#207 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Saturday November 27)
Good morning!
Good morning!
MUSIC AND THEATRE
Yesterday America lost the musical theatre genius of our generation—Stephen Sondheim, at age 91. Sondheim cut his teeth writing lyrics for the classics Gypsy and West Side Story. Under the tutelage of Oscar Hammerstein II and Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim was the apotheosis of 20th century musical theatre.
He went on to even greater renown with the “concept musical” Company, a favorite of mine. Here is Dean Jones singing the emotional show-stopper “Being Alive” from the recording of the cast album in a true tour de force (the final cut starts at 0:55):
Sondheim went on to a remarkable career with Sundays in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sondheim was notable in his super-literate lyrics plumbing sets of seemingly competing emotions—longing and rage, love and loss, compassion and anger, obsession (see, e.g., Georges Seurat) and selfishness. He was able to be dispassionate, telling difficult stories often involving complicated people, while understanding the basic humanity of these troubled people and the universality of their emotions.
For an example of the vast range of Sondheim, from love to macabre to emotional support, here a concert versions of some of his greatest tunes, all from a single musical, each sung by Broadway greats:
§ First, the love song “Joanna”, from Sweeney Todd, sung by Bernadette Peters (note the melody descending to atonality and back):
.
§ And then there is “A Little Priest” sung by Patti LuPone on Sondheim’s 80th birthday (about making meat pies, loaded with pun after pun about such a macabre subject:
.
§ And finally, “No One’s Gonna Harm You” sung by Neil Patrick Harris:
What a genius. We are all in his debt for the genius of his contributions to the American musical canon.
A FINAL WORD
Ben Brantley wrote about Sondheim dealt with emotions in a New York Times article last year:
“But what happens when love itself becomes the overwhelming obsession? Sondheim finally approached that subject late in his career, with “Passion” (1994), his penultimate work to date. As shaped by Sondheim and the writer and director James Lapine (his collaborator on “Sunday”), this operatic masterwork follows the initiation of an ordinary man, a soldier, into the labyrinth of its titular subject.
His instructor…Foscca, teaches him that love is an irrational force — ‘as pure as breath, as permanent as death, implacable as stone.’ The paradoxically uplifting darkness of the music here suggests that the triumph of love is something neither to celebrate nor to lament. It simply is, in all its irreducible complexity.
When Fosca describes what might be considered both her nemesis and her salvation, she might be speaking for Sondheim — a composer once dismissed as all head and no heart. ‘I know I feel too much,’ she says. ‘I often don’t know what to do with my feelings.’ Sondheim has always transformed that not knowing, a state in which we all exist, into some of the most fully feeling songs ever written.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/theater/stephen-sondheim-composer.html
POETRY
As the Festival of Lights begins this week, a bittersweet poem about light:
The Light Wraps You
Pablo Neruda
The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight
that revolves around you.
Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.
A bough of fruit falls from the sun on your dark garment.
The great roots of night
grow suddenly from your soul,
and the things that hide in you come out again
so that a blue and palled people
your newly born, takes nourishment.
Oh magnificent and fecund and magnetic slave
of the circle that moves in turn through black and gold:
rise, lead and possess a creation
so rich in life that its flowers perish
and it is full of sadness.
Have a good weekend,
Glenn
From the archives: