Sunday In The Park With George: A Rough Guide for the M.D. Part II

Villanova University’s 2023 production of Sunday, directed by Dr. Valerie Joyce

Before You Start

Listen to the Original Broadway Cast Recording

Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters are such distinctive and unusual performers that every subsequent performer has to find a way forward that doesn’t imitate them. But the show is built around them, and their shadows loom very large over the show itself. The mix on the recording is odd. Some singers seem far away, and instrumental timbres are often unclear. But it’s still an amazing document. 

Listen to the 2017 Jake Gyllenhall/Annaleigh Ashford recording

This is a really fine record of Sunday in the Park with George. The orchestra in particular is very well recorded, and there are a number of things that can be heard clearly here that are somewhat obscure in the original recording. I was initially skeptical about Gyllenhall’s casting, but I’m sold. Annaleigh Ashford is quite good, although these old fashioned ears sometimes wonder about vocal choices here and there.

Listen to the 2006 London cast recording

I believe this is the production that had some truly extraordinary projections that I suspect consumed a lot of the production budget and necessitated the drastically reduced and revised orchestrations. These sometimes are rather thin, and are after all, not the ones you rent when you license the show. Hearing the opening horn line on a saxophone is somewhat jarring. The first act uses UK dialects, which are often revelatory. After all, as long as we’re singing in English, even though we’re in Paris, why not explore other dialects? To my American ears, the dialects in Act II are far less convincing. This recording is a terrific way to explore new ways of singing these songs.

Watch the video of the original production 

Someone has helpfully put the whole production on YouTube, but I own a copy on DVD, and you might want to as well. There are a number of places in the show where something seems confusing in the score. The video very helpful shows how the music was originally integrated into the action. You will want to find your own way of navigating the show for your particular production, so it will be prudent to go to the video when you need clarification. 

You might treat yourself to a kind of hybrid experience by watching this delightful video.

Read James Lapine’s incredible book Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday In The Park With George. It’s a detailed and very candid behind-the-scenes look at the making of the musical, in which Lapine doesn’t shy away from unflattering details about himself. If you know Sunday well, you’ll be amazed by revealing stories about how the musical came to be, and if you don’t know Sunday… Well, you will by the time you finish the book. 

Should Your Organization Do this Show?

All Sondheim shows are extremely challenging. This one is difficult for the tech crew, but there are ways to creatively overcome the difficulties. You must have a George and a Dot; the other roles can be filled from a general pool of musically proficient actors. There are very challenging pit parts that may do in amateur musicians. 

As You’re Casting:

Georges/George

You will need to cast a very strong tenor with a good ear in this role, an excellent musician who holds the stage with ease and can handle the pressure of holding down a very technically complicated show. The role doesn’t have a lot of high notes, but it lies high for a baritone. First act Georges does a lot of unsympathetic things, so you will need a really likable actor. Putting It Together and the Fifi-Spot section are must-sings in callbacks. Perhaps some of Color and Light would be helpful too. 

Dot/Marie

The role of Dot is one of the great roles for women in the American Musical Theatre. She has a really difficult arc and a lot of difficult music to manage. (although I think the role is easier on the whole than George’s) In callbacks, you’ll want to hear some part of Move On that shows the ability to count, and some of Everybody Loves Louis. Sondheim used to joke that he envisioned George being a baritone and Dot a soprano and in the end they cast a baritone as Dot and a soprano as George. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it’s good to have a somewhat earthy Dot. 

Old Lady/Blair Daniels

The traditional casting of the same actor in both these roles is fun and interesting, but not mandatory. The song at the end of the first act is very difficult both to hear and to sing in time, and it’s dramatically very important. This is a role for a good musician and experienced performer. In the right hands this number grounds the first act narrative in a really critical way. Casting a really fine actor in this role makes George’s journey more believable and gives him something strong to play.

Jules/Bob Greenberg

This is not a particularly vocally challenging role, (the higher notes are not sustained in the phrase) but you do need a good ear, and this actor needs some gravitas. The Jules/Greenberg pairing is dramaturgically very interesting, but you could cast it in a different pairing if you so chose.

Yvonne/Naomi Eisen

This traditional pairing of Act I and II roles doesn’t have any deep hidden meaning as far as I can make out. The scene between Dot and Yvonne is subtle and important. Like Jules, this requires a good ear. You will want to hear “It might be in some dreary socialistic periodical”. from No Life in callbacks. 

Soldier/Alex

This is a wonderful small comic role for a strong baritone or tenor. I was bewildered that quintessential baritone Robert Westenberg covered Mandy in the original production until we cast a wonderful tenor in the role for our production and I began to see the connection. The pairing of first and second act characters is a fruitful one in terms of themes, but you could pair it a different way if you needed to.  

Boatman/Charles Redmond

The Boatman stands in the outsider role that was so important to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals. He tells the truth nobody else wants to hear. The vocal part has some difficult timing. You will want to hear the “You and me pal” passage in The Day Off at callbacks. The pairing with Redmond isn’t very meaningful, and Redmond’s part isn’t any more or less difficult than any of the others in Art Isn’t Easy, so you could cast the doubling differently if you wanted.

Nurse/Mrs./Harriet Pawling

The nurse only has one brief singing passage, but it’s somewhat tricky, so you’ll want to hear it in callbacks. Ideally has some chemistry with Franz and is a sufficient foil for the Old Lady. This role is often double cast with Mrs. She doesn’t sing as Mrs., so you can cast to the funniest actor for the part. The role of Harriet in Act 2 doesn’t particularly resonate with Mrs., but she does interact with Marie, the ‘Old Lady’ of Act II, so you might want to keep the traditional doubling. Harriet sings higher than Nurse, at least as high as F, but even higher if you don’t alter her part in 29 P.

Mr./Lee Randolph

Not singing roles, so you should cast the funniest actor for Mr.’s scenes. The pairing is not necessary, except perhaps that Mr. and Lee are both involved in arts patronage.  

Franz/Dennis

Franz needs a decent German dialect and chemistry with the nurse. The pairing with Dennis is not necessary. Dennis doesn’t really sing in act 2, but he has a very important scene with George. If you do cast the same actor for Franz and Dennis, it’s a chance for a strong actor to play some very broad comedy and a rather touching realistic scene in the same show.

Frieda/Betty

Frieda also needs a German accent and chemistry with Jules, although this chemistry can be unusual, since their relationship is clearly made much more exciting through transgression. Betty sings very little in Act II.

Celestes 1 and 2/Waitress, Elaine

The two Celestes are essentially interchangeable. Ideally you have two very similar actresses who have good comic chemistry with each other and with the soldier. The Act II parts are both quite small. The waitress doesn’t speak. Elaine has 7 lines. (in a nice scene)

Louis/Billy Webster

Louis barely speaks; he’s almost an idea. Unless I’m missing something, the range I’ve included above is from his one singing line at the top of Act II. If you double cast with Billy, the range is wider, essentially the same as all the other singers in Putting it Together.

Louise

The trick to casting this is to get someone old enough to be reliable in It’s Hot Up Here, who is nevertheless young (or short) enough to read the right age for this part. Consequently, this is a role you may want to delay casting in a professional production. 6 months can make a big difference in height for young people the age you will likely be looking at. 

A Few Things to Note About the Music Director’s Materials

The original published score is very well laid out, as are all the Sondheim scores of this time period. I was nervous about the re-engraved piano vocal score that come with the rental materials, having played from the new engraving of the Into The Woods score, which is not an improvement on the original published score. This new Sunday is very good, easy to play from, and well cued to the orchestra parts. If you compare the two piano vocal scores, though, you will see hundreds of minor discrepancies, and a couple significant errors, which I’ll note below. 

The vocal/script books and orchestra books are also very good, with only a few minor errors I will also note. 

Going Through the Show Number By Number

I’m not the first person to note that the acts have a number of matching pairs.

ACT I	ACT II
Sunday in the Park With George	It’s Hot Up Here
Color and Light/Gossip Sequence/Finishing the Hat	Putting it Together
Color and Light	Chromolume #7
Finishing the Hat	Lesson #8
We Do Not Belong Together	Move On
Beautiful	Children and Art
Sunday	Sunday

This parallel construction obviously brings an internal coherence to the piece, made stronger still by musical material appearing in multiple songs, developing the ideas and characters in subtle transformations. But the parallels also highlight the differences between the acts. The painting sequences in Act I show how a disconnected George is bringing a vivid world of characters to the canvas. When we reach the parallel sequence in act 2, we find George talking to everyone. He’s the product now, not the painting. Finishing the Hat and Lesson Number 8 are both about artists’ problems, but they reveal two totally divergent states of mind. First act George is in a flow state. Second act George is blocked.

In any well made musical, a reprise helps us make sense of time passing, themes developing, and ideas changing. Apart from the finales, these are not reprises at all. They are echoes of situations and people in time. Stephen Banfield makes a lovely point about these parallels, noting that Sondheim and Lapine had originally meant to be a show made up of a theme and variations. 

“The whole artistic question of when to repeat and when to do something different… is what George’s crisis in act 2 is about.”

We see in the macro the ideas explored in the micro. This is a hallmark of many masterpieces, and a calling card for Sondheim in particular. 

1. Opening-Prelude

This fanfare has always read to me as a kind of idealized perfection of creation; the world as George wishes it. We will descend almost immediately into a state of imperfection, but this first gesture establishes George’s kingship over the world he is trying to create. This fanfare will undergo a number of important transformations, morphing into the horn fanfare in The Day Off, the melodic idea of both Finishing the Hat and Putting it Together and the underscore of We Do Not Belong Together and Move On. 

Right away there is more information in the old piano vocal score than we have in the new materials. The original score includes some instructions on the chords themselves for when things fly in. These are not terribly significant in the long run, though, because the tech for these elements will likely determine the timing. We performed this in a proscenium theater with a fly space, but flying in giant trees or pulling white drops back from tree legs is an all-hands-on-deck situation. You may discover you need to take quite a bit of time on each fanfare fermata. 

Measure 9 contains one of the most difficult passages for horn in the musical theatre repertory (more information on that when we come to talk about pit players)The part is extremely high and very exposed. The player will need to play it at a decent volume to get the note secure and in tune, but horns tend to sound a little thin up there, so the quiet dynamics in the other players will be very unlikely to be drowned out by the horn line. 

2. Flying Trees

This is, on the face of it, a clever theatrical joke, throwing us as an audience a curveball and letting us know that we are not watching a strictly realistic world. But it’s also a key to a major theme of the piece. 

It was one thing to open the show with an artist bringing a world to life. But that world, populated by presumably real people, is also being continually edited by the artist, and we watch it being edited. The Old Lady can see that the tree is missing. Are we in George’s mind or not? Is the Old Lady the only person who can see what George is editing? Their connection becomes more important as the act progresses, because the Old Lady is the catalyst that moves George from the devastation of We Do Not Belong Together to the triumph of the first act Finale. 

If you made it through the opening, you’ll be fine here musically. 

3. Sunday in the Park with George

Sondheim includes the monologue Lapine wrote at his request which became this number in his book Look, I Made a Hat. It’s well worth looking at this monologue, and reading his commentary about it. He would organize the number around her short attention span and her physical discomfort. 

This number has become so iconic and familiar by now that we may have to work to remember how unusual it is. It is almost as shocking as the beginning of Oklahoma would have been compared to normal expectations of a musical’s opening number. There is no chorus, the few characters on stage have shared an odd, mannered, rather low-key scene before the number proper. The percussive and spare accompaniment is packed with minor seconds, expressive of Dot’s discomfort, and her brief bursts of melody require our full attention to understand the form. In a costuming tour-de-force that is also totally grounded in the narrative, Dot unexpectedly steps out of her dress. The music begins gradually to leave ‘my-foot-is-falling-asleep’ angularity and creep toward something more ardent, and Dot introduces important themes: she is the first to say the word ‘connection’ and the first to raise the idea of permanency. Permanent expression. Durable. Forever. When Dot finally does break into full lyricism, we are given what will become the musical’s most rhapsodic and structurally important material, first:

“Your Eyes, George”

And then 

“Most of all…”

In these critical moments, we discover why Dot remains there: George and his painting are beautiful. 

As Dot steps back into her dress, we are thrown once again into claustrophobic paresthesia, and we experience her discomfort viscerally ourselves. It is a microcosm of the journey of the show from the beginning through the top of act II. 

If you read part one of this blog post, you will recall my saying Sondheim is a minimalist composer. One of the ways he uses repetition is to build phrases from small cells of notes. When his characters become stuck in a loop of pitches, they have invariably also gotten caught in a loop of thought, as Dot does here, when she sings:

“There are worse things than staring at the water on a…”

And then, of course, 

”There are worse things than staring at the water as you’re posing for a picture after sleeping on the ferry after getting up at seven to come over to an island in the middle of a river half an hour from the city…”

The melodic repetition makes us feel trapped with her in rumination, and the release is a kind of minor catharsis. Consider similar passages and you’ll begin to notice them all over Sondheim:

Another hundred people just got off of the train…

Pardon me, is everybody here, because if everybody’s here…

What if he knew who you were when you know that you’re not what he thinks that he wants?

Throughout the number, George does not sing, but instead intrudes on her thoughts with unwelcome corrections. Every expression of her physical self is rejected. 

“Don’t move, please” 

“Eyes, open, please.”

“Look out at the water, not at me.”

“Don’t lift the arm, please.”

“The bustle high, please”

“Don’t move the mouth.”

He is not, in fact, trying to get to the bottom of who Dot is. He is trying to make her appear the way he wants her to be. The number establishes immediately that our place is with Dot, trying to figure out George, and trying to find a place in his world. 

The pensive chords that accompany ‘Your Eyes, George’ melody are a motive that runs throughout the show. If you track the appearances of these ruminating chords sequentially in the show, you can see in brief the whole trajectory of their relationship, even through to Act II: 

“Your Eyes, George…”

“If my legs were longer”

“If I was a folly girl…”

“And he burns you with his eyes”

“If the head was smaller…”

“Hello, George, where did you go, George?”

“The bread, George…”

“We lose things, and then we choose things”

“Yes, she looks for me. Good.”

“Yes, George, run to your work…”

“What I feel? You know exactly how I feel.”

“Hello, George, I do not wish to be remembered like this, George”

“Alright, George. As long as it’s your night, George.”

“Say Cheese, George, and put them at their ease, George”

“Be New, George. They tell you till they’re blue, George.”

“Elaine, fix my chair so I can see Mama…”

“Charles has a book, Charles shows them his crayons…”

The more active pattern of sixteenths that follows, as Dot sings “But most, George, of all, but most of all.” is another motivic accompaniment pattern that we will hear less frequently through Act I. Tracking those:

“But most of all, I love your painting.”

[Scene Change from Old Lady into Studio]

“Well, Louis, and George, but George has George”

“But if Anybody could… Finishing the hat…”

When the motive appears in Finishing the Hat, it has been slightly altered, becoming an accompanimental grounding for George’s most important cri de coeur. More on that later. This set of musical ideas in the first complete song in the score strongly establishes the sound world of the musical. Now to more prosaic matters: 

The original score here marks the first measure Rubato, (quarter = 112 bpm) 

Measure 2A is marked Larghetto (quarter = 84) 

Measure 6 has a lyric error. (now THE foot is dead)

The triplet rhythm in vocal in measure 7 is not in the original score, and seems out of left field to me. 

Measure 9 is originally marked poco mosso (quarter = 82)

Measure 18 is originally marked Strict tempo (quarter =92)

Measures 34 and 35 are tricky. If you play it in your left, it’s somewhat awkward to get under your fingers, particularly over and over again. If you break it up between left and right, you may find it more grateful. I’m sorry to report that the orchestration doesn’t really help you. The figure in the left is split between the viola, the cello, and the double bass, and the timbre differences between the instruments keeps the figure from cohering really. The melody doesn’t ‘pass off’ from one instrument to another. I added the viola notes to the cello, which seemed to give it body. It’s a neat figure, and it covers some business, so the audience has little to do but listen! It’s also an awkward loop to escape, since when you leave the vamp, it sounds like the same measure until the end. I explained that my signal would take us out of measure 35, not out of measure 34. You will have to formulate your own solution to this little nub.

Measure 87 should be in 4. (quarter = 92) in the original score. You will have this figure a lot in the show. Sometimes it’s in 2, sometimes in 4. 

There is an error in the bass book in the last note of measure 107. That should be a G, not an F. 

4. Parasol

You’ll have to find out from your director what this fanfare actually illustrates. In our production it coincided with a parasol opening. (which is not the cue in the score) 

5. Yoo-Hoo

This is slower than you might imagine for musical ideas like this. It was originally a longer number, and was cut down on its way to Broadway. You can see the original lyric in the published libretto and in Look I Made a Hat.

6. No Life

We again see George through the lens of others. As usual, Sondheim is accomplishing many things: establishing the convention that we will see paintings appear from the world of the piece, establishing the values of the art world George is defying, establishing Yvonne’s attempts to be witty enough to please Jules, all over a stately promenade, to which the harpsichord lends a musty pall. 

In Sondheim’s notes, we see he was originally planning a series of promenades to connect the vignettes, an idea inseparable from Mussorgsky’s 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition, in which a recurring promenade leads us through an imaginary gallery, and each ‘painting’ is a characteristic piano piece. No Life serves such a purpose here, although Sondheim’s original intention to connect Act I using this device doesn’t go much further than this. 

This is one of the places where Sondheim is also clearly referencing French impressionism. (it’s a Satie Gymnopédie) It is very easy to overpower the dialogue and vocals here, lower the written dynamic after the repeat section by at least 2 levels. The English Horn in particular can be somewhat aggressive in that register. 

The passage beginning at measure 58 is not in the original piano vocal score, but it was in the original production. It also tends to overwhelm the dialogue, and can easily be cut or truncated. 

7. Scene Change to Studio

This is just a truly lovely scene change, particularly with the harp and celesta sounds. If your scene change is running long, you may well want to repeat the first 8 bars so as not to park on D minor for too long. 

8. Color and Light (Parts I-IV)

“If there is any song in the score that exemplifies the change in my writing when I began my collaboration with James Lapine, it would be ‘Color and Light’… I organized this song, and much of the score, more through rhythm and language than rhyme.” -Sondheim

Sondheim truly breaks new ground in musical theatre here. It might even be argued that he himself never again surpassed this sequence, and certainly none of his imitators have either. 

We have thus far only seen George as reflected through the lens of those around him. We haven’t heard him sing yet. But now we see and hear George for the first time from, as it were, his own perspective. We catch the excitement of flow, and we see him address his artistic subjects like a director or a dictator, even in their absence, editing their essences.. “So black to you, perhaps. So red to me” The subject of the painting has no agency in the portrayal. 

We also see Dot editing herself, her powderpuff in counterpoint with George’s brush strokes. She is trying to discover a version of her identity that bears significance, and one that bears significance to George. We come to see that George’s eye is his power not only to paint, but his power over Dot. The counterpoint between the two escalates until the climax, “I could look at him/her forever” The moment is made somehow more poignant by the clarity that these two are so deeply alienated from one another even in their most unified moment. The grounding musical motive that underpins this thrilling ending is a development of the Red-Red-Orange theme. 

This accompaniment pattern only appears three times in the show, but they are the most loaded expressions of attraction and alienation between the two of them.

“You look inside the eyes and you catch him here and there, but he’s never really there…”

“Let her look for me to tell my why she left me, as I always knew she would”

“What you care for is yourself. I am something you can use.”

The fact that the motive is built from the musical motive associated with George’s flow state makes the point quite beautifully. George’s artistic lifeblood is also the source of his alienation.

“I care a lot about art and the artist. The Major thing I wanted to do in the show was to enable anyone who is not an artist to understand what hard work it is.”, Sondheim told Craig Zadan. Color and Light is where that hard work is most clearly depicted. 

