(Note: This post has been edited as of 11:23 PM Eastern on 25 Oct to correct a number of typos and scattered solecisms.)
In-between wrestling matches with my new computer during its setting up, and in transferring to it all my existing data files, I watched the six-part PBS documentary, Broadway: The American Musical, broadcast in its entirety in three two-hour segments over three consecutive nights last week on PBS.
And a splendid documentary it is, too. I know that because I — someone who has no interest in, and in fact has a marked aversion to, the Broadway musical — watched the whole damn thing; every engrossing minute of it. And what most struck me throughout my watching was my fresh recognition and appreciation of the genuinely high-caliber talents of the past involved in this quintessentially American art form. Their names are familiar to just about everyone. Even today, when the classic Broadway musical has become something of a dinosaur, so endemic a part of the American cultural landscape are those names that they're impossible to not know even by those who've never seen a Broadway musical: Ziegfeld, Gershwin (George and Ira), Hart, Rodgers, Kern (Jerome), Hammerstein, Lerner, Lowe, Prince (Harold), Merrick (David), Coward, Robbins (Jerome), Comden (Betty), Green (Adolph), Styne (Jule), Bernstein (Leonard), and the list goes on.
And then there's Stephen Sondheim. First apprenticed to Hammerstein, and then Bernstein, and writer of the lyrics for such classic Broadway musicals as West Side Story and Gypsy, and lyrics writer and composer of the music for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and several more, and more adventurous, Broadway musicals to follow, Sondheim reached his absolute zenith as a composer and lyrics writer of works for the musical stage with the 1979 Broadway production of Sweeney Todd (book by Hugh Wheeler), an authentic masterwork now part of the repertoire of even several major opera companies.
I came a quarter-century late to Sweeney (hardly surprising given my already confessed antipathy for the Broadway musical), and was positively blown away by it on very first encounter such a veritable wonder is it. And I came to it via a TV version done originally for the Entertainment Channel with George Hearn in the title role, and the incomparable Angela Lansbury (about whose stellar performance I cannot even begin to speak without sounding like a gibbering groupie) as the very creepy but curiously charming and touching Mrs. Lovett, an impossibly difficult role both vocally and dramatically.
Although I realized instantly this was no ordinary Broadway musical, I was at first confused by that TV production because something important seemed missing; something I sensed (but of course couldn't then know) was essential. And what was missing, I conjectured, was the orchestra, which in this TV production was barely audible. For the typical Broadway musical that would not be a serious problem (as opposed to being merely a problem) as the orchestra for such is not much more than fill accompaniment, much like the orchestra in a typical Italian opera. For both, it's the songs and singers that are important, and as long as they're fully intact, and the stagework what it should be, all is well.
And I conjectured correctly, for after purchasing the original cast CD album (also starring Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett, but with Len Cariou in the title role), and for the first time being able to hear that orchestra (a supplemented pit band in a superb performance conducted by Paul Gemignani, a name heretofore unknown to me; a performance ensemble-wise at least the equal of many of this country's major symphony orchestras), I understood at once just how important it is to the work, which is to say almost Wagnerian-important. The very core of the work's dramatic center is contained within the orchestral music in Jonathan Tunick's brilliant orchestration, and a coherent Sweeney even partially lacking a full realization of that orchestral music is to me now inconceivable.
More generally, Sondheim's music for Sweeney — melodically, harmonically, and in places rhythmically — is even today avant-garde for the Broadway stage (and the choral writing especially complex, and realized to perfection on the original cast recording), utilizing a crazy quilt of forms which range from the Dies Irae of the Gregorian Requiem Mass (a prominent idée fixe cum leitmotif in the Sweeney score) to love ballads sacred, profane, and perverse — the "Johanna" ballads sung by Anthony (sacred) and Judge Turpin (profane and perverse), "My Friends" (perverse), "Wait" (sacred, in a Mrs. Lovett creepy way), "Not While I'm Around" (sacred when sung by Tobias; perverse — and creepy — when sung by Mrs. Lovett) — to Broadway "jump tunes" ("By the Sea") as I've heard this form referred to by Broadway mavens, to the big Broadway production number ("Pirelli's Miracle Elixir", "God, That's Good!"), to extended Broadway comic numbers ("The Worst Pies in London", "A Little Priest"), and even to Old English folk ballads ("Parlor Songs"), and a kind of Chanson ("Green Finch and Linnet Bird").
