| Contents |
Sondheim's career and output. The Hammerstein connection ; College activities ; A student in New York ; Journeyman work ; Sondheim as lyricist: West Side Story ; A decade of uncertainty ; A career in full flight ; Into the 1990s -- The compositional process. General considerations ; Lyric sketches ; Prosody ; Music sketches ; The score ; Orchestration ; Literary sources -- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Farce as genre ; Plautus, new comedy, and "Trick" songs ; The score and its profile ; The Broadway matrix and Hispanic features ; Refrain and motif songs: structural ambiguities ; The meaning of song construction ; The whole song -- Anyone Can Whistle. The motivic score ; Act 1 ; Act 2 ; Act 3 ; The generic scheme ; Divertissement songs ; Symphonic songs ; A score in search of a show? -- Company. The concept musical ; The modernist lyric ; Urban music ; The score as a whole ; The need for deconstruction ; The question of the ending ; The four last songs -- Follies. The image in the mirror ; The list song ; Song as folly ; Diegetic song ; Character groupings in Follies ; The pastiches ; The ghost music ; The original music ; In praise of folly -- A Little Night Music. Sondheim's middle period ; Folly once more, and its motifs ; Period tone: the nineteenth century ; The waltz and its symbolism ; The metric fount: Hemiola ; Character dances and further rhythmic resources ; The lyrics and hemiola ; Lyrics and the Luftpause ; The ending -- Pacific Overtures. The orientalist tradition ; Pacific Overtures as historical pageant ; The reflexive dimension ; Aspects of the lyrics ; Multiple perspectives in the music ; The phrygian matrix and stylistic unity ; The Kabuki element ; Ritual form and the mimetic interlude -- Sweeney Todd. A piece that sings ; Is Sweeney Todd opera? ; Diegetic musical motifs ; The Dies Irae ; Structural processes in the score ; The range of the score ; The universal ballad -- Merrily We Roll Along. The problem of the show musical ; The historical metaphor ; Concordances of the reverse narrative ; Musical planes: Frank and Gussie ; Modular furniture: the popular song analyzed ; Stylistic unity and the return to Broadway ; The show song and its meanings -- Sunday in the Park with George. The joyous synthesis ; Wagner, musical impressionism, and the synaesthetic circle ; Chromatic theory ; Chromaticism, diatonicism, and pointillism in the score ; Promenades ; Theme and variation ; Toward a fundamental aesthetic ; Sondheim moves on -- Into the Woods. A fairy tale musical ; Morals and choices ; Musical and lyric simplicity ; Beans and spells ; Pentatonic innocence and children's games ; The music of a community ; The achievement. |
| Abstract |
With thirteen Broadway musicals to his credit, Sondheim's career in the musical theater has outdistanced those of most of his contemporaries. Each of his shows has presented new challenges to audiences, and each has cast fresh perspectives on the nature and potential of the American musical, as well as probing deeply, often painfully, into the nature of our culture. Sondheim's Broadway Musicals is the first book to take an in-depth look at Sondheim's work. The author examines each of Sondheim's musicals for Broadway, from West Side Story and Gypsy to the 1987 musical Into the Woods, and includes A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George. The author also discusses Sondheim's other work, such as the 1991 show Assassins and his music for the 1990 film Dick Tracy--for which "Sooner or Later" won him an Academy Award for Best Song. |