Compare this detailed depiction of artistic process and personal alienation to The Last Five Years for example, where we hear Jamie crow about the results of his success, and we even see him spinning a yarn in the Schmuel song, but we don’t get any sense of what his artistic process means to him. We also have no clear idea of what Cathy thinks of his work and her connection to it. This is one of the reasons most audiences don’t think Jamie is the protagonist of L5Y. It’s a choice between his relationship and his ego, not his art.

Here we are thrown deeply into the creative process itself, made even more vivid by the lack of traditional song or lyric structure. When Dot sings about the Follies, we flirt with a traditional song form, but the passage reads as a stream of consciousness. It’s a testament to Sondheim’s mastery of musical rhetoric that the piece doesn’t fall apart at the seams or overstay its welcome. It helps that Sondheim had written something of a conceptual rough draft in Opening Doors in Merrily, where Franklin Shepard is editing and editing the tune he’s writing as the world spins around him. It also helps that George isn’t writing music. The worst scenes in musical biopics are usually the ones where the composer is tearing his hair out at the piano trying to arrive at the tune the audience already knows by heart. But here we are not imagining the destination of what George is painting so much as sharing in his excitement of the work itself. We can’t even see what he’s painting, so our imagination has to take over. 

Sondheim establishes a technique here that stakes out a major theme of the work: I like to think of it as Windows. He will use the idea again in Into The Woods to establish the options in points of decision. Into The Woods is about the unintended consequences of decisions. Sunday is in some sense about the distinction between the reality of being a human and an artist’s depiction of that reality. The musical geography is critical to Sondheim’s portrayal of that theme

Notice that George’s ideas have a lower accompaniment, Dot’s accompaniments are much higher. (this is harder to make out in the original piano vocal score layout) We ultimately hear Dot’s accompaniment becoming the pensive two chord idea she introduced in the opening.

“Your eyes, George”

These two musical locations, one low, and the other high, are placed in close proximity to one another so that we can experience the gulf between them. This back-and-forth is broken by the stage direction: 

[George steps around canvas to get more orange. Their eyes meet for a second]

In other words the dual world musical dichotomy is broken by an actual person-to-person connection, made just as the music shifts to the accompaniment they share troughout the musical. 

We will see later in the piece that this delineation of musical real-estate is a critical area of exploration. How much of what we are seeing is real and how much is George’s construction? It all has to do with these windows. (more on that later) 

If you’ve hired keyboard 2 (and I sure hope you have!) You will want to go through keyboard 1 and mark what you’re playing and what you’re conducting. It’s a great challenge to switch back and forth, and cue the singer where necessary. Getting into measure 92 in part 3 can be tricky; you will need to run it a few times to get the tempo to drop in correctly. The passage beginning in measure 112 is hard without a bass player, because neither hand is intuitive really. Take some time to work through measure 144, especially if you are conducting from the piano. If you know what you’re doing, it works well. If not, it will be a struggle. The top note in the right hand in measure 156 should be F natural. The timing in measures 200-204A can be tricky to line up with the vocals. You may have to move rather quickly through the whole notes and potentially cut the repeat of 205. The existence of 205A and 205B indicates this was an issue in the original production as well. The end of 8B is a really neat effect, rather like the subito piano at the end of Epiphany from Sweeney Todd. It is also somewhat unsatisfying because Dot leaves without a button and nobody can applaud her in what is one of her more beautiful moments. The very last measure of 8C is tricky to land. After goofing it more than once, I actually dropped out in measure 250, conducted, and played beat 2 of the last measure. There’s plenty of tutti there, and a clear button is essential. 

9. Scene Change to Park

This cue is almost all music we’ve heard before. The entrances of the Boatman and the Celestes are ideally cued to the phrases that begin on measure 11. 

10. Gossip Sequence

Having heard from Dot and from George himself, we are again amid the other subjects of the painting. Sondheim introduces ideas we will encounter later: The Celestes’ “They say that George has another Woman” will become:

“I mean, I don’t understand completely” 

“It’s not enough knowing good from rotten” 

Etc. 

The Old Lady and the Boatman show a certain misanthropic musical kinship here, although the Boatman accompaniment is 3 octaves lower with a more dissonant minimalist polyrhythm (see earlier post) 

Our appreciation of the larger meanings in the work will be deeper if we catch some subtle distinctions here:

The Celestes, the Nurse, and the Old Lady are trying to keep up with the romantic news; Dot has left George, George behaves unusually. They are uninterested in his work. “They have so little to speak of, they must speak of me?”, George asks at the top of the show, and he’s right. 

The Old Lady is pragmatic. You can’t make enough money to raise a family by painting. She also brutally assesses people with a single word: Noisy. Famous. Filthy. Deluded. Unfeeling. 

Jules and Yvonne are concerned with the oddity of George’s new technique and complaining about what George is painting. Boatmen and Monkeys are both inappropriate subjects.

The Boatman cuts through to deeper truths. He relishes his status as an outsider. The companionship he most enjoys is the friendship of the dog, primarily because the dog does not make demands and allows the boatman to be who he is, unexamined. To the boatman, the Celestes, The Nurse, the Old Lady, Yvonne, Jules, and George have all fallen into the same foolishness: trying to observe things. After all, what are these drawings even for?

The characters are so interesting and funny that we may miss a larger point: All of them are making judgments and assuming intent constantly, especially the boatman. Only George is permanizing the judgements. 

An interesting musical coincidence may be noted to Sweeney Todd:

These similarities in melodic contour are unintentional, of course, but they are examples of the coherence of Sondheim’s mature style, in which these odd melodic shapes are organized and re-organized to fit the same stream of consciousness the character is navigating.

The accompaniment is a little math game, and a tricky one at that. You’ll notice the right hand is playing a 4 note pattern. The left gives us a dissonant 2 notes, then 3, then the pattern repeats and gains momentum. By measure 6, the two hands settle on a 4 note pattern for 2 measures, but then the left becomes a pattern of 3 notes, against continuing four note patterns in the right.

Measure 19 is so interesting, you will be tempted to play it loud, but mark everything piano, because you’re playing under some dialogue here, and the scoring is heavy. If you’ve managed the earlier 4 against 3, then the passage beginning in measure 38 should start well. But then the pattern in the right starts to change…

Try and figure it out yourself. Left hand pattern remains unchanged, in a 3 eighth note pattern. But the right hand is being constantly reconfigured. Measure 46 on isn’t too terribly hard, relative to the earlier work you did. I cut the harpsichord part in measure 68 and 69, because it threatens to drown out an important line. In the new score, the vocal parts are not properly identified from 68-71. Here is the passage as it appears in the original score:

The last passage, at 71 is too long for the dialogue, I think. If you watch the original production, you’ll see that the lines are delivered very slowly and deliberately. The sequence is very mannered, an approach which may or may not work for your production. It is quite difficult to get this passage under the dialogue, just as it was at the end of No Life.

11. Cues in the Park

This number is three cues which are found elsewhere in the show. Easy. 

12. The Day Off (Parts I-VII)

Along with Color and Light, this is one of the most distinctive, conceptually daring and expressive parts of the musical, and a showpiece for the actor playing George.

We have another example here of musical spaces. Spot’s initial music is punctuated by a dissonant, rather low chord reminiscent of the Boatman.

In Spot’s second portion, Sondheim introduces a rhythmic motive that will ground the rest of the extended number.

There’s a chord in this motive that seems very much like a point of stasis, and sometimes Sondheim will linger on it. Banfield identifies this chord as a point of stasis, calling it a ‘freeze frame’ harmony. This chord gives a feeling of ‘lift’, which is mirrored by a reappearance in Putting it Together.

Sondheim has given us grooves like this since at least The Little Things You Do Together from Company, but this instance seems very situated to function as a resting spot, a place for a snapshot.

A third groove emerges to close Spot’s section:

When Fifi comes in, she is accompanied by two percussive and dissonant chords in a higher register.

When the two dogs alternate, we see Fifi’s percussive chords (now mere 2nds) sitting atop Spot’s third groove, like so:

Despite the boatman’s conviction that Spot doesn’t expect anything of him, Spot turns out here to have a few negative opinions after all about the Boatman. And Fifi is also very judgmental about her companion. 

Ultimately, though, I don’t think we can take this episode as reflecting any reality for the dogs themselves. These are George’s projections; he is play-acting the animals to get into their heads. We can tell this partly because the dog music George has constructed continues into George’s subsequent observations about everyone else. A transformation of George’s fanfare creative motive also appears regularly, which we may take as a musical indication that he is in his creative mode.

The Nurse and several of the subsequent subjects George encounters here SHARE simultaneous vocal lines with him. But they seem to follow these moments of agreement with their own distinct opinions,. apart from him. These shared lines include:

“One day is much like any other, listening to her snap and drone”

“Second bottle, Ah, she looks for me”

“You and me, pal. We’re the loonies. Did you know that? Bet you didn’t know that.”

“Mademoiselles, I and my friend, we are but soldiers!” 

We also get the first appearance of the Celeste’s motive

It’s telling that we first get this jittery musical idea as we’re talking about fishing, an evidently unintended prostitution reference, if the literature is to be believed.

A purely coincidental connection is also hiding beneath the surface. If you slow the motive down and swing the rhythm, you’ll see that this motive is also a cousin to:

The melody that holds the larger sections together is inflected in so many different ways that we might lose track of their derivation from the same musical contour. Sing these to yourself and you’ll hear the continuity.

Frieda and Franz open up another angle on the outsider’s view of the artist: The wastefulness and privilege of the artist. For Jules and Yvonne, George’s choice of subject in painting the lower classes is in poor taste. But Fritz, even though he affectedly poses for George from his very first entrance, is perhaps too common to paint. Fritz dismisses him. Art isn’t ‘real work.’ 

The accompaniment pattern in 12F ingeniously retools the original gossip theme to fit above the established Samba pattern. 

In measures 24 and 25, there’s a lyric discrepancy. In every production and in the original score, George sings, “Would you like some more grass?”, not “please, a little more grass.”

The passage in part one between 31 and 41 is very difficult to time to the meter. Mandy doesn’t follow the meter in the original cast, and neither do any of the subsequent recordings. We don’t particularly want to be tied up in counting these odd spacings when the actor needs to feel really freewheeling. This is not really a problem, except as you have to conduct it. Go over the vocal cues with the percussion, strings, harp, and horn, write some key words from the vocal into the parts, and cue the moments individually until you drop into tempo at measure 42. 

The button at measure 121 was Michael Bennet’s idea. Having seen Patinkin make such a strong impression, it seemed wrong to deny him applause. But the button falls (to my ear anyway) in a nonsensical place; at the end of a section, to be sure, but without a closing phrase that feels like an ending. 

In section 12B, in measure 37, the score is missing a new time signature. (¾, obviously) 

The shifting right hand passage in 12F at measure 23 is annoying when you first encounter it, but it sure is fun when you get it under your fingers. 

13. Everybody Loves Louis

Another iconic song where much is done with rather simple musical means. George has spent quite some time conjuring the world of the park, to the point where we may even have begun to question whether we are in fact seeing reality or George’s editorialized version. Bursting suddenly into this world is a perspective that truly challenges George and calls him to account. 

As we have seen, Sondheim thinks most clearly and speaks most effectively when he organizes thoughts into some kind of binary. This particular binary is stark and full of wordplay, made more effective by the fact that Dot almost doesn’t speak of George; the repudiation is by implication. As the number goes on, the comparisons are more and more personal and potentially hurtful.

Louis	George (by implication)
Everybody loves him	Nobody likes him
Simple and kind	Complicated and cruel
Loveable	Difficult to love
Really an artist	A false artist
Not the smartest, but popular	Too smart, unpopular
Bakes from the heart	Too cerebral
Makes ‘bread’	Doesn’t sell his work
Kneads her like dough	Is less attentive in bed
Pleasant, Fair	Unpleasant, Unfair
Present, Generous	Distant, Stingy
There	Gone
Easy to follow thoughts	Impossible to understand
Art not hard to swallow	Art difficult to digest
Makes a connection	Disconnected

The crux of the song is of course her moment of vulnerability, set to the gently alternating chords Sondheim keeps returning to for these critical junctures: 

We lose things, 

and then we choose things

And there are Louis’s

And there are Georges 

Well, Louis’s 

And George

But George has George,

And I need someone

Louis. 

To a certain extent, at least, Dot hasn’t really moved on yet. There may be many people like Louis. But if the one-of-a-kind George is unreachable, Louis will have to do. When we see this dynamic at work, Dot’s description of Louis develops a new dimension. She is not merely trying to make George feel bad. She’s trying to depict Louis in a way that elevates his art to a level where he bears comparison. Again we find a character framing reality to suit their own narrative. George is not the only artist. 

(I was confused by the pluralization of Louis as Louis’s, and discovered to my dismay that this is in fact the correct way to pluralize singular words that end with a silent ‘s’. Try pluralizing ‘chassis’ and you’ll see the problem.)

There are passages throughout the score where no performer sings the notes on the page. The ‘Louis it is!” at the end is one of them. Try it once and see how alien it sounds! 

The original piano vocal score and probably every other iteration you have played of this song contains the jaunty woodwind passage in the right hand. It’s hard to play this lick from the new licensed piano vocal score, but the polka piano part you’ll play in the show is easier to play ultimately, and much easier to establish tempo from, which is truly the most important aspect. 

Measure 38 is a real conundrum. The three dots after ‘but…’ are impossible to convey to the audience if you plow directly into the next measure. Here are how the various cast recordings have solved this problem. 

Annaleigh Ashford sings the rhythm that’s on the page, and we lose the feeling of the ellipsis entirely. This graphic with the tenuto marking is from the original score. In the new parts, that chord is marked staccato.

Bernadette adds a measure, singing something like this on the original cast recording and on the video:

Jenna Russell also adds a measure, but the piano retains the staccato chord, like this:

You will have to choose an approach and convey it to the orchestra. There isn’t any solution that honors both the music and the text in the score.

Measure 107 is a passages, now in 4, which here in particular needs to be in the correct tempo, because at 113, we find ourselves with the two musical ideas superimposed. You’ll want to think of 107 in the tempo of the Everybody Loves Louis chorus. I don’t think the fermata at the end works. You do what you like. 

14. The One On The Left

This was originally a much longer number. Sondheim explains it in Look, I Made a Hat. The last line of the original number is one that any other writer would have killed to keep in the show. You can hear the number as a bonus track in the 2006 recording. But the characterization in the shortened version is so strong that we don’t really need a much longer number to establish who they are. 

The fact that the other soldier is a cardboard cutout is a wonderful and theatrical device, but it also justifies and draws connections to the George cutouts in act II. When we see them in Putting it Together, they haven’t appeared out of nowhere. 

The fanfare melody of the soldier is one in a long line of fanfares going all the way back to Marcus Lycus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and continuing through at least 4 or 5 other scores. Sondheim uses this kind of figure to indicate silly, hypermasculine men. This particular version also owes a little to Stravinsky’s L’Histore du Soldat.

Work with the Soldier in 83 and 84 to really count the full measures, or the cue coming out of 84 will be tough with the orchestra. 

Budget a little time to talk through measures 85-87 with the pit; the entrances in the parts are not particularly intuitive. 

The bass part at the end of the number is just wrong. I’m attaching a correction here. It’s an ingenious little minimalist phasing: The right hand is in 4, the left essentially in 5. As it is in the licensed parts, that distinction goes away. 

15. Finishing the Hat

It took me far too long to realize that the order of the phrases at the beginning of Finishing the Hat are the reverse of the order they appear in The Day Off, even reversing ‘pastry’ and ‘chicken’ from their original order. Again these points of suspended time in the groove from The Day Off serve to underscore the quasi-reality of George’s recollections. 

In a show full of superlatives, I have to trot out another. This number has meant so much to so many people. It is in a way the photonegative of Being Alive, another Sondheim ballad that has resonated with many people’s life experiences. Being Alive is about someone realizing that embracing the messiness of other people is the first step to finding authentic relationships. George, by contrast, is a person who is far more lost, because the true animating force of his life is the window to his imagined world. The imagined world will always supersede the real world of actual people. 

This is the second appearance of the motive which will find its ultimate fruition in We Do Not Belong Together. Here it accompanies the revelation that George has had a number of women, and each of them was unable to deal with his temperament. She was supposed to be different, though, and when he gets to the line;

“But if anybody could…”

We hear the “But most of all, I love your painting” underscore, which becomes the basis of the accompaniment for the remainder of the song. The pattern here is not the same as it has been elsewhere in the show. Since I came to this number first, I thought this pattern was as it appears everywhere in the show, and I had to relearn it.

Here’s the way the figure appears in Everybody Loves Louis:

And here’s how it appears in Finishing the Hat :

They are, quite clearly, the same accompaniment pattern. But they are also fundamentally different. It doesn’t take much thought to find a dramatic significance to the musical detail.

Again, there is a kind of delineation of musical space, here actually on the word ‘window’, which stops the rolling accompaniment pattern in its tracks twice before the first major climax.

This climax, “and how you’re always turning back too late” is an extremely clear distinction, musically, between the two warring states of mind George is describing. 

In Sondheim’s classic manner, the song then descends back into repeating patterns in both music and lyric, until George’s music eventually opens into a kind of a clearing to make the window metaphor explicit. This is followed by a repeat of the earlier delineation of musical space. 

On the way into George’s final alienating observations, Sondheim uses the complete vocabulary he has established in quick succession:

Throughout this passage we get further into the nub of the issue with one of Sondheim’s central insights, one we find throughout his musicals, but particularly reminiscent of Buddy’s Blues from Follies. George actually wants to be in a relationship with a fully formed person, but that sort of person wouldn’t deal with the distant person that he is. This insight is what allows us to empathize with him; he recognizes his own unsuitability to any woman with self respect. 

From this final desperation, George again descends into repeated phrases, the solace of the work. We can see that he has no intention of solving this problem. The hat doesn’t complain. 

The original score has “I give all I can give” in measure 80. No singer actually sings that. Every recording, and the new score has “Well, I give what I give.”

At the end there’s an odd discrepancy. The Jake Gyllenhaal and Daniel Evans versions are performed exactly as the licensed vocal score now lays out the ending. But in the original production and vocal score, there was one more measure. The current score indicates two measures, but it really only cuts one as far as I can tell. Reinstating that measure would be fairly easy if one were so inclined. I’m not sure what is gained by cutting it. 

16. Bustle

This is one of the two chaotic sections which are very dependent on the staging. It isn’t clear from the score that the orchestra goes out of sync with itself as it accelerates, to a kind of cacophony, which is cut off abruptly at the bustle reveal. This section is aleatoric, a premonition of the Chaos to appear 7 cues later. One of the major questions in Sunday involves whether what we’re seeing is reality or George’s editorializing eye. At this moment, George is not in control, and the world is unorganized, formless. The one to stop this chaos though is Dot, as she reveals her pregnancy, again using a costume creatively to drive the action. 

17. Scene Change to Quartet (originally entitled Scene Change to Studio)

I found this scene change surprisingly difficult, because the ending isn’t really very easy to memorize, so I had to read the music. But the cue to end was on a lighting change, so I had to keep my eye out for the change. I ended up memorizing the last measure. The original score had another repeat, of measures 9 and 10. If you reinstate that repeat, you may have an easier time of it. 

In the extraordinary scene that follows, we see a terribly revealing moment. George addresses the painting intimately. 

“He does not like you. He does not understand or appreciate you. He can only see you as everyone else does. Afraid to take you apart and put you together again for himself. But we will not let anyone deter us, will we?”

He has forgotten that Dot is even in the other room. 