Thanks, however, to Sondheim's and Tunick's rare and original treatment and to Sondheim's brilliant lyrics which everywhere are pure magic, all the familiar forms take on a character and coloring markedly unlike that which their ostensible generic provenance would suggest they ought to have. And both Sondheim and Tunick are not above, um, "borrowing" — at times almost verbatim — from the music of composers such as Bernard Hermann (from the scores for the movies, Cape Fear and Psycho), and Gian Carlo Menotti (from the opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors), to name just three borrowings immediately recognizable.
In all, Sweeney is a rich and veritable musical smorgasbord without parallel in the Broadway musical theater — at least as far as it's known to me.
To thoroughly familiarize myself with this new-to-me work, I began by following my usual procedure with any new musical work, which is to first listen several times through to get the work's overall shape. Had anyone suggested to me before my meeting up with this work that I'd spend two consecutive days listening four times through a complete Stephen Sondheim musical — listening in the same way I listen through, say, a complete Wagner opera — I would have thought that person lunatic. But that's exactly what I ended up doing with Sweeney. Subsequent to that, I then attempted to embark on my usual next step, a study of the full score — and was stopped dead in my tracks. It seems there's no printed full score to be had, the only printed score available for purchase being the piano (vocal) score; almost useless for the study of a work as musically complex as Sweeney. Worse, it seems that in all probability there's no printed full score even extant — for purchase, rent, or otherwise — or so I was informed by a professional acquaintance of mine with many years experience conducting non-Broadway productions of Broadway musicals. (He informs me, for instance, that not until the mid-1980s was there available a printed full score for even so classic a Broadway musical as Bernstein's 1957 West Side Story(!).)
For a classically-trained musician, such a state of affairs is both astonishing and incomprehensible. How, for instance, does one prepare for a performance absent a full score? And absent a full score how is the original orchestration preserved across performances in various venues?
The answer, it seems, is the rental of a copy of the original manuscript(!) full score from a designated agent from whom all the orchestral parts (also manuscript copies) must be rented as well, and all that available only to a theater company that intends actually producing the work. It seems the matter of copyright infringement (i.e., performances unauthorized and / or unpaid for) is the threat attempted to be protected against by this misguided practice (misguided because, especially today, there's nothing to prevent quick and easy unauthorized copy of such rented material; and even if only the parts were rentable, nothing to prevent utilizing them to readily "reverse-engineer" a full score).
But as in all things, old practices don't go easily or willingly into that good night, and in the meantime seriously interested amateurs such as myself (not to speak of students who want to make the Broadway musical theater their professional life's work) are royally screwed, and have no choice but to make do with a piano score, as woefully inadequate as it most decidedly is for a work such as Sweeney.
What to do?
Not a bloody thing possible, it seems, and so, for the nonce at least, I'll never be able to know this work with the same intimacy as I know, say, most of the mature works of Wagner; a palpable and deeply regretted personal loss for me, but one I'll for the foreseeable future simply have to learn to live with.
very long time ago there lived a king and queen who dwelled together contentedly, and they had two beautiful daughters.
