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

mode variation on the tune. Anthony’s paraphrase of the tune (including some changes in the note order in the first four notes of the chant) in “No Place Like London” (15.1e) adds harmonic density by placing the Dies irae in F minor against E in the bass (plus two non-chord tones B and D), to create an enriched variant of the “Sweeney Todd” chord (a minor seventh with the seventh in the bass or in this case E-F-A-C).

Example 15.1. Dies irae and Sweeney Todd

(a) Dies irae original chant (beginning)

(b) First reference of the Dies irae in Sweeney Todd Prelude (first seven chant notes)

(c) Dies irae paraphrased in the opening of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (notes 2 through 7 of the chant)

(d) “Sequence of the Dies Irae—up a third” described by Sondheim in “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” (first five chant notes)

(e) Dies irae paraphrased in “No Place Like London (first four chant notes rearranged as notes 4, 2, 1, and 3 with notes 5-7 in original order and all seven notes harmonized with the “Sweeney Todd” chord)

(f) Fleeting allusion to Dies irae in “The Worst Pies in London” (first five chant notes)

(g) Dies irae in “My Friends” (first four chant notes first inverted and then in their original order)

(h) Dies irae in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (quotation and transformation, first seven chant notes)

(i) Possible allusion to Dies irae in the “The Miller’s Son” from A Little Night Music (first five chant notes with an added note between notes 4 and 5)

The Dies irae does not appear directly in the music of the Beggar Woman (Sweeney’s wife Lucy) but nevertheless provides its foundation. In particular, the half step descent on the first two notes of the chant appears prominently in her recurring lament (“Alms … alms … for a mis’rable woman”). In “Epiphany” the descending half step will launch a scalar series of four notes starting with the musical phrase that begins “never see Johanna” and repeated obsessively with new words for the rest of the song. It is possible Sondheim realized that the descending four-note scalar figure, a ubiquitous motive that goes back at least as far as John Dowland’s song “Flow My Tears” in the early seventeenth century, has become a traditional musical sign of lament and mourning. In any case, this is how Sondheim used this simple but powerful figure in “Epiphany” and later when Sweeney mourns his Lucy’s death in the Final Scene. Although the musical connection between the Dies irae with Mrs. Lovett is present (in the midst of “The Worst Pies in London” for the first notes of the chant), the chant reference occurs so fleetingly it is barely audible and may be more imagined than real (15.1f).

Example 15.1g shows how the first four notes of “My Friends” inverts the opening notes of Dies irae as Sondheim noted when describing his use of the chant (in the second phrase of the song, the first four notes of the chant appear in their original order). The remaining excerpts demonstrate how Berlioz famously reused the Dies irae in his Symphonie fantastique (15.1h) and how Sondheim might have previously incorporated the chant in the music he gave Petra to sing in the defiant recurring faster section of Night Music’s “The Miller’s Son” (15.1i). If the allusion is intentional in the earlier musical, the point might be considered ironic in that this young sensual character seems so non-judgmental and full of life. On the other hand, the irony is tempered by the fact that Petra points out in her song that life is brief and moments of joy are fleeting.

Reprise Redux

The reprise or return of a song, usually the return of a song from the first act in the second, is a tested, ubiquitous, and perhaps even invariable feature of the Broadway musical. In a previous chapter we have observed the replacement of “Buddie Beware” in favor of a reprise of “I Get a Kick Out of You” in Anything Goes in deference to Ethel Merman’s wishes. In another chapter we noted that Kiss Me, Kate, a show written by Cole Porter during the heyday of Rodgers and Hammerstein, implausibly reprised a song “So in Love” by a character who had no discernible opportunity to have heard it. We have also seen that the change of a word “how I loved you” instead of “if I loved you” was momentous when it was reprised in Carousel. The next chapter will look at the frequent, systemic reprises of Lloyd Webber.

In his essay, “The Musical Theater,” Sondheim voices his skepticism about the effectiveness of reprises.52 For Sondheim, the fact that most characters change throughout the play necessitates at least a change in the lyric of a reprised song. Throughout his career Sondheim has found welcome opportunities to reprise the melody of a song, but never a situation where it was possible to reprise its lyric. This is why he objected to Rodgers’s desire to reprise “Take the Moment” in Do I Hear a Waltz? simply because the composer wanted the audience to hear the tune again (as was Merman’s rationale for reprising “I Get a Kick Out of You” thirty years earlier).53

In a double interview with Prince and Sondheim, “Author and Director,” the “author” commends the “director” who initiated the idea to reprise all the songs at the end of Night Music.54 Although in the end they were able to reprise only five songs (“Soon,” “You Must Meet My Wife,” “A Weekend in the Country,” “Every Day a Little Death,” and “Send in the Clowns,” plus significant underscoring of “Liaisons”), Sondheim found this device movielike and “very effective.” With Sweeney Todd, Sondheim credits Wheeler with the suggestion that he could base the final twenty minutes of the show on “little modules” of reprised melody. Although Sondheim may not have completed some of the unmusical portions of these twenty minutes to his full satisfaction,