18. We Do Not Belong Together

This is the emotional climax of Act I, and the moment that I think most necessitates Act II. Sondheim had been using leitmotiv for a long time, especially in Sweeney Todd, but here the deployment of accompaniment patterns is simple and calculated, to devastating effect. 

We begin with the ruminating two-chord pattern, which has been reserved so far to accompanying lyrics involving George’s vision and the effects of that vision on the self worth of the people around him. 

“Your Eyes, George…”

“If my legs were longer”

“If I was a folly girl…”

“And he burns you with his eyes”

“If the head was smaller…”

“Hello, George, where did you go, George?”

“The bread, George…”

“We lose things, and then we choose things”

“Yes, she looks for me. Good.”

When Dot accuses him of caring about things and not people, the music shifts to the third and final iteration of this accompaniment pattern:

Dot is more pointed and unguarded here than at any other point: George is using her. He only cares for himself. We find ourselves in another whirlwind of repetition, which Dot releases in a brand new section we have never heard before:

“You could tell me not to go.”

George doesn’t join here in this new material, but retrogresses into the earlier musical material. “You know I cannot give you words”

All this has been leading up to a brand new idea, the transformation of George’s opening fanfare to a turbulent, roiling accompaniment in D minor. 

Compare the right hand of that figure to the second fanfare from the opening of the musical (both hands in treble clef in E flat major):

If the opening image of the show was George’s mastery of his world, this is the beginning of the disintegration of that world which will shortly lead to Chaos, a kind of ‘darkness on the face of the deep’

George is helpless. He can’t see it from her perspective. She knew what she was getting into. This music will take on new meaning in Act II, but here, George’s attempt to command the narrative fails because Dot again reasserts her argument with another new motive that he does not participate in. The new motive is based on the first iteration of the opening fanfare. 

Sondheim did all this very deliberately, of course. 

“It seemed effective to use rhythm to reflect putting dots on the canvas, to show his distraction as well as his concentration. But that, of course, becomes motivic, that rhythmic idea. There are two basic rhythms, actually: There’s the arpeggiated rolling rhythm that is set up right in the opening arpeggios and eventually becomes Finishing the Hat and the kind of rolling vamp in Sunday in the Park with George, then there’s the painter’s theme, which is sharp and staccato and jabbed. That, combined with the rolling vamp, becomes Move On. 

The line, “I am unfinished with or without you” is troubling, but also brutally honest. Leaving an unhealthy relationship is leaving a diminishment, while also being itself a diminishment, because you leave part of your identity with the other person. 

I think most people respond viscerally to the lines, 

“No one is you, George, There we agree,

But others will do, George. 

No one is you and no one can be,

But no one is me, George, 

No one is me.”

She is developing her earlier thought:

“There are Louis’s and there are Georges,

Well, Louis’s and George.

But George has George, and I need someone”

But now she’s arrived at the fact that she is herself a singularity worthy of respect. 

By the time she begins these lines, George’s fanfare motive has disappeared from the accompaniment. 

The creation fanfare comes back as she changes tactics to affirm his mission: 

“You have a mission, a mission to see.”

Sondheim denies Dot a button to applaud, and as she leaves, the fanfare motive disintegrates as George is left onstage. We transition back to the ruminative motive, and George is alone with his mother. 

I’m not sure it’s possible for a production to truly capture everything that’s bubbling up in this number, but in terms of the structure of the musical, George has lost control of his world, and he has no tools to reclaim it. Against this backdrop, Sondheim is poised to explore the ephemerality of all art. 

There’s an awkward violin voicing in measure 50 and 51. (the 5th at the top of the first violin) The voicing does appear in Cecil Forsyth’s orchestration textbook, which is where I suspect Starobin got it. Let your players do what seems best to them, but I can think of a couple of workable solutions that preserve the idea well.

19. Beautiful

I usually skipped this when I was listening to the CD as a kid, but when I was working on the show, I came to find it one of my favorite moments. It’s critical to the exploration of the artistic process, and even though it slows the action of Act I, it can ONLY be here, where it will say the most to us. 

The Old Lady, as the script calls her, had earlier been reluctant to sit for George, but now she consents to be depicted, and the script describes her as having ‘a kind of loving attitude, soft and dreamlike’. She begins by recalling a past that George disputes. We sense that George may be factually correct, and that his mother has edited the past to make the memories more pleasant. George’s mother lives in the past. As she looks, she sees a world counter to the imaginary past of her memory. Towers, noisy children, they’re all a kind of aberration. Like Jules, she resists change. But where Jules resisted artistic change, the Old Lady resists reality changing. 

We discover telling details about George’s distant and unfaithful father. But as tantalizing as those details are, I think another dynamic is more fascinating still. The melancholy disappointment of George’s mother opens up a place where George can speak a truth that is key to the entire piece. The people, the relationships, the joys of life, the landscape itself are constantly in a state of becoming something else. This is a beauty in itself. What gives the changing thing any meaning at all is what it comes to mean for the person who sees it, who remembers it. This is a lovely parallel to the method George is trying to pioneer. The eye of the viewer literally constructs the colors of the painting. 

Any depiction of this changing world will always be a revision, just as George’s mother is continually revising the past. 

“I’ll draw us now before we fade, Mother. 

You watch, while I revise the world”, George suggests

“Quick, draw it all, Georgie… You make it beautiful.”

“Look! Look!”, George says. 

This is perhaps the only true connection George actually makes with another living person in the first act. But as the number concludes, George’s mother slips back into nostalgia. “How I long for the old view”. 

Following this song, the promenade of characters slips out of order. Fights start, each relationship is in danger of splintering. This number with his mother begins the last big shift of the act, as George names and inhabits his role of idealizing and permanizing the world.

I recommend you copy the Piano Synth part and give it to your Keys 2 player. That will free you to conduct, Keyboard 2 doesn’t have much in it, the Piano Conductor score is missing some important Keyboard 1 music, and in all likelihood, your singer and your players will appreciate seeing your hands getting through the tempo changes and ritardandi. The harp part has one rather awkward pedal change. To manage that, your harpist may want to do the number slower than your singer would. With practice, the pedal change becomes manageable. I wouldn’t bring it up with the harpist, but I would be aware of the difficulty.

Measure 14 in the licensed materials has a lyric error: It should read: 

“I see Towers where there were trees” 

Measure 59 in the new score is missing a left hand part; it ought to read as measure 55 would. 

20. Soldier Cue #1

This is tricky to cue because the cue line is in the middle of a lot of overspeaking dialogue. Ears open! 

21. Jules and Frieda

This is in keyboard 2, but you may as well play it yourself, if you’re conducting from the first book. It’s disorienting music, and it keeps the bizarre seduction scene from reading fully as comedy, which I think is intentional. 

22. Soldier Cues #2 and #3

Again, a very simple cue

23. Chaos

This is the second and climactic chaotic section, cued clearly to the action. (George frames the scene) Each production is going to cue this slightly differently. 

Dot’s final break with George has somehow broken a delicate equilibrium. Each character is involved in an irreversible disruption. All relationships are being broken. 

If we’ve built up the right kind of momentum in the act, we will experience the beginning of the next number as a jolt, as the Old Lady tells George: “Remember!” 

24. Sunday-Finale Act I 

Sondheim explicitly tells us that the chorus here are figments of George’s imagination. I’ll let you read in Look, I Made a Hat about the fragmentary expression, what made Sondheim cry in this number, and more. I won’t deprive you of the pleasure of discovering those things yourself. 

The first act finale draws together all the threads of exploration we have explored over the previous hour, as George arranges out of the chaos an idealization of these people and this place. Dot is somehow with Jules. No one faces the painter. Louise loses her glasses. Dot gets a monkey. 

Near the top of the show, George had casually said that he was drawing the monkeys, not their cage. This depiction is an idealization of the monkeys (these characters). It doesn’t depict the cages in which they find themselves, socioeconomic, interpersonal, and otherwise. 

I think one of the things that makes this song so meaningful for people is the juxtaposition of the painting’s perfect order with our memory of George’s loneliness and the entire cast’s alienation from each other. In George’s idealized world, no one looks at him or one another. Some have written that Sunday is a perpetuation of romantic stereotypes about the tortured artist. I think this reading misses a lot of nuance. Everyone in the piece is disconnected. Everyone in the piece is reframing the reality around them. George is just the one who creates an artifact; the painting. The piece doesn’t particularly ask us to pity George (who is generally rather unpleasant) or rail at an unfair world (George gets a pretty fair shake). It asks much more troubling questions about how each of us sees the people around us. It further asks us why we are so moved by these particular idealizations. 

The piece doesn’t answer these questions.  

Banfield notes the striking harmony before ‘of the grass’, where a c sharp in the right hand rubs against a strong C natural immediately thereafter in the bass, implying secondary dominant and the subdominant at basically the same time. (we are in G here)

There are a variety of convincing tempi for this number, but you may have things flying in and out that require a particular timing. Keep that in mind as you teach it.

If you listen to the original cast, you will discover that the cutoffs indicated in the score are not observed; Nearly all the choral moments are cut off on the downbeat of the next measure. I did not do this in my production, but it is a change I recommend, since the cast is by necessity looking offstage right, not at you, and the cutoffs as indicated in the score are not intuitive. 

At the end of the song, the violins are conscripted into the percussion section. Have a look and figure out what you want to do there. 

The licensed materials have an error at the end of measure 58. That last ‘bum’ shouldn’t be there.  

25. It’s Hot Up Here

The opening of Act II is the counterpart to Dot’s opening number, the opening section a tritone away in key. (as far as we can go) We used to be in Dot’s uncomfortable world, literally chafing against the confinement. Now ALL the characters must conform eternally to George’s vision, and they don’t care for it. 

This number is the true close of the story of act II, but it could really only go here, at the top of a very different act. 

The original cast recording was organized to be like a cantata, a freestanding musical journey. That has sort of blunted the original intention of this moment. We are meant to be uncomfortable. When the curtain comes up after the act break, take some time. Let the audience wonder if something has gone wrong. 

The stage direction reads:

(Lights slowly fade up. Long pause. Audience should feel the tension as they wait for something to happen. Finally, music begins)

When you begin, leave a lot of space in the first fermata. The number lands better coming from this place of discomfort. 

While the accompaniment pattern derives from Dot’s Act I opener, the melodic material is new. The chorus that follows is totally new, although the melody is an elaboration of ‘It’s hot up here’. The accompaniment is a rough draft for the title number of Sondheim’s next show: Into The Woods.

The centerpiece of the section keeps it from being merely a comedy sketch:

“Hello, George, I do not wish to be remembered like this, George”

The accompaniment, melodic contour, and harmonization have changed, but this is clearly a continuation of the act I thematic idea, which is always about their relationship, and how he sees her. 

As impressive as Dot’s long phrase is at the end of her first number, the group version at the end of “It’s Hot Up Here” is more so. Budget a lot of rehearsal time to solidify the passages from 36-43 and from 81-88. Initially the challenge is to make the entrances one after another. But this is live theatre, and the true goal here is to know where your part goes EVEN IF ANOTHER ACTOR MISSES THEIR CUE. 

In the tutti sections, as after measure 15, it’s about crisp diction. Make some decisions about where those cutoffs go and drill them from the very beginning. (in particular the ‘t’ of ‘what’ in measure 22) 

The nurse has a line “I put on rouge today too” somewhere around measure 85 in every version of the script, but in no versions of the score. I can’t hear it in any of the cast recordings. If anyone knows where that’s supposed to go in the melee, please put it in the comments. 

There’s some rather ineffective scoring in the passage beginning at 108. The horn, (stopped) and cello have an offbeat pattern that plays against the bass and the left hand of the piano. Those instruments don’t really blend, and can’t properly establish the musical idea, so it sounds like they’re playing the piano left hand part incorrectly. I don’t have a solution, but to my ear, it doesn’t really work.

It’s unclear how the (s)he’s in the lyric at 106 is supposed to work. I read it as each character being annoyed at their antagonist, and the characters choose the correct pronoun for the person who annoys them. 

Carefully drill the timing at the end, so that the ‘t’ at the end of the final ‘hot’ is exactly in the right place. They will all be looking offstage right, so you will not be able to cue them. 

26. Eulogies

The printed script I have from 1991 and the version included in Lapine’s new book include a long monologue for George after It’s Hot In Here. It depicts from George’s perspective childhood memories and then eventually what seems to be the beginning of his final illness. The monologue is not in the video of the original broadway production. I don’t think this monologue should be reinstated, but it is interesting that George says:

“A mission to see, to record impressions. Seeing… recording… seeing the record, then feeling the experience. Connect the dots, George.”

Sondheim and Lapine were, I think, starting to lay the groundwork here for the key questions of act 2, and to draw them back into act I in a way, to remind us of Dot’s need for connection, something Louis made and Act I George could not. The idea of trying to make connections permeates all Sondheim’s work and in particular looks forward to Assassins. “Connect! Connect! Connect!” (Everybody’s Got the Right to be Happy)

The music of Sunday is kind of a grab bag of 20th century techniques:

French Impressionism in No Life and Beautiful 

Aleatoric music in Chaos

Stravinsky in The One On The Left and in the 3 dissonant notes before the vamp begins in Sunday

Minimalism in Color and Light, Gossip Sequence, Putting it Together, and elsewhere

Electronic Music in the Chromolume 

Jazz in the Cocktail sections of Putting it Together

The notes of the first section underscoring the monologues are a 12 tone row, although Sondheim doesn’t develop them. After the initial statement he repeats on a synththem getting faster and faster.

The nerd in me wishes there were some significance for each of the 12 pitches to the 12 people exiting the stage, but there isn’t any clear correlation. 

The row repeats in measure 13. I made that loop as an audio cue, which is, I think, the only way to do it effectively. If you can play that 12 tone loop at speed getting faster and faster, you’re a better musician than I am. 

27. Chromolume #7 (Part I)

This part of the show disappoints some viewers, (see my earlier post) but I think it was shrewd of Sondheim and Lapine to make George’s art non-representational. It takes off the table the first act’s questions about seeing and being seen, whether the artist should have license to edit the world. This leaves the field open to be able to talk about the complicated world of selling the art you make. 

I was so carefully looking for patterns in our production, I suddenly became convinced that Naomi Eisen was somehow an anagram. Some grad students were concerned for my mental health… (thanks, Sloan and Alison!)

I started by playing this on my keyboard with a pad, but I found the drop with the pitch wheel didn’t go down far enough to sell the instrument breaking down, so I built an audio cue with a lot of crackling nonsense sounds at the end in addition to the drop. I found this much more effective. 

28. Chromolume #7 (Part II)

I built this in an audio program using free synth plugins that imitated the analog synths used in Stranger Things. For the first 21 measures, You’ll see that the patterns essentially layer on each other. I made all the layers, each in their own tracks, and then I exported the stems so they were on the click together. The sound designer then pulled those stems into Qlab and set up the cues so each click would unmute a new stem. 

The process begins again at measure 22, but without cueing, so you can just time it out the way your production needs it. My sound designer wanted to manipulate the individual synth loops in the 3D soundscape, so I gave stems for that as well, which he sent to various speakers. It was a neat effect. 

All this was originally performed by pit players activating synth loops from backstage. Pre-recording a track  is much less stressful, I would imagine, and has the same effect. 

My production really wanted a button at the end as well, so I built a synthy conclusion. 

29. Putting it together (Parts 1-17)

For an extensive analysis of this number, please see How Sondheim Found His Sound by Steve Swayne. Sondheim had been chasing a number like this for a long time. Its antecedents can be traced in Yatata Yatata from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro (for which a very young Sondheim had been a gopher) 

Most recently, Sondheim had written a very extended and somewhat similar party scene called The Blob in Merrily We Roll Along. But the previous attempts pale in comparison to this number, which accomplishes so much and is so satisfying. 

The material not associated with George echoes Jules and Yvonne’s No Life and the Celestes in the Gossip Sequence. The responses to the new art will always be perplexity masked by boredom. The marked difference between the gossips of Act I and these gossips are that none of the Act II gossips are concerned with anyone’s personal lives. Instead they argue in vague terms about the art itself. Alex has taken the place of Jules as a jealous artistic antagonist, and there is a running theme that art is inscrutable and that fashions change all the time. In that respect, the art world depicted here is quite different. 

Jules in Act I: 

“(getting angry) Always changing! Why keep changing?”

Later, George offers this counter to Jules:

“Why should I paint like you or anybody else? I am trying to get through to something new. Something that is my own.”

In Act II:

Greenberg:

“It’s not enough telling good from rotten 

when something new pops up every day. 

It’s only new though for now, but yesterday’s forgotten”

Redman: 

“And tomorrow is already passé”

Greenberg:

“There’s no surprise”

It’s a curious inversion of the dynamic of Act I. The Act I world at large was constantly being revised, but the art world resisted change. Here the art is constantly changing, but the outside world seems oddly familiar. Again we find ourselves discussing the ephemeral and the malleable. But Act II George is no longer lost in the wonder of the creation; he is too busy on the promotional end of the art. George’s entrance is heralded by the same fanfare as in act I, but he is not the same George. 

Mandy didn’t realize it until many years later, but George’s melodic contour in Putting it Together mirrors his melody in Finishing the Hat. This underscores the fundamental problem of Act II George: His energy isn’t in creation, but promotion, which is unsustainable. It’s hard not to conclude that this insight is related to Sondheim’s disillusion with commercial theater after the failure of Merrily. 

The inclusion of George’s multiple cutouts is a stroke of theatrical genius that is a parallel to Dot’s dress exit in act I, and just as central to the narrative. Dot’s stepping out of the dress allows us to see her as George is depicting her and also as she is in her own identity. George’s multiple versions of himself reveal that the locus of George’s creative energy isn’t the chromolume, but his public persona. He is the product, not the art. 

This is by far the most difficult number of the show. As I was rehearsing it, I wondered if I was, in fact, capable of playing it! Slowly, solutions became possible, and I actually developed quite a facility in executing the patterns. Don’t despair, but do plan to practice! 

The cocktail piano versions are in the same rather unimaginative lounge style we also find in Merrily We Roll Along, but don’t go too crazy embellishing or improving them, because they all sit under dialogue, and you don’t want to draw focus. 

The end of Part 4 had a break in the original production. (see video) You’ll have to decide how to manage it.

The original production did not tie into measures 4, 6, 8, and 10 in part 6. Instead, measures 3, 5, 7, and 9 were just 3 staccato chords each.

Part 7 is much faster than the metronome marking. The original production plays the underscore around 90 beats per minute for the dotted half, and even at that clip, they almost don’t make it by the end of the dialogue. You will also notice that the part is simplified. It might be wise to write in chord symbols and find your own simplification on the fly.

29K is a fingering conundrum. I don’t think it makes sense to go into too much detail because each hand will be different. I will say that however you divide the pattern between the hands, you’ll probably need to adjust it at some point.

In part 13 (29 N) The 5/4 bar originally went with a camera flash. I think trying to establish that extra beat is a waste of time, especially since nothing happens in the bar musically. Think of it as a lift, and tell the players to do the same. 

Measures 24 through 27 of 29 O were particularly awkward to play for me, although in looking at them, I can’t make out why. Measures 34-36 are hard for the singer to feel. Try and orient them to the Bass line as you rehearse it. I toyed with the idea of cutting a bar out, but the patterns are impossible to truncate; if you cut anything, the next passage doesn’t line up correctly.

The opening of 29P is hard to time against the dialogue. Learn to play it yourself, and cut the second keyboard (they don’t really add anything to the proceedings here) 

Measures 57 and 68 of 29P is another place where it isn’t worth it to try to get the 5/4 accurate. Think of them as a little lift.

