Some Thoughts On Sweeney Todd

(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 emotional 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 to Sondheim's and Tunick's rare and original treatment, however (and 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 almost 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.