More On The Regietheater vs. "Traditional" Front
XKE
On Interpretation
Be true to the creator's intentions! is the cry so often heard in the matter of interpreting a work of art in performance. It seems a perfectly reasonable, logical, and honest credo; even a goes-without-saying credo of unquestionable veracity. On closer examination, however, it reduces to little more than lofty-sounding, sententious gibberish. Who can say with any degree of certainty what were the creator's intentions? One might imagine the creator himself could, for one, speak with unimpeachable authority on the question. But when the artwork under consideration is a product of authentic genius, and therefore a genuine work of art, such is not the case. Creators of authentic genius are forever finding their conscious intentions regularly and unknowingly (by them) subverted by their unconscious intuitions during the process of creation, and when that process is completed and the artwork finished, find themselves, if they're honest about it, forced to declare along with Richard Wagner,
So, the creator's intentions, then, are not the measure. Rather, it's the finished artwork itself that holds the keys to its interpretation, and is ultimately the sole authority dictating the range of acceptable interpretations, and the sole standard against which interpretations can be measured, the creator's intentions when creating the work, or his after-the-fact thoughts on that work, decisive as such may be expected and appear to be, having little more than marginal authority over the readings of knowledgeable, gifted interpreters of that work.
As the hallmark of every genuine work of art is its capacity to be read and experienced in a multitude of ways, this seems a perfect prescription for no-holds-barred interpretive anarchy, and so it has been warmly embraced by an ever larger number of self-involved, self-serving interpretive "artists" as witness the growing proliferation of atrocities in postmodern productions of established masterpieces in the theatrical and operatic realms; productions which have given us, for particularly egregious, fairly recent example, a Macbeth who's a 1960s Louisiana politician (Joe Banno's 2001 production of Macbeth), and a Parsifal who's a samurai warrior, Star Wars style, accompanied by Knights of the Grail traipsing about as WWI soldiers (Nikolaus Lehnhoff's 2000 production of Wagner's Parsifal).
Such productions are, of course, clear outrages (criminal immediately suggests itself as an appropriate additional intensifier), and perfectly idiot in both conception and realization. For while all such interpretations profess to be true to the ideas of whatever work happens to be in question, they're in truth anything but, prodigiously clever intellectual justifications for, and rationalizations of, the outrages notwithstanding. What each of these interpretations in fact does is take a concrete view of some idea or other embedded in the work in question, dress it without textual or musical warrant, as the case may be, in modern-world-relevant garb (using the term both literally and metaphorically), and present the resulting "concept" as a fresh realization of the deeper meaning of the whole, thereby thoroughly emasculating the work as a work of art by wantonly robbing it of its hallmark capacity to provoke in a receiver a wealth of multifarious resonances and meanings because fixing all resonance and meaning to the interpretive artist's concretized "concept".
In the abstract realm of so-called "absolute" music things are not much better as one might expect them to be as there exist no overt ideas to muck about with, and a printed score to tell us authoritatively every step of the way just how things must go. But even given scores of the late-19th century and after with their well-developed and well-understood system of notation (scores before that time assumed a fairly large measure of common-knowledge performance practice on the part of performers, assumptions largely misplaced for modern-day performers of those same works), only the note pitches and time values are almost always treated as invariant. Within the bounds of reason and good taste, everything else is taken as up for interpretive grabs, not only in the matter of divergence from the notation, most of which is of a relative nature, but because not everything in the final music intended (i.e., the sounded work) is capable of being notated.
So what to do? The problem is a real one, and not to be glossed. A guiding rule is required, and — mirabile dictu! — one is at hand, and that rule in all cases is the negative one of the physician's oath: Primum non nocere — First, do no harm. Macbeth cannot be a 1960s Louisiana politician as it makes absolute nonsense of Shakespeare's language and much of his text; Parsifal cannot be a Star Wars-style (or any style) samurai warrior and the Knights of the Grail WWI soldiers as that makes absolute nonsense of both Wagner's text and music; and to take as randomly chosen example in the realm of "absolute" music, the tempo and rhythm of the second movement of Beethoven's third (Eroica) symphony, even though a march and notated with the standard 2/4 time signature of a march, cannot be taken at the tempo and with the lively rhythm of a Sousa march as that makes absolute nonsense of the music's clear funereal character.
As a guiding rule, Primum non nocere may not be much to go on, but it's a rule more than sufficient to save one harmless from perpetrating clear outrages, and a rule most urgently needing ruthless and rigorous application in the postmodern, I'm-As-Important-As-The-Creator interpretive world we at present inhabit.
Posted by A.C. Douglas on 27 October 2004 | Permalink