From 71 on is the most difficult part of the show. Sondheim reserves these all-cast cacophonies for very particular moments: God That’s Good comes to mind, A Weekend in The Country from A Little Night Music or the Interrogation in Anyone Can Whistle. The cast recordings naturally have George’s vocal in the forefront, so most people have never really heard the other lines well. They are VERY fast and come in at difficult spots. Your right hand can go on autopilot, but your left has a very specific offbeat pattern that is difficult to execute. If you have the time, get a nice loud metronome (through a sound system?) and teach the parts at a fraction of the speed. Once you have the parts roughed in, increase the speed by a few beats a minute each time until you get near the indicated tempo (half=116) You really can’t cue this from the piano as you play. They just have to know it. In truth, the most critical part of the ensemble singing is the downbeat of measure 93A “That is the state of the art” Teach your singers how to listen for George’s line OR the bass. Hearing the half note in measure 90 and then the subsequent 3 bars can really help land that tutti entrance. In measure 92, Harriet’s part goes quite high. I think that 2 measure phrase should really be down the octave.

30. Children and Art

This is another number that is difficult to get excited about when you’re listening to the cast recording, and frankly in performance. According to the stage directions, three times in the piece the singer nearly falls asleep, and the lifts at the end of each measure are part of that sleepy disorientation. This means the vibe can be dangerously narcoleptic, a relief after the adrenaline of Putting it Together, but not exactly what you’re hoping for in the middle of a second act. 

But when we see it as a bookend with Beautiful, not necessarily thematically, but functionally, Children and Art really starts to pull a lot of weight. Marie is beginning second act George’s journey from disconnection to healing. In order to get there, George has to ground himself in the heritage of act I George. Marie has to introduce her to his grandmother, because the way back is the way forward. Marie is not the kind of character to sermonize, though. That happens later. This lyric is oblique to the main thrust of the narrative, and diffuse compared to the dizzying specificity of the lyrics we’ve just heard. 

I was bewildered by Sondheim’s frequent references to this as a Harold Arlen song. What could he mean by that? I think I finally cracked it while playing the run of the show. Arlen’s torch songs, like Come Rain or Come Shine, The Man That Got Away, or This Time The Dream’s on Me have a kind of slow burn repetition that suspends time in an odd way, that reminds one of slower songs in general, and this song in particular, as foreign as the style may be. 

The last chord seems to be hard to voice because of the dynamic levels in the ranges of the instruments as they are laid out. Play around with it at the sitzprobe until it sounds balanced.

31. After Children

The cue for this is “Connect George, connect.” It takes us into the final scene of the show, on the island as it is in 1984. 

32. Lesson #8

This was the last song added to the show. The original title was ‘primer’, which I like quite a lot. As the song stands now, we may lose a little of that connection. Dot was learning how to read, and now George needs to learn something too. 

Sondheim’s writing here is again somewhat oblique, but that seems only to increase its effectiveness. Patinkin evidently even prefers this moment to Finishing the Hat, a number I would imagine is much easier to act. George doesn’t have any epiphanies here, it’s a moment of despair. As Sondheim describes it: 

“He has no center. He has no vision. He’s not connecting. He’s feeling empty.”

The action accomplished here is the conjuring of Dot. 

Only the 2006 recording has measures 7-12 as rhythmically notated. It’s one of the easier numbers in the show to play, so you and the actor can really find the trajectory and the phrase rhythm of the piece. 

33. Move On

Sondheim told Criag Zadan:

“The way the score was constructed was based on the relationship of the two central characters. Theirs is a continuous and continuing love song that isn’t completed until the end of the show. In the song “Sunday in the Park with George”, Dot, in one section, begins a lyrical theme, which is her affection and her love for George. This is picked up later in “Color and Light,” and it develops and starts to reach a climax, and just at that point, they break off and they speak. Then in “We Do Not Belong Together” it’s picked up and further developed as if it’s almost where they left off, and ends with an unrhymed line where she sings, “I have to move on.” And when their love is finally consummated, which is the end of the second act, it all comes together and becomes a completed song in “Move On.” “Move On” is a combination of all the themes involving their relationship, including every harmony and every accompaniment; it’s where everything culminates. Only it’s over a period of four major scenes covering a hundred years. It’s one way of threading the theme through time.”

Ghosts are important in Sondheim. When they appear, the past breaks into the present to accuse or to encourage. Sunday, Assassins, Into The Woods, Passion, and Follies all include interactions between the living and the dead. This ghost is a spirit of reconciliation and mentorship. 

It does take some mental gymnastics to get where Dot takes us. Was George really giving Dot the gift of mindfulness? No matter, that’s the lesson she evidently took, which she tries to give back to Act II George. 

At the top of the number we hear as underscore the music from We Do Not Belong Together. This music originally underscored:

“You know exactly how I feel. 

Why do you insist you must hear the words

When you know I cannot give you words

Not the ones you need”

Act II George will once again be unable to give her words. The first thing he sings is:

I’ve nothing to say. 

Well, nothing that’s not been said.

Under this we have the music derived from the opening fanfare, but this time instead of being in a roiling D minor, it’s in a lush C# major. When Dot first says, “Move On”, it modulates DOWN to B major. For a song about moving on, it is surprisingly static harmonically. There is a B pedal for a full 28 measures before the texture thins and we move to the subdominant. The entire song moves deliberately to a particular tonality and stays there for a while; a minimalist trademark in an often minimalist score. 

The answer to George’s artistic stagnation is, as it turns out, his subjectivity. George needs to make a choice from his own perspective and go with it. 

“Anything you do, 

Let it come from you

Then it will be new”

The truth of the expression lies in the subjective experience of the artist as they move and change with the world that also moves and changes. 

Laura Hanson points out that “It is only through women, first Marie, then Dot, that George is able to trace his lineage and find the nurturing link with his artistic heritage.” 

The passage from 111 through 131 Sondheim thinks of as sounding like Rachmaninov. It lands spectacularly in another extended B major passage. 

I believe the cue at the top of the number should be “What did I give you?” The timing for the singers can be tricky. I could be wrong, but I believe the 3/2 bar (measure 24) is not in the original broadway cast or the 2016 cast, but it is in the 2006 recording. 

Ask your 2nd violin to play down the octave at 27, and later at 131. it’ll sound fuller, and I think it will be easier to tune for the first. 

At 103, have your singers learn this exactly in tempo and when it’s really solid, loosen up the phrasing. There is a bootleg of Mandy in his last performance utterly breaking down in this section which is very endearing. 

Two of the three reed books have what a number of pro players have told me are essentially unplayable passages. I am not a woodwind player, so my knowledge of the clarinet break is limited to orchestration textbooks, which all have some variation of this: “The clarinet break is something you should know about, but it doesn’t really matter because an excellent player can make it seem like nothing.” Well, in this case we have a number of passages that continually go over the break in a way that at the very least doesn’t pay off in sound what it demands in difficulty. I rewrote two of the three books and came up with something that worked for me. It isn’t ideal, but it’s better than the players fumbling these passages. You’ll find it here and here.

34. Act II Finale

This second iteration of Sunday is shorter, but no less impactful. George’s mother has entered, mistaking Act II George for Act I George. 

George’s opening words are repeated: Order, Design, Tension, Composition, Balance, Light, Harmony (The word tension is not in the opening, the list of words has altered each time it has appeared) They act as another incantation, summoning the rest of the painting. 

The inhabitants of the original painting bow to George, who we now realize is a sort of ‘eternal George’. 

Sunday concludes with a striking admonition to keep exploring new things from a subjective point of view and then immediately reminding us of the connection we share with the people who have come before us. The encouragement to be true to your own vision feels progressive, but the connection with the heritage of the past feels profoundly conservative. This tension is, I believe, one of the secrets to Sondheim’s success as a writer. The striking novelty and conceptual daring of his work is grounded in basic principles conveyed to Sondheim by his mentors. He encourages us to be a part of that too. 

The video of the original production has the ending as it appears in both the old vocal score and the new one. The original Cast recording, the 2006 recording, and the 2017 version have a slightly different opening here, which is essentially the first three measures of the show transposed down a minor 6th.

Depending on your production’s tech needs, you may have a lot of things that need to fly in to make this number work, which is going to determine potentially how slowly you will need to play this. The notes from the first act finale all apply here, except for the slight changes for this now shorter version. Because George is speaking during most of this, the Soldier takes his vocal part. You may find you need to augment that line with some of your stronger singers to get the balance working correctly. 

35. Bows

This is a neat bows. Oddly, there is no part in the bows or the exit music for the bass. I wrote one I’m including here. There is an anecdote in Lapine’s book that Michael Starobin asked the sound op to turn up the band for the bows, but they were already using the stage mics to make the applause sound louder when the show was struggling to find an audience. 

36. Exit Music

Here is the bass part I wrote for the Exit Music. The orchestration does not have one either. You will find the Sunday music a lot less powerful without the chorus. Violin 2 has a suspended Cymbal roll at the end that you might have to deal with. The horn once again has a high concert G right at the end. Say a prayer for them. 

Piano things to woodshed before you start:

Playing and conducting 9-16 of the opening Prelude

Measures 34 and 35 of 3. Sunday in the Park With George

The end of 8A Color and Light Part II, particularly the timing of very last note.

10 Gossip sequence polyrhythms

12F The Day Off Part VII changing right hand patterns

18 We Do Not Belong Together coordination of left and right hands after measure 80

29J

29K Experiment with the distribution of notes between the hands before you settle on a fingering.

29N

29O From measure 28 on, you may find you can move your right hand thumb and play the other two notes of the pattern with fingers 2 and 3

29P measure 28 to the end.  (block out a lot of time for this one)

33 Move On 13- End Coordination of right and left hands

Pit Orchestra Considerations

This orchestration was Michael Starobin’s first Broadway show. He had already orchestrated a few other things, including March of the Falsettos, but this score has the ambition of someone who doesn’t know what can’t be done. When it succeeds, which it does most of the time, it’s one of the most gorgeous scores in Broadway history. But there are many things about the score that make it a real challenge to play well. You will need to hire the best players you can afford in your market. 

Horn Part

This horn part is for thrill seekers only. At both ends of the show is one of the highest notes you can play on the horn, totally exposed, and virtually unprepared. I hired the horn player first. I have heard of productions moving the high horn parts to a flugelhorn.. When you hire your player, send them this picture and say, can you do this reliably every night? 

We encountered an interesting problem that you might consider as you plan your pit configuration. I initially seated the horn player in the center of the pit, right in front of me. One of my reed players, seated in the corner of the pit, had some difficulty hearing the other reeds, so I swapped the two of them, placing the horn in the far end of the pit. This worked out great for the reeds, but the horn player was no longer in the center of the action. He had trouble hearing the pulse, particularly at the top of the show where the texture is flowy and indistinct. In trying to hear what was playing, he had to lower his volume, because he was drowning out the rest of the group. But playing quietly at the top of the range makes an already quite difficult passage nearly impossible. The solution we arrived at was to make a special headphone monitor mix just for the horn. However you work out those details, hire the best horn player you can, and make sure they are set up to play as confidently as possible. 

Reeds

This was originally a 2 reed book, and they’ve fortunately split the book to three reeds, which is good. When they updated this orchestration, though, they did not fix the biggest problems in the books, which are the awkward passages for clarinet. There are also a few chords where the dynamic ranges of the instruments go somewhat against the proper balancing of the chords. 

Percussion

There is a little bit of set work in the show, but this book is really here to add color and detail to the rest of the score. You should pick a player who likes to find all the right sounds; this isn’t a book where you sub out the sounds for other things. A ship’s bell needs to sound like a ship’s bell, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. The mallet stuff is also very specific and color oriented. We used a Malletkat, but it wasn’t ideal.

Keyboard 2

The Keyboard 2 book is helpful in terms of taking some of the heavy lift off the first keyboard, but it isn’t as helpful as you might want it to be in, say, Putting it Together. Handing off the crazy passagework is almost more difficult than playing straight through, especially if you’ve figured out how to do it in rehearsal. There is a recurring ensemble patch which seems to be just a pad that sits behind the first keyboard part, and which makes more sense to just incorporate into the Keys 1 book as a layer. Keys 2 originally had the bass part in it, so if you’ve hired a bass player, you will have to clean out those lines; they aren’t necessary and the bass does a much better job of covering the ideas. 

Harp

Boy is this harp part helpful, and fairly well written for the harp, as these things go. When the harp is prominent, there is absolutely no substitute. Beautiful is somewhat difficult at speed (which I’ve gone into above) 

Strings

The string parts are a fine challenge for pro players. There are some awkward parts your players will want to tweak, but unless you’re a string player, I would leave it up to them to solve the problems.

If you decide to actually have the string players play percussion at the end of act I, you will want to organize the pit to make that possible. 

The Bass book was not in the original, so you’ll be tempted to drop it, but it is really quite helpful where it establishes the groove, and the synth bass in keyboard 2 is really not a good substitute. There are some notable errors in the books which I’ve explained above, and there is no bass part for the bows or the exit music, which is bewildering. Did someone have a train to catch?

Have a wonderful production!

Sunday in the Park with George: A Rough Guide for the M.D. Part I

Villanova University’s 2023 production of Sunday, directed by Dr. Valerie Joyce

I’ve decided to break up my exploration of this musical into two parts. This first part is a deep dive into Sondheim’s place in music history and this piece in Sondheim’s output. This first part will appeal perhaps to the folks who read my blog for big ideas I may have stumbled into. The second part will be devoted to more practical matters: the actual nuts and bolts of putting the show on.

A personal story

During the fall of 1992 I went on a 4 hour bus ride to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco with my High School choir to see Les Miz. (I feel confident that Robert Westenberg was playing Javert, but I can’t find any record of that online, so I may have hallucinated it) I was aware of Into the Woods at the time, and would play Rapunzel’s Prince the following Summer, but I was just beginning my exploration of Sondheim. Not far from the Curran Theatre at that time there was a little record store, and in that store I found the original Broadway cast recording of Sunday on CD. I grew up in Redding California, and there was a little music store in the mall where we lived, but they didn’t have a great selection of recordings outside the top 40, so I needed to take whatever opportunities I could to get my hands on new music. My friends were at the time very excited about Les Miz, but I didn’t share their enthusiasm, partly because I had recently gotten into opera, and Les Miz seemed by comparison weak sauce to me. The other reason was that I was a snob, and I didn’t want to enjoy anything that was popular. Sondheim was different, somehow; none of my friends were into his music or even knew who he was. 

I listened to the score in the bus on the way home on my portable CD player and was instantly very taken with it. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. I brought the CD to my french horn teacher, who was the conductor of the local community orchestra I played in. He was one of my lifelines to the world of high culture. I was curious to hear his thoughts. The next week when he returned it to me he said that he liked what Sondheim had done with minimalism; Minimalism was another thing I had never heard of. 

In retrospect, the musical was both helpful and harmful to me as a young person. I loved high art, I loved the craft of music and musicals, and although I was a popular kid who led something of a charmed life, I didn’t have a lot of close friends, and none of my friends shared my obsessive enthusiasm for opera and musical theatre. I couldn’t readily access lyric theatre or even much classical music where I lived. Sunday in the Park was about someone with an obsession to create who, like me, was alienated from the people around him, and the musical urged him (and by extension me) to keep at it, to find something new. I recognized myself in George, and he made it okay for me to feel like an oddball. I felt in George a kindred spirit. The musical validated the identity I was staking out for myself. 

The musical also did a great deal of damage, which I only came to realize later. George’s disregard for the feelings of the people who love him is posited as an unfortunate necessity for the creation of his art. Like a lot of people, I was particularly moved by George’s line:

“And when the woman that you wanted goes

You can say to yourself, ‘Well, I give what I give’

But the woman who won’t wait for you knows 

That however you live, there’s a part of you 

Always standing by

Mapping out the sky

Finishing the hat.” 

It’s that “Well, I give what I give”, that’s the rub. Once you’ve decided that your pursuit of your art allows you to disregard other people, you’ve given yourself license to behave rather badly. Like most young people, I made some choices I sure wish I could go back and change, choices I justified by my sense of artistic alienation. So when I was finally able to music direct Sunday at Villanova this year, it was a bittersweet experience. Sondheim is always rewarding to work on, but my time working on Sunday was also a season when I needed to come to terms with the ways I had internalized a negative message. It was in many ways painful to face those truths about myself. 

And yet George’s story isn’t the only one to listen to. Others have taken courage from Dot’s story, particularly where she movingly says:

“You could tell me not to go. Say it to me. Tell me not to go.”

And then,

“You are complete, George

You all your own

We do not belong together.

No one is you George, there we agree

But others will do, George.

No one is you, and no one can be, 

But no one is me, George, no one is me.”

The magnetism of George’s artistic energy is thrilling and alluring, but you can’t build a lasting relationship with someone like that. Moreover, you can’t find the best version of yourself with a partner who doesn’t value you on your own terms for who you are as a complete self. Dot ultimately discovers her value as a person and follows that value across an ocean.

One of the great joys of working on a Sondheim musical is that there are many depths to plumb. The story is about complicated people, and there is more than one moral to discern. I discovered a different moral while working on the show. As much as George is working alone and alienating people around him, and as lonely as we find Act II George in pursuing his craft, the Georges don’t actually live in isolation. Success is found in connection with those living and dead. Our task as artists is to have the courage to push through to something new, hopefully without sacrificing those we love on the altars of our craft. Our task as people living around artists is to leave them room to create, and to respect ourselves enough to know when to find our own paths without them. 

Groundbreaking, and not to everyone’s taste

Sunday in the Park with George seems to catalyze people’s polarized opinions about Sondheim and his work. A number of my friends strongly dislike Sondheim, and Sunday seems to activate many of their most heated negative opinions of his work. Conversely, people who love Sondheim find Sunday the essence of everything they enjoy about him. 

These strong reactions are to be expected for a figure like Sondheim because he broke from the strongly established musical and dramatic language the general public had come to enjoy, striking out in a new direction that had far fewer reference points for a general audience. Gluck, Beethoven, and Wagner elicited similarly strong positive and negative responses, because what they were doing seemed to many a rejection of the things they most valued. The subsection of the audience that disliked the new direction found the new ideas these writers presented pointless, boring, or perverse. 

My friends who dislike Sondheim are not just bewildered by my enthusiasm, they seem angry at me about it. It reminds me of my experience as a child, when everyone was looking at Autostereogram or ‘Magic Eye’ pictures. They were marveling at the 3D images they were seeing. I couldn’t seem to make it work, and their excitement annoyed me. It seemed to me they must be making it all up. If you’re reading this, I suppose you are likely one of the folks who can see the ‘Magic Eye’ picture in Sunday, at least to some extent. If you can’t see it, nothing I say here is going to change your mind, and that’s really quite fine. Plenty of wonderful things bewilder me. I no longer need all my friends to agree with me about such matters.

Lapine’s recent book, some incredible podcasts, and even TikToks are beginning to peel the layers of this endlessly fascinating musical, so I don’t feel the need to say everything that might be said. I’ll limit my thoughts to four areas:

1. Sondheim’s relationship to the ‘Golden Age’ Musical, Serialism, and Minimalism
2. The way Sondheim trained his audience to understand his storytelling language
3. How that distinctive language has been diluted into a much less interesting lingua franca for contemporary musical theatre
4. Does Act II work?

In part II, as I’m discussing the many practical difficulties in the show, I’ll be discussing some brilliant and idiosyncratic aspects of Sondheim’s craft, so you’ll want to check that out even if you don’t have any intention of being the music director.

In this exploration, I hope to humanize Sondheim somewhat: to place him in his time, among us as fellow artists and as his audience. As long as he remains a god, we can’t see our own part in his story or his part in ours.

