini, he suggests<\/em> rather than represents, unable to escape a Western perspective while purportedly telling a story from a Japanese point of view. It\u2019s a contradiction that doesn\u2019t serve the musical as well as the more globalist style of \u201cSomeone in a Tree,\u201d a song that brought a simplistic American Minimalism to Broadway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Inspired by the spareness of Japanese visual art, Sondheim composed an analogue in a song that does little more than develop a single chord, over and over. As Philip Glass and Steve Reich were applying a world-music sensibility to the classical sphere, Sondheim wrote his own kind of repetitive phase music. \u201cIt\u2019s not insignificant that when I met Steve Reich,\u201d Sondheim later wrote, \u201che told me how much he loved this show.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was on culturally surer ground with \u201cA Little Night Music\u201d (1973), in which the idea of variation is applied to waltz-like melodies in three. He wrote that his favorite form was the theme and variations, and that he respected Rachmaninoff\u2019s \u201cRhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.\u201d This musical came closer to that piece than anything else Sondheim wrote, with a hint of Sibelius.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Sondheim\u2019s sound, like that of any good postmodernist, was both consistent and chameleonic, never more so than in \u201cSweeney,\u201d which displays his genius and misguided musical beliefs in equal measure.<\/p>\n
Aside from \u201cPassion\u201d (1994), it is Sondheim\u2019s most operatic work in sensibility and craft, yet he bristled at the idea of \u201cSweeney\u201d being called an opera or an operetta and once wrote that \u201cwhen \u2018Porgy and Bess\u2019 was performed on Broadway, it was a musical; when it was performed at Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, it was an opera.\u201d (That\u2019s not true. It was always an opera, and played on Broadway at a time when many operas did.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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All told, \u201cSweeney\u201d is a hybrid of music theater, one that brings in yet another medium: cinema. Sondheim believed that, with all due respect, \u201cJohn Williams is responsible for \u2018Jaws,\u2019 not Steven Spielberg.\u201d His score for \u201cSweeney\u201d is similarly rich with edge-of-your-seat underscoring, while the lyrics are both ingenious and inherently melodic. Sondheim was proud of the opening line of \u201cThe Ballad of Sweeney Todd,\u201d and rightfully so: \u201cAttend the tale of Sweeney Todd\u201d sets a mood of theatrical artifice and anachronism, with a piercing consonance in the T\u2019s as unsettling as Nabokov\u2019s \u201ctip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth\u201d in \u201cLolita.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Here, it must be said, that the sound of Sondheim would not be such without a crucial collaborator: Jonathan Tunick, his orchestrator to this day. (His credits were on the scores of all four shows I recently attended.) Sondheim composed at his piano, then sang through while accompanying himself; from there, Tunick teased out the textures of his playing into entire instrumental ensembles.<\/p>\n
In an interview, Tunick said that you can\u2019t overthink the process. \u201cI was able to tell a great deal, not only from the actual notes but from the way he played them,\u201d he added, \u201cthe way he phrased, the way he attacked a chord.\u201d He described the transformation as, more than anything, \u201cDionysian.\u201d At its fullest, the orchestration on Broadway now, the \u201cSweeney\u201d score abounds in colorful flourishes and bone-rattling horror, the fluttering in the winds in one song as delicate as the low brasses are chilling at the start of \u201cEpiphany.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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If \u201cSweeney\u201d reflects a worldview, a pretty dismal one, that speaks to America only allegorically, a more direct view of the country emerges in later works. \u201cMerrily\u201d comments obliquely on the period of history it covers, with the space-age promise of Sputnik giving way to cynical neoliberalism. And American themes are even more overt in the shows that brought Sondheim back together with John Weidman, the book writer of \u201cPacific Overtures\u201d: \u201cAssassins\u201d (1990) and \u201cRoad Show,\u201d a troubled musical that went through multiple revisions and titles before premiering in its final form in 2008. Both shows are flawed \u2014 \u201cRoad Show\u201d structurally, and \u201cAssassins\u201d for its disturbing pageant of mental illness \u2014 but reflect the promise and tragedy of the American dream.<\/p>\n
\u201cAssassins\u201d goes so far as to propose \u201cAnother National Anthem,\u201d which reads as a litany of disenfranchisement from a cast of characters who all feel let down by a system that was supposed to work for them; it\u2019s not far from the complaints that fueled distrust of government today and the rise of Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n