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

“What I wanted to write,” Sondheim says, “was a horror movie. The whole point of the thing is that it’s a background score for a horror film, which is what I intended to do and what it is. All those chords, and that whole kind of harmonic structure … the use of electronic sounds and the loud crashing organ had a wonderful Gothic feeling. It had to be unsettling, scary, and very romantic. In fact, there’s a chord I kept using throughout, which is sort of a personal joke, because it’s a chord that occurred in every Bernard Herrmann score.”47

In a later interview Sondheim elaborates on the connections between Hermann’s score for Hangover Square and the musical requirements for a “musical thriller.” His remarks reinforce the position that the plentiful score of Sweeney Todd was due more to the requirements of mid-twentieth-century American horror film scoring and harmony than the demands of nineteenth-century European opera:

I wanted to pay homage to him [Herrmann] with this show, because I had realized that in order to scare people, which [is] what Sweeney Todd is about, the only way to you can do it, considering that the horrors out on the street are so much greater than anything you can do on the stage, is to keep music going all the time. That’s the principle of suspense sequences in movies, and Bernard Hermann was a master in that field. So Sweeney Todd not only has a lot of singing, it has a lot of underscoring. It’s infused with music, to keep the audience in a state of tension, to make them forget they’re in a theater and to prevent them from separating themselves from the action. I based a lot of the score on a specific chord that Herrmann uses in almost all his film work, and spun it out from that. That and the “Dies Irae,” which is one of my favorite tunes, and is full of menace.48

Like West Side Story, the score of Sweeney Todd demonstrates impressively intricate musical connections that are dramatically meaningful. Although he acknowledged some indecision about the conclusion of the work, the idea that major characters would be given distinctive themes and the decision to have these themes “collide in the end” was present almost from conception. This is how Sondheim explained his procedure: “I determined that it would be fun for Sweeney Todd to start each character with a specific musical theme and develop all that character’s music out of that theme, so that each song would depend in the true sense of the word on the last one. Sweeney’s opening scene dictates his next song, and so on. It’s a handy compositional principle, and it seemed to me that it would pay off very nicely at the end.”49

In order to understand how this compositional principle works it is necessary to introduce the Gregorian chant Dies irae (literally the Latin for “Day of Wrath” and more conventionally Judgment Day), a thirteenth-century text and melody that became officially incorporated into the Catholic Requiem Mass, the mass for the dead, by the sixteenth century. It is this chant that Sondheim chose as the starting point for Sweeney’s theme and for the opening choral number, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” sung by a chorus to help the audience “attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” and reprised to introduce various episodes throughout the story. With its connections to death and the Last Judgment and its musical resonances, the theme has been especially favored in the last two hundred years from Berlioz to Rachmaninoff. It was an inspired choice to serve as the embodiment of a character who by the end of the first act “Epiphany” will take it upon himself to impart his demented vengeful judgment on the world. On the stage, “Epiphany” provided an opportunity for Sweeney to break the fourth wall and invites the audience to “Come and visit your good friend Sweeney” and to get a shave and “welcome to the grave.” The Sweeney in Burton’s film extends this idea and, in a fantasy sequence, leaves his shop, roams the streets like a ghost visible only to the audience, and invites unaware passersby to get their shaves and his vengeance.

Sondheim explained why he chose the chant and offers information about how he used it: “I always found the Dies Irae moving and scary at the same time,” says Sondheim. “One song, ‘My Friends,’ was influenced by it … it was the inversion of the opening of the Dies Irae. And although it was never actually quoted in the show, the first release of ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ was a sequence of the Dies Irae—up a third, which changed the harmonic relationship of the melodic notes to each other.”50

The following set of examples (see Example 15.1 on the next page) begins with the opening of the Dies irae chant, continues with various transformations of the chant’s opening in Sweeney Todd (mainly its first seven notes), and concludes with a famous use of the work in the classical literature and a possible earlier allusion by Sondheim himself.

Although Sondheim states he did not quote Dies irae (15.1a) literally in Sweeney Todd, the published score offers just such a quotation on its second page in the Prelude (15.1b).51 Probably the most prominent and most recurring reference to Dies irae is the paraphrase of the chant that marks the opening of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” which includes notes 2–7 of the chant (15.1c). Interestingly, the jig-like rhythm of this paraphrase is reminiscent of the melodically more literal rhythmic and major mode transformation of the chant in the “Dream of the Witches Sabbath” movement of Berlioz’s famous Symphonie fantastique of 1830 (15.1 h). The longer and more chant-like notes (the first five notes) at the portion of “The Ballad” shown in Example 15.1d described by Sondheim are offset by some pitch alterations to create another major