But He Combines All These Different Trends: Sondheim, the ‘Golden Age’ Musical, Serialism, and Minimalism

From the outside, Sondheim appears to have emerged with a singular perspective alone in his generation. Trailblazers are like that. But the reality is of course far more complex, rooted in some heated cultural arguments from the mid 20th century, when Sondheim was formed as a writer. If we place Sondheim properly in that world, we can see that he is part of an interconnected web of ideas, not a lone wolf. This doesn’t diminish his achievement. We see the questions he was driven to ask, and we can ground his answers to those questions in the world of his contemporaries. George isn’t really alone, and neither is Stephen. 

Sondheim had two mentors, Oscar Hammerstein II and Milton Babbitt. I have a feeling most folks know about Hammerstein, but Babbitt is much less well known to theatre people. It would be impossible to find two more disparate influences. They stand on opposite sides of a deep divide in 20th century culture. 

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

Babbitt was one of the most important composers and thinkers of the Serialist (twelve tone) school of composition. He is particularly famous for an article included in every anthology of 20th century music writing: Who Cares if You Listen? It would take much too long to really explore what this often cited and much misunderstood article was about in a page like this. But Babbitt became a very public example of a composer advocating for music the public was never intended to understand. If this sounds very like George’s ‘I do not paint for your approval’, you’re catching the drift. 

My ethics as a professor compel me to add that Sondheim studied showtunes with Babbitt, not Schoenberg, that Babbitt loved musicals and was writing one when he and Sondheim worked together. Babbitt was not the pointy-headed, audience hating academic people have portrayed him to be. He did, however, represent the high-modernist aesthetic at its height. His was music of rigorous mathematical construction, explicitly rejecting the populism of the general public’s fickle tastes.

Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)

Hammerstein was Babbitt’s polar opposite. Hammerstein was doggedly interested in communication, and he was so good at it, he built an entertainment empire and inaugurated the so-called ‘golden age’ of Broadway. Hammerstein experimented and took risks. When the risks paid off, (Oklahoma, Carousel) he risked even more. When the risks failed (Allegro), he would turn back toward what he knew would connect with the audience. (South Pacific) Sondheim saw the failure of Allegro firsthand as a 17 year old gofer. It was a seminal experience in the development of his concept of what a writer does. 

Mentored by these two giants, Sondheim fused their approaches in a kind of perfect Hegelian synthesis. Sondheim’s work as a composer is marked by motivic interrelationships and calculated development of small musical ideas. This is the Babbitt legacy. His work as a writer is about clarity and communication. This is Hammerstein’s legacy. 

To reconcile the opposites, Sondheim needed to temper Babbitt’s purely musical logic. As an example: In the initial planning stages for Sunday, Sondheim was struck with the idea of the elegance of Seurat’s palette:

“I thought: Isn’t this interesting that Seurat had, on his palette, eleven colors and white. And I thought, eleven and one make twelve. And how many notes are there in the scale? Twelve. And I thought, isn’t that interesting? So I thought I would utilize that in some way, shape, or form.”

There is a twelve tone row in Sunday, but it isn’t structurally important, because Sondheim decided the idea was unworkable. 

You have to think like Babbitt to come up with that idea. And you have to think like Hammerstein to reject it. 

When we situate Sondheim’s output in the context of that mathematician/storyteller dichotomy, we can begin to understand him as someone very like other creators of his generation. His descriptions of himself begin to make more sense in this context as well. Without this context, it’s difficult to make sense of quotes like these:

“In philosophy of art, generally, I’m a conservative. My beliefs are conservative, but my work is not.”

Why would Sondheim take such care to identify himself as a traditionalist? Can anyone hear Sunday in the Park as a conservative work? What might he mean when he distinguishes his beliefs from his work?

The key lies in the divide I’ve been describing. When Sondheim talks about being a conservative composer, he isn’t speaking with reference to other American musical theatre composers. He is positioning himself in the world of tonality as opposed to the school of serialism as classical composers do. 

It’s important to keep that dynamic in mind when reading any of Sondheim’s remarks about Babbitt. 

“I haven’t studied atonal music. When I studied with Milton Babbitt I asked him if I could study atonality, and he said, ‘you haven’t exhausted tonal resources for yourself yet, so I’m not going to teach you atonal.’ And he was absolutely right; I’m still in tonal… Oh, I listen [to atonal music] but I’m not particularly fond of atonal music. I’m really very tonally oriented. I’m very old fashioned- I’m about 1890. I’m still early Ravel- that’s my idea of terrific. I know something about these things but I rarely use them.” 

-Sondheim interviewed by Mark Eden Horowitz

In an interview with Tim Paige, Sondheim claims no association with the sound of Babbitt: 

“I hear a little of Oscar [Hammerstein], not a lot, and I hear nothing of Milton.” 

Despite his careful efforts to distance himself from the work of his famously thorny teacher, Sondheim’s music reveals a composer more indebted to Babbitt’s approaches and methodologies than he is admitting. Sondheim’s innovations in Sunday are out of step with every other Broadway composer of his time, but are very much of a piece with the work of his generation of classical composers. Sondheim, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley were all born between 1930 and 1937. These composers began their musical training in the high modernist tradition, but they found themselves working just as Sondheim was to find intellectually stimulating methods that were nonetheless accessible to the general public.

When my French Horn teacher returned my CD of Sunday all those years ago, he said, “I like what he’s done with minimalism.” That’s almost right. Sondheim wasn’t using the ideas of minimalism to depict pointillism. Sondheim is a minimalist composer, maybe the most successful one of them all. 

Minimalist composers still enjoyed the creative task of organizing pitches in mathematical ways. But they wanted the audience to be able to enjoy the game. The movement which would come to be known as Minimalism was not a total rejection of the values of serialism. This music is still carefully structured around processes. Composers didn’t simply write whatever struck their fancy. They treated collections of notes as artifacts to be manipulated, run against each other in interesting ways, repeating, expanding, phasing, contracting, modulating, altering and expanding groups of notes in ways that were interesting to think about and intellectually rigorous. What distinguished these young innovators and made this new music so exciting in the classical sphere was the fact that these composers re-embraced tonality. (which you might think of as being in a key) They further made sure the processes they were employing could be clearly heard, even without any prior explanation. 

In 1968 Steve Reich wrote about what he found interesting in musical processes:

“I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music… In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible…What I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing… The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all.”

Minimalist composers made a point of exploring repetitive Southeast Asian and African musical practices. (When Steve Reich first met Sondheim, he expressed an admiration for Pacific Overtures) The Minimalists also drew inspiration from the repetition at the center of the popular music they were listening to. It was easy for naysayers to ridicule the ever repeating patterns of Philip Glass’s music, but minimalism’s intellectual underpinnings were broad based and anything but simplistic. The music had many points of reference that made it intelligible to an ever larger audience. Repetition was something a 20th century audience implicitly understood from decades of acclamation in popular music, and as Robert Fink has demonstrated in his wonderful book Repeating Ourselves: American Minimalism as Cultural Practice, the repetitions of Minimalism reflected the repeating patterns of 20th century life. We hear in this music the rhythm of the advertising industry and the repeating multiplicity of branding that so intrigued Warhol and the other pop artists who were working at the same time. 

To an older generation of classical music enthusiasts, Minimalist music was mindless or worse, nihilist. Reich’s Four Organs famously drove a Boston audience to a fury of boos, which started when the audience began to realize the repetition would continue indefinitely.

But the minimalists had the last laugh.

In time the musical language of Minimalism made such a cultural impact that today film scores, advertisements, and popular music are suffused with minimalist gestures. The normalization of this musical language is one of the great success stories in Western Art music, and this popularity has obscured Minimalism’s experimental and process based roots. The shadow of Serialism looms large in the fractal patterns of Glass, Reich, and their many imitators. Without serialism’s insight that music could be organized in patterns and processes, the music would never have developed the way it did. 

Lara E. Housez has a remarkable exploration of some of the ideas I’m talking about in the fascinating new book Sondheim in Our Time and His. Housez names both the serialist influence in Sunday and the minimalist techniques very well, but stops short of naming Sondheim a minimalist as I have here. You should read her chapter if you find this connection interesting. 

Like the other minimalists, Sondheim uses process transformation of melodic ideas as the basis of his later work. Influenced particularly by the music of Steve Reich, Sondheim developed his stylistic language to answer the Musical Theatre crisis of the late 1970s in a way that hadn’t yet occurred to anyone. The way he used repeating structures was driven by the drama, but some of his musical ideas are are very similar to common minimalist procedures.

The passage below comes from Gossip Sequence. The right hand is a pattern of 4, the left is a pattern of 3. The two parts phase against each other. You could think of this as a polyrhythm, but because the pattern sits in a single set of pitches, it sounds much more like Reich than Jazz.

Here’s the beginning of a celebrated piece by Reich: Piano Phase

Two pianists play the same little pattern over and over. They slowly go out of phase with one another until the pattern is displaced by one pitch in one of the players. Then the process continues. Each re-alignment reveals a new combination of pitches in the pattern.

Sondheim uses this method throughout Sunday, but here specifically, the repeating and obnoxious needling performs a dramatic function; like the Pick-a-little-talk-a-little ladies if they were all singing different patterns that contradicted each other.

The chords that begin the musical are repeating with variations in a very minimalist gesture.

Compare this newer masterpiece of minimalism, Promises by Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders:

If you were to play the first page of Sunday repeatedly for 45 minutes, you’d have a credible minimalist concert work.

I can anticipate enthusiasts of minimalism taking issue with my assertion that Sondheim is a full-fledged minimalist on various grounds. After all, repetition is not necessarily minimalist, and Sondheim doesn’t park for long on any idea. But Sondheim’s increasingly motivic melodic transformations in the vocal lines themselves are driven by the same musical imperatives as the minimalists and are even explicitly minimalist in their expression. (a little more on that in the next post) What distinguishes Sondheim from the other minimalists is that the totalizing commitment to the process is always sublimated in his work to the needs of the drama.

As it happens, other minimalists were writing operas. Glass’s seminal third opera Akhnaten is also from 1984. But because Minimalists are generally so invested in playing out the possibilities of musical ideas on musical terms, these operas tend to have large, static, pulsating sections of text setting, and they don’t move dynamically and fluidly with stories in real time. They feel like pageants, a series of thrilling tableaus, or like a baroque opera, impressive and inert. Even in a season as light as 1976-1977, it would have required someone of extraordinary vision to see Glass’s Einstein on the Beach in one of its two New York performances and predicted it as a way forward for the Broadway musical. Sondheim is too canny to publicly dismiss minimalist opera, but he did write in Look, I Made a Hat:

“When I first heard that the libretto of Philip Glass’s 1979 opera Satyagraha was written in Sanskrit (by him and Constance de Jong) I giggled inwardly at what I deemed its pretentiousness, and delightedly reverting to my snotty adolescence, made many a witty remark at its expense. Then I saw it. Not only was I mesmerized for most of it, I was brought up short by the realization that Sanskrit was the best possible language for an opera libretto. It has the two necessary qualities: it utilizes predominantly open vowel sounds (listen to the title) and it doesn’t invite you to try to understand the language, which is something you automatically do at the opera if you know a smattering of German or Italian or French.”

For a lyricist of Sondheim’s caliber, complimenting a libretto for not inviting comprehension gives a sense of what an audience might value in minimalist opera: Spectacle, not narrative. This was not Sondheim’s way. 

Sondheim occasionally joked about stealing ideas from Reich, as in 2012, in recorded remarks for an award ceremony honoring Reich:

“Steve’s experiments with phase music and the musical use of spoken fragments have alone opened the ears of many younger composers as well as some elderly ones like myself.  In fact, stealing ideas from him is one of the more satisfying pleasures that I’ve had.  I only wish the opportunity arose more often, but, unfortunately, it’s not always appropriate.”

But it should also be noted that repeating and transforming patterns appear in Sondheim’s work as early as 1965’s Anyone Can Whistle, when Reich was just beginning his tape experiments in near anonymity, and that repeating patterns became the organizing principle of large sections of Company and Follies in 1970 and 1971. This is an important point to make, because Sondheim is not exactly copying the minimalist style, as some have described it.  He arrived at similar ideas independently and in tandem, working out of the same cultural influences as the composers of art music. To understand him correctly, Sondheim needs to be seen as a minimalist composer himself, not a copycat who pulled minimalist ideas opportunistically into the world of Musical Theatre.  

In an interview in 2015, Sondheim claims the first piece he heard of Steve Reich’s was 1979’s Eight Lines, and he “Immediately went to Jerry Robbins and said, ‘you gotta make a ballet out of this’, and he did.” The very minimalist score of Pacific Overtures predates this familiarity with Reich’s music by a full 3 years. 

In a July 1985 WNYC interview, Sondheim says: 

“It’s not so much that minimalist music influenced me as [that] I got into it, I’ve been an admirer of Steve Reich in particular, and Glass over a period of years, and I found that I realized that as I was trying to musicalize I realized the kind of so-called pointillist painting application of many many tiny strokes of color was not unlike the application of tone clusters, that is to say he would  pure tones of color next to each other in order to make another tone, and that’s often so to speak as a matter of fact”

Sunday is therefore both a continuation of Sondheim’s general development as a minimalist himself, and also a specifically Reichian musical language Sondheim sensed would be a good analog to the ideas of the work at hand. 

Gathering Supporters and Adherents: The Way Sondheim Trained his Audience

Another drawback to thinking of the artist as an isolated hero is that it neglects the importance of the audience the artist is addressing. The traditional narrative of the trailblazing creator focuses naturally on the progression toward the work we have come to recognize as significant. We want to get a sense of how these breakthroughs came to be, and how the writer thought up their greatest ideas. We consequently lose the sense of the artist slowly bringing themselves and the audience along from work to work, acclimating the audience to the means of expression and setting the terms for what they might expect. A writer with a body of work is in a kind of negotiation with an audience. When a writer with a particularly long career writes a work that represents a new mastery or synthesis of ideas, that not only means that the author has had enough chances to write a piece that they have a deep well of technical skills. It also means that the audience has had enough experiences with the intervening steps toward the capstone work that they can process what the author was trying to say. Without many such points of intersection between the writer and the audience, this dynamic can’t take place. 

For example:

To tell the full story of Show Boat is to acknowledge that the audience for the Princess Musicals had learned from Kern’s body of work how to hear the kind of musical storytelling he had in mind; to expect fewer musical trifles and more content, to expect the music to help tell the story. 

To tell the full story of Oklahoma is to correctly place the audience’s understanding of what a musical might be in the story of its innovation and success. That audience had partially learned from Hammerstein himself how to hear what he was trying to do. 

If Sondheim had written Forum and somehow figured out a way to write Into The Woods without writing, recording, and releasing any of the intermediate shows, the audience wouldn’t have understood the language of the musical enough to enjoy it as they did. 

It was fortunate for Sondheim’s career trajectory that he had moderate successes and daring failures in almost equal measure from the beginning, and that all his shows (even the flops) were recorded and publicly released. In this sense Sondheim’s body of work is one of the first to benefit from the readily available distribution of recordings. A subsection of the audience was able to listen again and again to the scores and in doing so develop an understanding of his language. 

Gottfried Van Swieten (1733-1803)

In the 1780s and 1790s, Gottfried Van Swieten, an Austrian diplomat and imperial librarian, privately introduced Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to the music of Bach and Handel. Each of these composers were deeply impacted by this music, known at that time only to a tiny group of connoisseurs.

Sara Levy (1761-1854)

Not long thereafter, a Prussian Jewish woman and amateur musician named Sara Levy also collected this music and shared it with her friends. Her library would eventually make possible the Bach revival led most famously by her great nephew Felix Mendelssohn. Composers who were exposed to this music began incorporating more complicated polyphony and dramatic baroque gestures into their own compositions. Listeners in turn began to appreciate this density and excitement, and to be aware of the Baroque antecedents. This is a case of a very small but well placed audience slowly disseminating a complicated and partially forgotten musical language until eventually the circle of appreciation led to the middle class and the general public. The process took more than half a century. 

Wide distribution and consumption of cast recordings accelerated a process like this tremendously. Now anyone with a turntable could memorize shows that didn’t run the length of a week, and one didn’t need to live in New York or afford tickets to be aware of the latest developments in the field. 

The cast recording of Oklahoma! In 1943 was the first ‘Original Cast Recording’ and sold over a million copies. This proved the potential profitability of recording every Broadway show that had any public appeal. By 1960, the Original Cast Recording of Camelot was so successful as an album that it significantly boosted the fortunes of the troubled stage show it documented. By 1969, composers like Andrew Lloyd Webber realized that they could exploit that dynamic deliberately, writing the shows to work as albums first, then figuring out how to stage them after they were already popular. In less than 30 years, the tail of recording was wagging the dog of the production itself. 

The economics of the theatre was still very challenging for a composer like Sondheim, who wasn’t courting a broad audience like Lloyd Webber. A new show still had to convince enough New Yorkers and tourists to buy tickets and pay off the investors. But that was becoming a separate issue from the development of one’s individual voice, which could be established and disseminated to people who never even attended any of the musicals. I grew up in rural Northern California. The first show I ever attended on Broadway was Sondheim’s Passion, in late 1994, but at 19, I had already purchased and memorized Sondheim’s entire recorded catalog.  

A number like Changing from Act I of Sunday is incomprehensible in the language of a ’50s musical. But if one has heard Too Many Mornings from Follies, Another Hundred People from Company, Every Day a Little Death, and Liaisons from Night Music, and Kiss Me from Sweeney Todd, one not only knows how to hear what the piece is about, one expects such a number from Sondheim. 

This is also a major factor in the careers of Minimalist composers. Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams released their music on Nonesuch Records, a prestige label known for releasing beautiful recordings of exciting new work, stylishly packaged to look terrific on your coffee table. It wasn’t necessary to have one’s work programmed by a major orchestra to get musical innovations into the ears of the public. The minimalists built an audience that had to be reckoned with, irrespective of their popularity (or lack thereof) in traditional venues. 

This relationship of composer to audience via the medium of recordings is self-selective, which is another of the reasons why Sondheim’s music speaks so well to some people and so little to others. Those in the know chose to be in the know and put in a great deal of time to learn the language.

Now they’re just becoming more and more about less and less: Contemporary musical theatre and the dilution of Sondheim’s Language

Even as early as the mid-1990s, Sondheim’s musical language was so well known among musical theatre fans that it was becoming a major part of the vocabulary of most young writers. In 1995, when the style had begun to permeate the new shows, Amanda McBroom wrote a song entitled ‘Everybody wants to be Sondheim’ Part of the lyric reads:

Listen as they hammer out one chord.
Listen ’til you’re ready for a lunatic ward.
No wonder Sweeney Todd went out of his gourd,

And later:

And yet the epidemic can’t be curbed.
Even Stephen would be disturbed
To see what he has spawned universally.
‘Cause everybody wants to be Sondheim.
Everybody wants to finish the hat.
Everybody wants to be Sondheim but…yours truly.

Everybody wants to assault your ear.
Don’t send in the clones – they’re already here.
Everybody wants to be Sondheim,
Primed every time to rhyme internally,

Everyone’s coming up Sondheim but me.

Today composers use insistent chords in the right hand with jagged offbeats in the left hand; it is as ubiquitous as the Alberti bass in the 1780s. Slowly pulsating quarter notes like the closing number of each act of Sunday are the underscore of most musical theatre ballads. The style is fairly easy to combine with the repetitive accompaniments of pop ballads, (which are also the musical cousins and grandchildren of minimalism). The triumph of his musical language, now drastically simplified and stripped of its rigorous motivic construction, reduced to a set of clichés, has put him in an odd position. His musical style is now in many ways in the position the ‘Golden Age’ stood when Sondheim was first remaking his style.

