Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

Sally’s boredom with Buddy’s constant admiration. Significantly, the music Sondheim gives Sally to sing for this mantra, “in Buddy’s eyes” (or “arms”), is the only music that fits the underlying static harmony. It is also significant, perhaps a sign of her lack of self-awareness and desire to avoid the psychological root of her problems (symbolically represented as the harmonic root of her song), that when Sally moves from the third to the fifth of the tonic triad, she conspicuously avoids singing the root note of this chord, so relentlessly repeated in the bass.

In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim describes this song as a “woman’s lie to her former lover” (Ben), but it may also be interpreted as her lie to the man she married (Buddy), a man who loves her deeply and who provides a steady but boring static grounding, both psychological and harmonic. For Sondheim, the song’s subtext is Sally’s anger at being rejected by Ben many years ago, a subtext that is not found explicitly in either the lyrics or implied by the melody or harmony. Sondheim credits and praises Jonathan Tunick, his principal orchestrator for more than the thirty years between Company and Road Show, who demonstrated his understanding of the subtext of this song by assigning the “dry” woodwinds to Sally’s wry references about Buddy, and warm strings for the self-referential parts of the text, Sondheim perhaps gives too much credit to Tunick. Even without this orchestral subtlety, which Sondheim describes as analogous to the details in the head of the Statue of Liberty that so impressed Hammerstein, it is arguable that Sondheim’s own subtle musical distinctions between the harmonically synchronized repetitive rhythmic pattern that accompanies the melodic mantra “in Buddy’s eyes” and the more varied contrasting musical phrases when she refers to herself (but still in Buddy’s eyes) would emerge with comparable clarity even in a piano-vocal reduction.

One last mentor, one not cited in “Theater Lyrics,” needs to be mentioned: the composer and mathematician Milton Babbitt. Babbitt’s mentoring began several years after Hammerstein’s initial tutelage when Sondheim, who had majored in mathematics as well as music at Williams College, elected to use his Hutchinson Prize money to study principles of composition and analyze popular songs such as Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” with the illustrious Princeton music theory and composition professor and avant-garde composer, who also was knowledgeable about jazz and loved musicals (he even tried his hand at writing a musical score once and published some of the resulting theater songs).26 At the same time he was teaching Sondheim traditional classical and popular musical forms, Babbitt was pioneering a new composition technique widely known as “total serialization” as well as complex electronic works. Babbitt has stated that he did not ask Sondheim to work within this modernist idiom because he did not consider it appropriate to his student’s aesthetic aims. But is it not possible that Sondheim chose Babbitt as a postgraduate compositional mentor at least partly because of his gathering reputation as a mathematically adept modernist? While thirty years earlier Schoenberg systematically arranged pitch according to various permutations of a twelve-tone series in his quest to systematically avoid a tonal center, Babbitt less systemically serialized other parameters as well, including rhythm and tone color.

Stephen Sondheim. © AL HIRSCHFELD. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the MARGO FEIDEN GALLERIES LTD., NEW YORK. WWW.ALHIRSCHFELD.COM

It is possible to make the analogy between Babbitt’s allegedly “total” serialization and Sondheim’s allegedly “modernist” musicals, aided and abetted by extraordinarily thoughtful and creative choreographers, directors, scene designers, and orchestrators, which really expand upon, rather than discard, the traditions established by earlier acknowledged masterpieces. Like Babbitt, who only seemed to break with the past while really extending Schoenberg’s aesthetics as well as his methods, Sondheim expanded on the insights and achievement of Hammerstein and other predecessors in what had become, by the 1950s, a great American musical tradition. Following the example of his theatrical mentors, Hammerstein, Shevelove, and Laurents, the revolutionary traditionalist Sondheim would continue to probe into the nuances of his complex characters and the meaning of his dramatic subjects, achieving moments of moving emotional directness as well as dazzling verbal and artistic pyrotechnics.

The Prince Years (1970–1981): Sweeney Todd

While the so-called integrated musical remained very much alive after West Side Story, the next step in dramatic organicism, the so-called concept musical, where “all elements of the musical, thematic and presentational, are integrated to suggest a central theatrical image or idea,” began to receive notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s.27 Sondheim and his collaborators, especially Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett, Harold Prince, Boris Aronson, who designed the first four Prince-Sondheim collaborations with striking originality, and several excellent librettists (George Furth, James Goldman, John Weidman, and Hugh Wheeler), were in the forefront of this development. Musicals based more on themes than on narrative action were no more new in the 1960s than the integrated musicals were in the 1940s. Nevertheless, earlier concept musicals, for example, the revue As Thousands Cheer in 1933 (arguably all revues are concept musicals), book musicals such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (1947), or Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948)—like the precociously integrated Show Boat and Porgy and Bess explored in the present survey—deviate from what Max Weber or Carl Dahlhaus would call an “ideal type.”28 In any event, the pioneering concept musicals of the late 1940s, Allegro and Love Life, failed to inspire a flock of popularly successful followers. In the 1970s, Sondheim and his collaborators were clearly critically central Broadway figures, even though they garnered only relatively limited live audiences, while more popular artists such as Andrew Lloyd Webber or Stephen Schwartz were marginalized and criticized, probably unfairly, for their alleged aesthetic vacuities.

Perhaps more than any single individual, the inspiration in the move toward the concept musical ideal was Robbins, who early in his career had established thematic meaning through movement and dance as the choreographer of The King and I (1951) and as the director-choreographer for Sondheim’s first