By the 1970s, the musical language of Broadway had developed an insular vocabulary. It sounded like itself, and only rarely did a song escape a show to be covered by a popular artist. One immediately knew from the style of the writing and the kind of singing that one was listening to a showtune. The bracing rock language of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar came as a welcome relief, even if at times the new sounds weren’t yet up to the task of telling the story. We feel that excitement in our day when a Hamilton or a Six offers us a glimpse of a stylistic diversity Broadway no longer has. Repurposing songs from outside theatre is not the answer to the artistic cul-de-sac either, as we’ve learned after decades of jukebox fare.

This is where we are now. In the diluted Sondheim language, sarcastic introspection and biolerplate piano accompaniment somehow lose their exploratory quality. It’s white noise, something to be pushed back against if we are to find a new way of making musical theatre, just as Sondheim himself did.

I Hate These People: Does Act II work?

In Kyle Marshall’s excellent podcast, he has been asking guests this season if Act II of Sunday is necessary. Most of his guests are saying it is. But from the very beginning, many have said that Act II doesn’t work. I never felt that way, probably because the encouragement I got from the show is virtually all at the end of Act II. It remains my favorite part of the show. 

From moment to moment, number for number, it would be tough to top the second act. It’s Hot Up Here is utterly delightful. Putting it Together is a tour-de-force; one of the most difficult and impressive bravura numbers in Musical Theatre. After a brief scene, there is a slow number that I will admit is not a highlight of the show. But then Lesson #8, Move On, and a reprise of Sunday, three numbers that often bring audiences to tears. So what’s the problem?

I identify a number of factors that make the act hit-or-miss for folks, and I believe all of them are simply unavoidable given the kind of piece Sondheim and Lapine were attempting to write. 

It is a principle of musical theatre writing that in the first 15 minutes of the show, the writers tell the audience what they might expect, who to root for, and what’s the main point of the show. If you drastically change the tone or style of the show or introduce major characters past that first portion, the audience feels cheated somehow. At the top of Act II, we briefly see the characters we know, and then they go away, replaced by an entirely new group of people who are exhausting and present brand new problems. The mental energy it takes to process this shift makes some audience members lose patience with the piece. After all, the first act of Sunday requires a very active mind of the audience, especially if one is seeing the piece for the first time. The top of Act II is just a bridge too far for some viewers. 

If your strongest connection with the piece is to Dot, not George, the second act is a real let-down. The empowerment Dot experiences at the end of Act I is reversed. Dot comes back to assure George that what he did was all for the best, as long as he made his art his own way. 

A third issue people identify is the Chromolume. The Chromolume isn’t meant to be particularly good work. Second act George is stalled out, and we need to see that. The tech for the first act of Sunday can be very complicated, leaving fewer time and resources to solve the chromolume’s technical issues. And these days the creative team also has to access ideas believable as artifacts from the 1980s. The audience has to make sense of this immediately upon meeting George in Act II. The scene where the machine breaks down is very funny, but it’s difficult to piece out how much of what is being portrayed is George’s stalled out art and how much is the decisions made by the production. To process all that while experiencing the show for the first time is a daunting task. 

Each of these issues stems from something intrinsic to the message of the show, and in fact, intrinsic to Sondheim’s understanding of himself in his world. 

The parallel construction of the two acts (more on that in the next post) tells us over and over again that as much as the world seems different now, these people are locked into the same patterns and playing essentially the same roles as people have always played. Second act George is a different person, but is essentially the eternal George, to the point where first act George’s mother recognizes him as her son. (After initially ignoring her actual son in the first act) When Dot concludes the show, “they are your words, George”, she is asking George to claim his legacy as the ur-artist. The history George discovers at the end of the show is meant for him to participate in and embody, not to imitate. This is how Sondheim himself saw his world. His artistic legacy is wrapped up in his heroes and mentors, who represent an idea of the artist’s struggle and quest in which he is meant to participate. The past nurtures the present and the future. 

Incidentally, Sunday is an explicit change in that narrative, In Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily, the past in some sense reaches forward in time to condemn the present for losing its way. In Sunday and in Into The Woods, the past reaches into the future to extend grace. In Assassins, the past goes back to being malevolent. But in Sondheim’s work, the past is always an active participant in the present and the future. 

There is no way to tell that story in this instance without a second set of characters in another time. The audience’s difficulties in processing the new characters are unavoidable.

Dot’s journey in Act I is refreshingly empowering, and we are sad to see that actress subsequently sitting in a wheelchair and an old-lady wig, draped in sweaters or blankets so that we can’t see that she’s still wearing a corset. She sings an intentionally meandering song and then re-emerges as Dot. Except this Dot has lost all the frustration and humor we loved and now exists as a kind of fantasy of maternal encouragement. (I have given here the unkindest possible reading)

But Sondheim is ultimately writing about George. He doesn’t truly know Dot’s world, and neither does Lapine. The core dramatic questions are artist questions, not relationship questions. In the first act, Dot’s pain is the price we see them both pay for the glory of George’s art. As much as we want to see more of first act Dot, her story has reached the only resolution that makes sense when she leaves him. For a satisfying conclusion to the story, the two must be reconciled, “We will always belong together”. But that reconciliation can’t happen with any honesty in their real relationship. It can only happen metaphorically. 

Finally, as Sondheim and Lapine are trying in Act II to draw explicit comparisons to the modern world of art, they have to show new George as a participant in the newest artistic exploration, he must have some success at it, or we don’t know whether he really should be doing this at all, and the work can’t be incredible, or he can’t have a crisis. They have to show this work that has potential, but isn’t all that good. 

This is an example of a problem we encounter a lot in art about art. When a character is supposed to have written the perfect song, a composer has an impossible task. And when a character is supposed to have made bad art, it’s an almost equally difficult task for the creator of the fictitious art. Normally artistic presentation leaves it up to the audience to passively decide if something is good or bad. When the piece sets up the quality level of the work as very good or even slightly bad, it invites unwelcome metatheatrical questions. The work in Act I is a famous pointillist painting, so the decision about the quality of the work has already been made by others, and the audience doesn’t have to ask the question. 

Again, the piece faces an intrinsic, almost insoluble problem. 

It makes sense to me that people don’t enjoy the end of Sunday. But I think what we have is the best possible completion given the placement of the writers in their world. To complete it differently would have required other writers with other stories to tell.

What the Eye Arranges is What is Beautiful

Sondheim usually brushed off questions about whether he was writing about himself:

“A lot of people think that a lot of the songs I write are autobiographical. And they think that the characters I write about are me. They think I’m George in Sunday in the Park with George, or I’m Bobby in Company. But in fact, there’s only been one autobiographical song I’ve ever written, and that was “Opening Doors” in Merrily We Roll Along”

In truth, though, all writers write about themselves. The things that are worth saying grow out of experiences, and you can only have your own. Sondheim is like the Georges and like us. We have inherited a way of seeing our world from the past, full of quarrels and contradictions. We take that inheritance into a world that is constantly changing, where many of the things we love are torn down to build towers. Whoever we may be, it’s up to us to construct a new world in the chaos that brings forward the best of what we’ve been given, even against a never ending parade of naysayers. It won’t do for us to live in the past. I’m changing, you’re changing. We revise the world whether we want to or not. The second acts of our lives may not make sense to some folks, but we can only say what we know how to say. 

Curtains: A Rough Guide for the M.D.

Logo from 2022 Villanova Production, directed by Fr. Peter Donohue

Curtains is an audience pleasing, traditional show-biz kind of musical with a large cast and impressive effects. I have been involved in two productions, one with an extremely small stage, and another in a large state-of-the-art proscenium space. If you are doing the show on a tight budget or in a small space, you’ll have to think creatively to replace the technical elements that are embedded in the plot. If you are doing the show with all the bells and whistles, it is logistically a big lift!

As always, in this blog, I’ll start by talking about the show in the context of other shows in the history of the work of the authors and American musicals in general and then I’ll move on to very specific tips and advice for music directors: How to navigate the materials from the licensing agencies, what to bring up in the production meetings, what to watch out for as you teach the parts, and how to conduct the show. 

Before You Start: 

1. Listen to the 2007 original cast recording. 
2. Have a look at this explanation of the show’s history by the dramaturg of our Villanova production Nic Ecker. 
3. Don’t watch this video which definitely isn’t Curtains. 

Some Background:

If you’ve followed my Before You Start instructions, you’ve already looked at Nic Ecker’s rundown of the history of the show. It took a very long time to get to Broadway, and it underwent many iterations and configurations before reaching the version now licensed and performed.

I’d like to devote the first part of this post to Kander and Ebb, since this is the first of their shows I’ve covered on this blog. 

Kander and Ebb: Do they have a personal voice?

In his important 1972 book Words With Music, Lehman Engel wrote these rather uncharitable words about Kander and (by extension) Ebb:

“I would like to speak for a moment about the wavering musical style of a very talented theatre composer named John Kander. I do this because I respect him, care a great deal about the danger I think he is in, and I want to see him go as far as I believe he can go, provided….

Look at three consecutive Broadway scores by John Kander. I cannot understand why so much of Cabaret sounded like Kurt Weill. Was it because Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, was cast as the old lady? Was it because the setting was Berlin? Either explanation contains a worldful of fuzzy reasoning. The Berlin of Weill was about fifteen years earlier than the period of Cabaret and nearly half a century before this production. What has casting to do with the style of a musical score? Why also did the Zorba score make a pale attempt at imitating Greek music? In the end, this sort of thing must fail since at best it is only an imitation, as is the “Spanish” music of Man of LaMancha. In the case of Zorba, the sound more nearly resembled Israeli music. The Happy Time sounded like an imitation of French-Canadian folk songs. 

It’s time that John Kander began to find John Kander, who, in my belief, is infinitely worth finding. Let’s never forget that style should be the property of the copyright owner and said owner should not pretend he is the pianist for a silent-screen performance- changing from cowboys to Indians to Chinese with the greatest of ease and with the same unimportant results that one has in unwinding a roll of toilet tissue. While these elements- personal style, suggestions of time and place- may make contributions to all shows, personal style is of greater importance. This is because without a distinctive musical personality and a special manner of expressing things musically and lyrically, the end product must lack characteristics which differentiate the work of this writer from that of all writers now living or long dead.”

Lehman Engel is a very important figure in American Musical Theatre. His insights into how musicals are constructed and function were revolutionary in their time, and the workshop that bears his name has birthed countless writers and pieces. But I think with more than 50 years of hindsight, we can see that he is fundamentally mistaken about Kander. A page later in the same book he writes:

“Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, both set in Spain, are as Spanish (nor did their composer even dream of their being) as the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna.”

He’s conveniently leaving out Carmen, also set in Spain, which tried very hard to sound Spanish at every turn and succeeded to the extent that for quite a long time, Carmen’s musical vocabulary became the de-facto definition of Spanish music, even though Bizet was French, writing at a time when many accomplished and actually Spanish composers were living and writing good music. I think by the definition of most people, Carmen is a successful piece of lyric theatre. 

He’s also mistaken about Cabaret. The musical is based on Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which are set from 1930-1933 in Berlin. Cabaret’s musical vocabulary largely comes out of The Threepenny Opera, which starred Lotte Lenya, and premiered in 1928 in Berlin, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which premiered in 1930 and The Seven Deadly Sins, which premiered in 1933. Weill fled Germany in 1933. So it’s a very sensible connection to use Weill’s musical language for a piece set exactly at the height of Weill’s early success and with his most famous collaborator (and wife) in the cast. And to a certain extent, Cabaret would do for Weimar republic Germany what Carmen did to Spanish music. 

Kander was intentionally trying to absorb the flavor of Weill’s music. Stephen Citron quotes him saying,

“I listened and listened and listened and then put them away and forgot about them. So when it came to writing the songs I didn’t think in terms of writing pastiche or imitations. Somehow or another, the flavor had soaked in just enough.”

But was he too close to Weill? Citron further quotes Kander: 

“I remember telling Lenya that I never intended to imitate Mr. Weill at all. She took my face in her hands and said, ‘No, no, darling. It is not Weill. It is not Kurt. When I walk out on stage and sing those songs, it is Berlin.’ And I thought if she felt that way, to hell with everyone else.”

I went through my score of Threepenny looking for direct links to Cabaret and the ‘Weill’ sound of Kander and Ebb when I was writing this blog, and was surprised that I could find very few direct stylistic links. Weill’s harmonic sense, which is truly distinctive and unclassifiable in his German work, doesn’t reallly figure into the Kander and Ebb sound. The modernistic German angle on American Jazz we find in Weill’s work with Brecht is refracted in Kander’s music back through the lens of American jazz to regular rhythmic formulas in an aggressive but very accessible synthesis of ideas. For most of us trying to conjure up in our minds a musical voice of Berlin in the 30s, Kander’s score to Cabaret comes to mind, even though it’s essentially a fantasy of Kander’s impressions of Weill’s work. Further, Weill’s music is itself a very particular and idiosyncratic subset of a much larger musical ecosystem that was active in the Weimar republic. All history is editorial. In this case, Kander was the unwitting editor.  

But Engel’s argument is really just fleshing out his larger point; that the musical voice of the author is more important to the success of a piece than any particular flavor of time or place in the musical itself. For my part, I think an author’s ‘personal voice’ is very real but impossible to pin down. Engel is essentially saying that he doesn’t hear anything particularly interesting in this music, and that what he does hear sounds like somebody else. Allowing that people will always differ in matters of taste, I argue that Kander and Ebb do in fact have a distinctive musical voice. When one hears the scores of Cabaret, Chicago, or even minor works like The Rink or 70, Girls, 70, we do hear something that registers as Kander-and-Ebbness. 

I don’t agree with Mark N. Grant about everything, but I think he’s speaking for many musical theatre fans when he writes: 

“The songwriting style of John Kander and Fred Ebb is a rebuke to Lehman Engel. In almost every Kander and Ebb show virtually every song is some variant of camped-up neo-Jolson razzmatazz, no matter what the specifics of character or situation. In defiance of Engel’s wisdom, they have written revue songs for book shows, they have de-constructed the golden-age writing style, and they have been one of the consistently successful teams of the last quarter century” 

Complicating the matter is something I haven’t heard folks talk about very much. Kander and Ebb were involved with two visionary trailblazers, Hal Prince and Bob Fosse. Prince and Fosse were driven by big ideas and personal vision. I think musical theatre fans naturally assume that Kander and Ebb were driven to create work with the same deeply personal, inimitable voice, since their output is so intimately connected with other idealistic creators. They’re thought of in a way as a more show-biz centric, less cerebral version of Sondheim. But I think it’s better to believe Kander and Ebb themselves when they explain that they just loved working together. Do they have a distinctive sound? Of course. But whereas creators like Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, Leonard Bernstein, or Jerome Robbins were dedicated to blazing brand new trails, the voice of Kander and Ebb grows out of who they are, what they loved, and what they discovered organically together. They found their voices while doing what they loved most: writing songs and hanging around theaters. 

So even though Cabaret and Chicago are the most culturally significant shows in their work list, in another way Curtains is most strongly representative of the Kander and Ebb world, unencumbered by the darkness of their collaborators in their more ‘important’ work, and thereby freed to express their joy of working in the theatre without the darker admixture of Fosse and Prince. It’s strange that though Curtains has the most murders of any of their shows, it is perhaps also the least cynical.

The Beating Heart of Curtains

Watch the cued part of this interview with Kander and Ebb. 

Then consider this section of I Miss The Music, music and lyrics written by Kander, after the death of Ebb.

Kander was unable to satisfactorily complete the song until he realized he needed to write it about Ebb. He commented in a Playbill interview in 2007:

“I didn’t know that’s what was doing when I was writing it. When we came to New York, I expanded it. First I had to recognize that, yeah, it really was about Fred, and then I could write the rest of the song.”

In a preface to an anthology of their music, Ebb answers the age old question Cioffi asks in Curtains (which comes first, the words or the music?):

“We work in the same room at the same time. I can improvise in words and John can improvise in music. Out of that improvisation comes our product. We work in the same room at the same time. When we walk into our music room, I am Fred Ebb, and he is John Kander. When we come out, we are Kander and Ebb.”

These are two men who put up with all the nonsense of musical theatre production for the pleasure of being with one another and writing songs together. And that’s why at the center of a piece that might evaporate into a whirlwind of clichés, the most compelling part of the show is really the most old-fashioned part; writers who want to write together, singers who want to sing, producers who want to produce, and an audience that wants to watch a show succeed. 

That’s why even though the show treats its many murders rather cavalierly, it can avoid being cynical by focusing on the wide eyed wonder of the characters, who I believe reflect the wonder of Kander and Ebb themselves. ‘Can you believe they let us do this?’ That may not be as sexy or as transgressive as the more prominent and critically acclaimed work they are most remembered for. And yet, I think it might reflect more of their essence as creators. 

As Ethan Mordden wrote in a New York Times piece on Steel Pier in 1997: “At the center of their art lies a love of the talent-take-all wonder of entertainment.” 

Some Musical Markers of Kander and Ebb

It’s difficult to articulate what constitutes a musical voice. Because Kander and Ebb start with an idea and arrive at form together, they don’t fall into the same patterns of formal construction that other writing teams often do. But contributing to the Kander and Ebb sound are a number of devices one encounters again and again. I’ll lay out some of them below.

One of my favorite Kander and Ebb devices is an interior line that sneaks up by half steps from the 5th of the I chord through the 7th, which leads to the IV. It’s rather like what Richard Rodgers does in his big ballads, but pared down to the essentials. Kander and Ebb reserve this harmonic move for the big yearning or resigned number.

Maybe This Time from Cabaret

Funny Honey, from Chicago

Nowadays, also from Chicago

Here heading to the ii area instead of the IV chord, in But The World Goes Round from New York, New York

You’ll notice that in each of these examples, the melodic line is insistently repeating a motive that releases, with the accompaniment line adding tension against a static pedal bass which resolves at the release of the phrase. In two of the four examples, the melody also includes the rising line as part of the contour. When you hear any of these examples, you are immediately aware of the Kander and Ebb world. Kander doesn’t actually do this trick in Curtains, although he comes close in Thinking of Him.

Many of the tunes in Curtains circle around a few half steps

Here in What Kind of Man

Here in the Verse to Show People

Which later morphs using the same pitches into the main melody:

It’s a little less obvious, but the E D# and C# B# half steps drive the melody of Thataway!

Half steps are also the thrust of the accompaniment.

If you’re not convinced yet, try the melody for It’s a Business, nearly all half steps:

Some of you skeptics might counter that everybody uses half steps; does the end of the bridge of Castle on a Cloud sound like Kander and Ebb? But sample these:

From Cabaret:

From Chicago:

From The Rink:

 From Woman of the Year:

From Funny Lady:

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

A lot of Kander’s tunes also get in a rut, but a rut that’s really exciting to park in 

From Cabaret (note the minor second melody here too):

From Chicago:

From The Rink:

Sometimes the tune stays the same while the harmony goes somewhere interesting  

Like this bit from Zorba:

There isn’t a lot of this in Curtains, but we get a taste at the end of He Did It when the 3 part canon occurs, or the ‘Stomp, hop slap step slap step stamp stomp’ section of A Tough Act To Follow.

Vamps are really important to Kander and Ebb

Ethan Mordden wrote in the New York Times:

“There is a strutting profile to a John Kander vamp, a show-off’s entrance music. It’s so endemic to the Kander and Ebb sound that the vamp becomes as familiar as the vocal melody. Think of the musical intros to ‘Willkommen,’ ‘All That Jazz’ or ‘New York, New York.’ This is music that has the hots for itself: alive, needy, working it.“

The vamp is essentially the way in for the creation of the song itself. Watch Ebb describe that process here:

We’ll discuss some important vamps in this show later. (heck, there’s even a 5 measure piece entitled: Vamps) But the fact that you can probably in your head immediately think of the vamp for Cabaret, All that Jazz, or New York, New York without me including a notated musical example is proof of Kander’s overwhelming skill at creating these introductory earworms.

Quarter note triplet melodies are common in downtempo numbers. 

This feature you really don’t notice until you compare a number of Kander and Ebb Ballads, but quarter note triplets often intensify an emotional moment or emphasize an idea:

From Cabaret

From Zorba

Also from Zorba

From Chicago

From New York, New York (film)

From The Rink

From Steel Pier

From The Skin of Our Teeth

In Curtains, we find this at play in Thinking of Him

Notice that in many of these examples, we see the repetition of an idea, and how in more than half of the examples, the melody includes flat 6th and/or 7th scale degrees.

Ragtime and Stride piano parts abound in Kander’s scores

Kander must be quite a good stride pianist, because stride figures occur all over his scores.

From Cabaret:

From Chicago:

From The Act:

From Woman of the Year:

From The Rink:

From Steel Pier:

A few from Curtains:

Notice the accented, often rolled downbeats and Earl “Fatha” Hines style right hand tremolando. Stride piano sections of Kander and Ebb songs often speed up gradually or dig in spectacularly. Many times these moments are meant to evoke old-fashioned ideas or ‘show-biz’, but Kander obviously understands and enjoys these sounds, and you can feel that he must enjoy playing these shapes. It’s also worth noting that Kander has found many different shades of stride. One hears great subtlety in their deployment, stride is a vocabulary, not a placeholder.

To tag and identify these few of many markers of ‘Kander-and-Ebb-ness’ is not in any way to reduce what they are doing to a bunch of show biz clichés. Musical theatre is a culture with a vocabulary, and mastery of that vocabulary was the most important skill for writers in the heady days of the 60s and 70s. Kander and Ebb are among the greatest masters of this deep vocabulary.

Should Your Organization do this Show?

This is a BIG show. I played it in a tiny theatre once and it was a blast, but the folks who did it had to be really creative to work around the technical difficulties the show presented, like hanging someone from the fly space, trapdoor, falling globes, and characters and cats coming out of the pit. There are a lot of chorus parts, which is awesome if you’ve got lots of people, but remember that you have to costume them. If you have a few really good chorus people, that’s great, but they’ll be running all over creation and changing costumes a lot. So count those costs before you start. 

It’s also a show with a lot of parts, mostly for guys, although there are two outstanding women’s parts and a number of smaller male parts that could easily be re-gendered or made gender non-binary. 

From the audience perspective, the main issue is the length. This is a murder mystery, and that necessitates a lot of talking; monologues for the detective, lots and lots of monologues. The show feels long, but it won’t help to cut songs, the musical part of the show is a very normal length. It’s all the scene work that takes so much time. And that scene work is moving forward a pretty complicated plot, so if you cut it down, you might make it a senseless story. 

So if you have an audience that loves classic style book musicals, a large group of talented performers, and lots of technical resources, you’ll have a great time with this fun piece. 

As You’re Casting:

Lt. Frank Cioffi:

This is the role built around David Hyde Pierce. It plays to Pierce’s comic strengths, so a good candidate needs to be immediately likeable by the audience, sing ‘well enough’, have a very strong memory and a good sense of how to pace long speeches. In the audition, you might hear the beginning of Cioffi’s part in Show People, to see if those lower notes ring, in addition to some of the other important solo sections

Range:

Niki Harris:

Needs to dance well, sing well enough, and make sense opposite your Cioffi in terms of age. A good sense of comic timing is important. Niki should be able to hold a harmony part, so hear In The Same Boat #1 at auditions with singers on all three parts, and hear Tough Act To Follow. 

Range:

Georgia Hendricks:

Georgia has one of the heavier lifts in the show. She has to play comedy and more serious scenes, she dances and sings quite a bit, and needs to be able to hold a harmony part, so hear In The Same Boat #1 at auditions against the two other parts in addition to one or two of the bigger solo moments. 

Range:

Carmen Bernstein:

This is a part for a strong singer and personality. The low E flats at the beginning of It’s A Business might prove too low for some singers, you may want to hear it in the auditions in addition to a section or two of the larger numbers Carmen has to carry. 

Range:

Aaron Fox:

If possible, this actor should be able to play the piano, although there are ways to work the piano playing to bring it within the range of a pianist with only moderate abilities. Plays both comic and serious scenes, and has an important ballad that you should certainly hear at callbacks. 

Range:

Christopher Belling:

Belling is really about the personality, the singing demands are moderate. 

Range:

Bambi Bernet:

Comic actress, singer and strong dancer. Needs to be able to hold a harmony part, so hear In The Same Boat #1 in the audition. 

Range:

Oscar Shapiro:

Oscar is an important part, but not a large one, and the singing demands are minimal.

Range:

Bobby Pepper

Bobby needs to be able to dance, and should also be able to carry a three part harmony. Hear In The Same Boat #2 at callbacks

Range:

Jessica Crenshaw

Jessica has to sing very badly, but I think the part should be played by a belter who actually can sing. They just sing the part very out of tune. As I point out below, this is harder than you may expect. 

Range:

Randy Dexter

Needs to be able to carry a three part harmony, so hear In The Same Boat #2. Randy has a pretty extensive solo at the top of Kansasland that you’ll want to hear. (but be sure you use the alternate text)

Range:

Harv Fremont

Needs to be able to carry a three part harmony, but this is the least demanding of the three smaller featured male roles. Hear In The Same Boat #2 with the other 2 roles.

Range:

Sasha Iljinsky

This blog is for music directors. If you’re music directing and conducting the show, congratulations, this character is you. I don’t see any reason why Sasha couldn’t be a person of any gender. 

Range:

Johnny

Johnny actually has a sung line in The Man Is Dead, even though the name isn’t listed in the range section of the score. B below middle C to B flat. Could be played by someone of any gender.

Chorus

This is a matter of personal preference, but I think the setting of this show in 1959 requires a period vocal production, not a brash 2022 Broadway belt with no body in the sound. Compare the original Broadway cast recording of Curtains with the sound of the chorus in Destry Rides Again, Saratoga, or Redhead. It’s still a forward placed sound, but it has more weight, and more legit sounds from everyone involved. 

If you’re looking for a musicianship test for the chorus, you might do well to teach the round at the end of He Did It and run auditioners against each other. 

When you teach all the chorus parts, I strongly recommend you teach all the various versions of In the Same Boat, He/She/They Did It, Wide Open Spaces, Thataway and so forth back to back. It’s not just a time saving device, but you want to really make it clear how they differ from each other. There are quite a few large splits in the chorus parts. I go through how to trim those divisi down in the breakdown below.

This is the table I made for myself to prepare for the audition process and the first rehearsals. There may be some discrepancies between the ranges as listed in the score, because I tried to track down all the places the characters sang. (and I may have made some mistakes) I don’t know that I used all these sides, but they may be useful for you as you plan your casting:

	Numbers	Range	Callback Piece	Notes
CHORUS WOMEN	2, 2b, 2c,4,5, 6, 13,15, 16,18,19, 22d, 22e,23, 24,25,26a,27,29	Middle C to 4th space E(higher Ab or Bb above the staff)	16 mm. 143-168
CHORUS MEN	2, 2b, 2c, 4,5, 6, 13, 15,16,18,19,22d, 22e,23, 24,25,26a,27,29	Middle C to 4th space E (higher G or Bb above the staff)	16 mm. 143-168
Jessica	2b,	Tone deaf, irrelevant
Carmen	3,5,6,16,17,26,29	E flat below middle C to 4th space E	17 mm. 1-12,171-end	21 for chemistry with Aaron?
Aaron	3,4,5,10,11,16,21,29	G below middle C to G flat above the staff	10, all11 38-79Check G flat.	Piano? Fake Piano?
Georgia	3,4,5,6,8,9,13,16,24,24,25,26a,29	G below middle C to 4th space E	4, mm 25-459 (all)	Close Harmony
Oscar	3,5,6,16,29	G below middle C to 4th space E	6, 118-134
Bobby	5,16,16a,24,29	D above middle C to 4th line D	16a	Close Harmony
Nikki	5,9,16,22,22a,24,27,29	B below middle C to 4th line D	9 (all)Middle6, 118-134
Christopher Belling	5,6,16,29	B below middle C to F above	6, 118-134
Johnny	5,16,29	B below middle C to Bb	6, 118-134
Bambi	5,9,16,24,29	D above Middle C to 2nd space A	9 (all) Lowest	Close Harmony
Cioffi	6,7,16,22a,24,27,29	Ab below middle C to 4th space Eb	7, mm.29-49
Sasha	15,29	B below middle C to 4th space C	IT ME!
Randy	16a,18,24,29		16a, 18?	Close Harmony, Rap at the top of Kansasland
Harv	16a,24,29		16a	Close Harmony

 

A Few Things to Note About the Music Director’s Materials:

The Piano/Vocal Score

This is a very playable book, giving important information about instrumentation where appropriate but mostly geared toward playing rehearsals. You can’t really play the keyboard book in the show from here, and I wouldn’t anyway unless I hired very few players. If you were conducting the show and not playing, you wouldn’t want to use this book. 

The Piano Conductor Score

This is also a well constructed book, but it isn’t as playable as a rehearsal piano part, and unfortunately also isn’t playable as a keyboard book from which you play and conduct. I did, however, play the show once from this score, in a production with a really small pit in which I was improvising a second keyboard book. I played from the non-keyboard instruments as they appeared, switching patches on the fly from my old RD700. If you’re doing things like that, this book is great because it has almost all the notes. 

If you’re not a full-score kind of person, you could well conduct from the piano conductor score, but the full score is much better for that purpose, if you know how to navigate it. If you were trying to play the keyboard from the full score, you’d turn pages too frequently for it to be worth your effort.

Unfortunately there are a number of small discrepancies between the two piano based scores, and I’ll let you know the ones I found as I come to them. 

The Full Score

The full score is very well laid out, and it comes in 4 volumes, to be printed on 8.5×14 paper. If you print it on 8.5×11, you’ll be squinting a lot. Oddly, book 2 doesn’t end at the act break. I printed mine as a reference, and my only gripe is that 1) I couldn’t really bind it or get it into a binder, and loose leaves in the pit was tricky and 2) The dialogue cueing is inconsistent and pretty small, so if I were to conduct from it, I’d need to get a pen and write all the cues in larger. 

Keyboard Programming available through licensor

The patches are really well put together, and they advance perfectly. In some spots, they have the last patch of a song as the first patch of the next, but you’ll find all those easily, because they’re marked, as in the graphic below. I found the tack piano patches much too loud in comparison to the other patches and too garish to actually read as a honkeytonk piano. Here’s how to edit those sounds in Mainstage:

In the Workspace area of Mainstage, Select Tack Piano as circled on the left. I adjusted the volume of output 1-2 to around -10 to bring it roughly to the level of the other patches. Then select ScanVib on the right to access the sounds in question. This is what you’ll see:

Play with the parameters to choose the sound you like. I went with this:

There may in fact be a faster or better way, which somebody will tell me in the comments, but this was how I managed it. I went through each individual Tack Piano patch and edited. If someone is aware of a way to edit them globally for an entire act, I’d love to hear how.

Going Through the Score Number by Number:

1. Overture

Cueing the top of the overture is tricky when you’re also playing the keyboard book, because you have to give the beat in your left hand while you white hand glissando in the opposite direction with your right. Best to give a full measure ahead of time, reminding everybody that NOTHING happens in the first beat. Lock in the tempo you want for measure 8, the earlier passage makes sense a little slower, and then you’re stuck. 

The balance in 8-11 is poor, you just can’t really balance xylo and piano against the rest of the orchestra. (this is probably why the piano is marked ff with a ‘loud’ indication) 

The transition into the softshoe at 82 can be tricky. It may help to think of the 4/4 as basically a l’istesso from the old tempo, with the new quarter note being equal to the old half note. The poco ritard. right before it muddies those waters a bit; but you might ignore that rit. and go straight on. Woodwind 4 can be a little sluggish on the bari sax, cut those measures if they bog down the new tempo. 

There is an error in the piano book in measures 111 and 112; the fourth note in each measure should be a B. 

The horn rip at 115-116 is really evocative, ask the players to bring it out. 

The keyboard strings make one wish for a real section, in a way that they don’t in the rest of the show. I actually made a book for a single violinist, which played along with all the string patches, and it really added a bit of verisimilitude to the patches. And since the score has mostly pads and pizzicato passages, the violin book turned out to be fairly easy, notwithstanding the show keys. 

2. Wide Open Spaces Opening Vocal

If you’re playing the keyboard book, you’ll be playing the last measure of the overture, and you’ll have no time to switch to the two-beat. But it’s the same tempo, really, so just tell everybody to keep the tempo going. This makes it pretty important that you be in the wide open spaces tempo from 109 in the overture. 

The bass book has an error in measure 45. The last beat should read F, not Bb.

You should work carefully to disambiguate the various versions of the number as you teach the vocals. It happens over and over and over again, with slight variations each time. 

2A. Wide Open Spaces Opening

This is pretty easy going. If you didn’t hire a guitarist, this will be very bare, you’ll have to reassign the comping to the keyboard and leave the string patch out. The gunshot cue is in the patches that come from the licensing organization, but you may prefer to leave it to the sound designer. They have to do a gunshot anyway at the end of the Kansasland Dance, so you’re not really adding more work. 

2AA. Robbin’ Hood Revealed

In the piano vocal score, measures 2 and 6 are laid out oddly. I moved the G flat into the left hand and crossed it out in the right. It’s laid out more sensibly in the Piano-Conductor score. 

2B. Wide Open Spaces Reprise

I recommend cutting the highest tenor part here. It’s seconds against the altos and doubles the soprano part. You won’t miss it, and you won’t have parallel major seconds to tune. 

Jessica has to sing badly out of tune here; it isn’t really enough for her to sing wildly erratically, the joke works only when it’s almost right. It turns out it’s actually pretty hard to sing intentionally out of tune. You may want to have your singer find a pitch to start on and then sing that same note even as the melody changes. 

A big dynamic drop at 43 with a steep crescendo works really well. 

The four part split at the end may be a little ambitious. If you’re cutting notes, I’d cut the A in the tenors and basses in measure 46 and the E in 47 through 49. In the Sopranos and Altos, I’d cut the Fs in 46 and the G in 47-49. Always best to have the space close to the bottom of the male voicings and have the chord in close position in the sopranos and altos. 

The rit. symbol in measure 45 is in a different place in the piano conductor score and the piano vocal score. I think the piano vocal score is correct. (this also agrees with the placement in the full score)

2C. Wide Open Spaces Bows

Photo by Paola Nogueras

This is one of the places where you will need to be paying close attention as the production is being blocked. Ideally “That was the conductor” comes right before the crescendo in measure 29. 

Again, if you didn’t hire the guitar book, you’ll need to figure out who is going to comp. I rewrote the beginning of the number in our tech rehearsal because the staging change required more time. The dialogue times out pretty well from measure 14, but if the scene change before that takes more time, there isn’t a safety to delay measure 30, and you’ll step on the punch line. A natural solution is to repeat 6-9 and 10-13, but when vamped, that music wears out its welcome quickly. Just be aware that timing may be tricky, and train the chorus to come in no matter what in measure 30. 

2D. Exit Music (Thatway)

The Piano vocal has fermatas on the first three notes, but the piano conductor does not, and neither do the full score or parts. It’s easier without the fermatas, unless you’re trying to stretch that transition for some reason. 

Again, you may have trouble with this timing, because it segues directly into 2E. Here, though, there are natural places to build in vamps. 

2E. Vamps

Measures 2 and 4 are listed as fermatas in the Piano Conductor score and in the full score, but not in the Piano Vocal. The measures don’t really need a fermata, and it’s actually more confusing to play them as such, because the measures don’t last long enough to warrant one. I’d try to get the actors to deliver their lines in the spaces without losing time, and tell the players to cut the fermatas. 

3. What Kind of Man

Brian Jacko, Erin Coffman, Amy Acchione Myers, and Nathan Irwin Diehl in Villanova’s Curtains. Photo by Paolo Nogueras

This is a really fun number that the audience enjoys. It was one of the numbers written early in the development process that stayed in the show in each iteration. Kander remarked in an interview that the original lyric was “much longer and much more disgusting”

The cutoff in measure 11 is fun to try and time out. 

The only real vocal challenge is remembering the difference between measures 9-10 and 18-19. 

Check which lyric your director wants at 33-34. 

At measure 47, the lower part is played on the bass clarinet in an awkwardly high register, and the percussionist has to switch instruments and play 3 notes on the xylo with very little time to change. This is an intentionally goofy fun-house sound, but it is a scary moment, and you may want to just add the cue for all of it to the toy piano 2 measures earlier so you’re sure it lands. 

The subito piano in measure 58 is a great touch. 

4. Thinking of Him

Erin Coffman in Villanova’s production of Curtains, Photo by Paola Nogueras

This is another of the songs that was written early and has stayed in through multiple drafts. 

Aaron’s piano part is not impossible for an amateur pianist to play. If it proves challenging, have Aaron play the top (melody) line of the introductory accompaniment and have the pit pianist play the rest of it. 

It took me too long to realize that Aaron is cueing Bobby’s entrance in at measure 46. It’s a nice dramatic moment too, because it’s Aaron both acting as composer and telegraphing that he still loves Georgia. 

The chorus ending here is comes out of nowhere. The piano vocal has it, with the women’s part cued on the bottom and the men’s on top, which feels odd. The Piano Conductor score has it laid out the way we’re all used to. It doesn’t appear in the Script/Vocal book, so you’ll want to copy that one page out of the piano conductor score before you teach it. 

5. The Woman’s Dead 

This is another of the songs that have been in the show since the earliest drafts. 

The Piano Conductor Score is missing the hairpins on the oo passages. The Piano Vocal and the Full Score have them. 

Ask your director which lyric you’re using. There are two options in measures 30 and 32-34. The audience’s opinion of you as a music director/conductor will rise or fall based on the cutoffs to the last 4 measures. A crisp ‘d’ with a shadow vowel after it will work like a charm. If you’re conducting from the piano, you can leave out the keyboard part here, all the notes are well covered elsewhere, and your hands will be better used coordinating the cutoffs. 

6. Show People

The cast of Villanova’s 2022 production, photo by Paola Nogueras

This is another of the numbers that went into the show early and stayed through multiple iterations. 

We’re in Cabaret territory here, but with a twist:

The upper example is from the intro to the title song from Cabaret, transposed into F minor for comparison. The lower example is the vamp from Show People. Notice that it’s essentially the same gesture, but with the hard edges shaved off. One dynamic lower, fewer accents, a genteel thumb-line added in the left hand and a less dissonant version of both the tonic and the dominant-functioning chords. This is an example of what I referred to earlier about a vocabulary of gesture. This idea is capable of lots of different kinds of expression. Kander is capable of shading it to his needs at a given moment; here it is aggressive, commanding, but not terrifying, as we needed it to be in Cabaret.

The opening passage of the number proper is pretty low if your Cioffi is a tenor, but there isn’t much to be done about it, since the whole number keeps going up and up, so you can’t just move it into higher territory without causing other problems. 

Again, ask your director which lyric you are using in measure 43. Start the tempo at measure 45 very moderately; it will make the accelerando much more effective. 

Ask your director which version of measure 44 lyrics you’re using.

Measures 205-212 will take some getting used to for your orchestra. Obviously it’s much easier when you’re conducting. The l’istesso tempo at 213 is very easy once you learn to feel it, but you will crash and burn the first time you run this with the players. 

This is also one of the spots in the show where there’s a big rallentando into a kickline tempo. This can be tricky, particularly if you’ve never conducted one from the piano before. (If you’re conducting with a baton, you may have an easier time of it) 

Head-bob folks, try and develop a little extra head bump to subdivide the 2/4 beat, and practice coming out of the piano part into measures 224-225. 

Baton people, remember that bigger isn’t always clearer. Subdivide the beat and be crisp, not big. 

There are fermatas on the last two notes of 224 in the Piano Vocal, but not in the Piano Conductor scores. The rallentando situation isn’t identical in the two scores either there, but it all amounts to the same thing. 

Drill the chorus in dropping that dynamic at 241 way down. Again, the crescendo will be much better coming from a very quiet dynamic. Don’t let all your sopranos sing the high A at the end. 

7. Coffee Shop Nights

This is a number where you really wish the orchestra had strings, but the winds are beautifully scored here, and the combo of bass, guitar, marimba, and fake Pizz strings is a really lovely sound in the mellower sections. 

It’s on the cusp of being in 4 or in 2. If your singer tends to rush, conduct it in 4. If your singer drags, conduct it in 2. Or do whatever you want! 

8. Georgia Can’t Dance

The faster the better really. Teach the chorus this section right after you teach ‘Thataway’, so they can hear the difference between this and the same spot in Thataway from 242-250. 

This will probably land better if you give a full measure of prep. 

9. In The Same Boat #1

Taylor Molt, Meghan Dietzler, and Erin Coffman in Villanova’s 2022 production, photo by Paola Nogueras

This is such a fun little number for the trio. The tighter the ensemble, especially in rhythm, cutoffs, and dynamics, the better this gem will hit. 

10. I Miss The Music- Intro

It is preferable for the actor to actually play the piano. The part can be simplified, or you can play the tough parts from the pit and let the player get the easy parts from the stage. Even people who don’t really play can be taught a version of those arpeggios hand-over-hand. Some of the larger left hand stretches can be brought into close position up an octave and made much more playable. 

The piano vocal score is missing the woodwind parts in measures 22 and 23. Piano-Conductor score has it. 

At the end, I find the railroad tracks (caesura) sort of contradicts the segue as one direction, and chose to just ignore the caesura. The dialogue doesn’t really fill up the 3 measures at the top of the next number, so you will want to get things moving. 

11. I Miss The Music

Brian Jacko and David Cregan in Villanova’s 2022 production of Curtains photo by Paola Nogueras

The B section of this song is the heart of the show, and it’s a very similar accompaniment to the opening of Coffee Shop Nights, a connection I can’t quite make sense of. If you’ve read my introductory paragraphs you know how poignantly the lyric describes Kander’s partnership with Ebb. What I’ve left out until now is how it musically references that partnership. In measures 47 and 48, Aaron plays 2 measures that strongly suggest Kander and Ebb’s first great success together:

B Section of I Miss the Music

What a lovely and touching tribute.

Measure 39-41 in the marimba in the Full Score is terribly laid out and makes no sense. In the part, though, it’s exactly as it is in the piano vocal score right hand. 

47 and 48 are easily playable by almost any actor who is playing this part. 

Measure 86 has a very acrobatic piano part, but you can get it if you work it a little bit. (if you’re looking at the piano conductor score, the right hand octaves are played with two hands) Since we’re in G flat here, if you hit a black note octave in each hand, you can be wrong and still sound pretty good there! Heck, you could even do a big black key gliss up and down the piano. But that would be tasteless. 

12. Before Thataway

No surprises here, just a fun dance number. Keep it fast. 

You can simplify the piano part in 22 and 26 by dropping the lower octave on the last 3 notes of the measure and keeping it in basically one hand position. 

The saloon piano is fun to play once you get your hands around it. 

13. Thataway

Erin Coffman and cast, Villanova production of Curtain 2022, photo by Paola Nogueras

Again, start nice and slow so that the accelerando can be gradual and meaningful.

The straight/swung eighths marking is inconsistent. 

Straight eighths appears in 16 and 17 in all the conductor and piano scores and for the WW 2 and 3 (the only players who have eighths)

After that, the markings seem to be aimed at clarity for each player, but not clarity overall. 

As I understand it, basically, the woodwinds have dotted-eighth-sixteenth style swing where we’re supposed to swing, and straight eighths otherwise. The brass have swung eighths all the time (even where the piano vocal indicates otherwise). The piano vocal keeps changing the swing feel, and none of the other parts include these changes. In measures 28 and 62 the top 3 woodwinds are clearly playing the same figure as the brass, notated 2 different ways at the same time. 

The piano vocal score marks: 

Swing eighths at 26

Straight eighths at 32. (not marked in brass) 

Swing eighths at 60

Straight eighths at 66 (not marked in brass)

Swing eighths at 70 (not marked in woodwinds)

Straight eighths at 84 (not marked in bones, but reiterated in woodwinds)

Swing eighths at 108 (not marked in brass)

Straight eighths at 114 (not marked in brass) 

The truth is that your band will hear the rhythm section and adjust accordingly. But if you’re a stickler, you should go through and make decisions, maybe before you send out the books. 

This number is where you’ll miss the banjo if you didn’t hire the guitar player. 

You’ll want your drummer to have 4 temple blocks for mesures 8 and 9. If they don’t have it, ask if they can get 4 different sounds on different rims or by other means. 

35 through 50 is one of the harder piano parts in the score and it’s very exposed. One night I accidentally advanced two patches and made a hash of this section, so atone for my sins by practicing that transition assiduously. 

At 118, really drill the closing consonants and rhythmic accuracy for the tenors and basses. It’s a very effective passage. 

Unless you’re a really good stride pianist, you may struggle with 134. But the bass is covering the lowest part, so you can play the off-beats instead if that makes it playable. It’s the right hand that’s important. 

The piano passage at 184 is also tricky; budget some time to woodshed it. 

The voice distribution at 223 and 224 is goofy. The high tenor part is the same as the women’s part. Unless you have crazy numbers of tenors, eliminate that top line and split the men’s part 3 ways instead of 4. 

At 253 and 254, if you’re looking to cut down the divisi, cut out the top note in the men’s part, and the second note from the top in the women. Or just cut the second note from the top for everybody, if they’re having trouble hearing it. The piano conductor score is missing the Rit in 253, which is a critical marking! It’s a rall. in the full score, hiding down above the guitar part, so if you’re conducting from the full score, write it in on the top of page 61! This is the second big rit into a slower tempo and my comments in show people also apply here. You could conduct with your right while you play the left on the piano, or you can leave it up to the 4 instruments playing that line. 

Conduct 255-258 in 4, speeding up to 259, where you switch to being in 2 again. 

Again, if the cluster chord at the end gives you trouble, cut the second note from the bottom. Or cut the second note from the top for the men and the second note from the bottom for the women. It’s the parallel seconds in adjacent parts that are the trouble. 

You have a line here. After Cioffi says “…Union Oyster House”, you say “Is it Manhattan?” to Cioffi. 

13A. Act One Curtain

Boy is this fun (and funny). 

Let the actor actually cue the band, they come in on the ‘eight’ of ‘five-six-seven-eight’. 

If you’re doing what the script indicates, you’ll have to fly an actor, which means you’ll play this a bunch of times in tech as they get the lift figured out. Without making an ass of yourself, remind folks that the curtain is really supposed to hit the ground at the bottom or the left hand line, and be fully up at the top. Depending on your theatre, this may be easier said than done. 

ACT II

14. Entr’acte

It wouldn’t be the end of the world to cut this Entr’acte, if for no other reason than that the show runs long. But it is a nice arrangement, and does a good job of building excitement after the intermission. You also don’t save that much time by cutting it; it’s very short. 

The passage at measures 5 and 6 isn’t easy, particularly if you’ve been conducting and have to close off your fermata while playing and establishing the new tempo. It may take quite a bit of rehearsal. If your bari sax and guitar can’t feel the new tempo, cut them and have everyone come in at measure 7. If the part just won’t fit under your hands, there are a couple of ways to keep the exact sound and drop a note or two. 

15. The Man is Dead 

Yours Truly, as Sasha. (photo by Paola Nogueras)

The singer is you. Be very involved in the production meetings to determine where you’re singing this, and how you’ll get there. If you perform it as written, you will cut off the fermata from the entr’acte, establish the new tempo, and have 4 measures to stand up and turn around, in my case to climb a ladder and get in position to be seen by the audience from the pit. You could also delegate someone to conduct the entr’acte without you, but that may present other problems. 

Sasha is presumably Russian, but in the original cast recording, the accent is not really definable, except that it’s foreign. At any rate, the lyric doesn’t give you a lot of sounds that you can ‘Russify’. 

If you’re playing the keyboard book using the patches they sell you as you conduct, you’ll have to delete the 3 sounds you don’t use when you’re singing or advance past them 

In Jennifer Ashley Tepper’s book, The Untold Stories of Broadway, David Loud talks about this number. 

“At the top of the second act, I would rise up on this podium and turn around and sing a song! It was such a funny idea that I would always get great laughs, even though I wasn’t particularly funny. The idea was so clever, and Scott Ellis, our director, and Rupert Holmes, our writer, made it so unexpected and delicious.”

16. He Did It 

He Did It went into the show in the second draft. 

Coming out of your solo in The Man is Dead, you will need to establish the new tempo: fortunately it’s l’istesso from the previous movement, so you can let the orchestra start it without you until you get back. 

The trickiest thing about this number is getting out of the vamps. Depending on the staging, you should be able to get through with only 2 times through each vamp. It’s better to end early than late. If there’s music after the last line in each section, it spoils the effect. Drill the chorus that an actor says, “he/she/they did it” then the three notes of the ⅜ measure happen, and everyone says “Ah!” on the downbeat of the following measure. If you do it enough times, it will be foolproof. 

There’s a caesura (railroad tracks) in the piano-conductor score and full score between measures 6 and 7 that isn’t in the piano vocal score. I don’t know whether it’s important really, but you’ll want to know about it in blocking rehearsals so you can tell the band whether to play it or not. 

You’ll also want to be part of the staging discussions on is the Surprise! Sections in 13, 57, and 101. The ‘shock’ moment needs to come on the loud hit, and the blocking relates to that. Again, the ‘surprise’ marking and the cues to start the dialogue are in the Piano vocal score, but not in the Piano-conductor. 

The arco bass solo at 50 is HARD! You may decide you want to give it to another instrument. 

In measure 94, the parts and full score all have a fermata. The piano vocal and piano conductor scores do not. (and I don’t think it needs one) 

Lots of diction/consonant drills for the chorus sections, get that whispery tone quality and mind the crescendos. 

Do your best to split the chorus groups into even numbers for the last section, and drill each part of the round with the accompaniment, and then adding them together, starting with the first, doing groups one and two, then all three. It’s not as hard as it sounds, but you do really have to know the part and hold it against the others. 

16a. In The Same Boat #2

Tomas Torres, Sheldon Shaw, and Joshua Gold in Villanova’s 2022 Curtains Photo by Paola Nogueras

Musically this In the Same Boat again reminds me of Cabaret. If I’m not mistaken, this song was originally written early in 1967 for a 1968 Ford Motors event, immediately on the heels of Cabaret, which had opened late in 1966. This might feel like a stretch, but this comparison really points up how some of the ideas in Cabaret are really more vaudeville than Weimar.

I’ve transposed the Cabaret example for comparison:

The little cymbal splash/choke makes that vaudeville flavor really pop.

17. It’s A Business

Amy Acchione Myers in Villanova’s production of Curtains, Photo by Paola Nogueras

This number went into the show early and stayed through subsequent drafts. 

There are a lot of words to memorize here. 

The trombone 2 glissando coming from 12 into 13 is important. Here’s my recommendation. After the caesura (railroad tracks), give a downbeat in the tempo of the cut time you’re about to go into. The trombone gliss, which is technically beat 4 of the old tempo, is a half a measure worth of the new tempo. Once you do it, it’ll make sense. Giving 3 in the old tempo and then switching immediately after one beat to a new tempo seems needlessly complicated. 

The vamp at 77-80 looks easy enough on the page, but it can be confusing from the standpoint of the pit players. You might actually set a number of repeats for measure 77 and go on deliberately to vamp 79 and 80 in the normal way. It sounds like the bass that changes in 78 is the last time through the pass, and that could cause your trumpets to come in wrong in the following measure. 

The stagehand parts are not a walk in the part, particularly where they’ve split into 3 parts. If you’ve cast any female stagehands, (and I think you should) you’ll want to get creative about how to assign parts. Having women sing that E flat up high in head voice isn’t really the vibe, but the low G might not have a lot of body if you have them sing it in the lower register. 

In the Piano/Vocal version of the score, the right and left hand step on each other in measures 206 and 207. Just play the right and the descending bass there, leave off the back-beats.

The Ka-Ching sound effect that comes with the mainstage files you buy from the licensing people is really cool, and is on the A and B at the bottom of the keyboard. You’ll have to get the band to cut off really short at the top of 210 if you want the audience to hear it. You also have to let your banjo player and your first trumpet know that you need beats 2 and 3 clear, because the banjo has a gliss and the trumpet has a doit, which both players may instinctively start before beat 4. 

18. Kansasland

Another place where you wish there was a fiddle in the pit. 

The harmonica patch in the keyboard book is really fun to play, and the combo at 41 is one of the most delightful sounds I’ve ever gotten to play in a pit. 

I’m not interested in getting into arguments here, but I strongly advise you to use the alternate text for Randy and eliminate the Native American character in the dance break. The lines they send you don’t line up exactly with the original text, you’ll need to make some choices about how they go. 

Then this Saint Louis Woman came a-knocking at the door

A former farmer’s daughter gussied up in Haute Couture. 

At first the mounted cavalry thought she was hot to trot

She picked bad guy Rob Hood to tie his noose or tie the knot. 

(it’s that last line that doesn’t really scan right. Bad Guy sits wrong on the stress of the measure, especially at speed) 

18A. Kansasland Dance

This is a great dance break, but if you find it’s too long, there are plenty of places to make sensible cuts, because it organizes itself into very discrete sections. 

19. She Did It (Reprise)

This is one of my favorite reprises; it’s such a fun joke. 

20. I Miss The Underscoring

Again, we wish we had real strings. Very straightforward cue. 

21. Thinking of Missing the Music

Yet another spot where we wish we had some strings! 

Note that the lyric is ‘the music I make with you’ this time around. 

22. A Tough Act to Follow

This number is a cousin of Singin’ in the Rain. (transposed for comparison, transcription is mine, the iconic intro for the Gene Kelly version is not in the published sheet music)

Tough Act to Follow went into the show early and stayed through multiple drafts. I think they were fond of this number because it is included in the 2004 Kander and Ebb anthology as the only song from Curtains, which was then in development.

The various scores disagree in notating swung eighths versus dotted eight-sixteenth note swing. The effect is the same.

Our Cioffi found the opening of this number too low, so I moved it up a step, switching back to the show key at 22A. If you do that, though, Niki has to sing C# for the first note of 22A.

22A. A Tough Act to Follow Dance

This really is a beautiful dance sequence, very fun to play and well orchestrated. The sax choir at 149 is terrifically scored. 

The transition into 3 at 100 will take some getting used to, both in dance rehearsal and with the orchestra. If you’re conducting from the piano, The harp figure that leads into 100 is probably a two handed affair, which will leave you with only a head nod to get the point across. If I’m not mistaken, though, the new quarter is pretty close to the old eighth, if that helps your players. 

At 121, it says dictated, but unless the choreography is trying to hit something very particular that need to be out of tempo, I’d just conduct it really clearly in 4, to set up the tempo primo at 123 correctly. 

From 147-169, the keyboard part is in that classic piano obbligato a la Ferrante and Teicher. If you are an improviser, there are some ways to open these out a little even, provided you stay in the spaces the orchestrator has made for these phrases. 

The chorus vocals at the end are mislabeled in the parts. They are correctly labeled in the Piano Vocal score, with the women on the top part and the men on the bottom. You’ll save yourself a lot of time in the music rehearsal if you tell them to relabel that right away. 

We found this choral part a little difficult, because we didn’t have a huge chorus, and this section needs a big MGM sound. If you have the resources to put backstage voices on this, you should, but of course this show is huge and you’ll probably be strapped for mics as it is. They’ll need to be on monitor to be in time. Just another of the many places you’ll want to be really engaged in the production meetings. 

If you choose to cut a note here and there from the harmony, I recommend taking a note from one of the seconds. Obviously, if you have the voices (and the ears) it’s better to have all the parts covered. 

Stomp, Hop, slap, step, slap, step, stamp is really tough to say! Make it part of your warm-up! 

22B. Eerie Sounds from the Pit 

It isn’t important that the actual sounds you hear from the pit are the ones listed. You can have fun here, as long as you don’t overdo it. Ideally you have a pit with access from the back, technically an actor should emerge from there. 

22C. Johnny’s Death

Clarity is important here. Don’t be afraid to cut a player if they can’t play the passages cleanly; there’s a lot of doubling. If you’re conducting from the keyboard, you might leave out the organ chord in the first measure and try for a clean beat instead. 

22D. In the Same Boat #3

This is supposed to be pre-recorded. It’s a better effect if you do, but you’ll have to do it at an orchestra rehearsal, and that will require some legwork you’ll need to bring the sound person in on. Again, another thing to bring up early in a production meeting. It’s only the drums, piano, bass, and chorus, so you could in fact bring the drummer and bass player in early and do it without the other pit players there. 

22E. In the Same Boat #4

This will also need to be pre-recorded. See notes above. 

23. In the Same Boat #5

It’s tough to establish the new tempo at measure 3. Get your drummer on the same page and hope for the best. Again, if you’re conducting from the keys, you might lay out for at least the first two measures to make the tempo clear. 

23. Something Fast 

Another brief number with a ridiculous premise. Play as fast as you can play cleanly. The piano part could come in the second time to add some variety if you liked. 

24. In The Same Boat- Complete

Fr. David Cregan and cast, Villanova Curtains production 2022, photo by Paola Nogueras

Kander at one point commented that this number does double duty as the 11:00 number for both Cioffi and the show within the show.

If you have Cioffi sing what he’s assigned on the page, it’s the most difficult part of the show for him, and quite difficult to remember, particularly in context with all the other things he has to remember. But you could also just have him improvise bringing everything together. He’s essentially toggling back and forth between all the various versions.  You’ll have to break them into 2 parts at 84. I chose to put the sopranos and tenors on group 1 and the altos and basses on group 2, for range reasons. If you’ve taught the earlier versions well, these parts should fit together like a glove, except at the modulation point at 114. That will take a little drilling. 

25. Wide Open Spaces-Sung Bows

This is similar, but not identical to the other versions. For one thing, Georgia sings it correctly! 

25A. The Company Exits

The timing of this underscore takes a little finessing; it doesn’t quite line up with the landmarks the way it appears on the page. There’s very little happening at 9, it’s easy to get disoriented somehow. From 25 on, particularly at 40, the balance with the guitar is tricky to manage. When the piano comes in at 44, playing a viola pizz patch, you’ll feel like it’s barely holding together. I like an underscore that stays in the background, but this one is so minimalist, you might feel like it isn’t there at all. 

After the number is over, you have a line. 

“We are excused, Inspector General?”

26. Show People Reprise

That opening note may just be in the brain of your Carmen, but if not, you’ll need to find a way to cue it subtly. 

26a. Transition to Stage

This is pretty straightforward. Your brass will feel like that MGM passage up top needs to be big, but you’re trying to stay under the dialogue. If that proves impossible, put a fermata on the timpani roll in the first measure with an fp marking, and just delay measure 2 and following a little to clear the dialogue and give Cioffi more time for his costume change. 

In measure 49, the timing is different for the chorus. 

There’s another gunshot cue in measure 64 you may want the sound people to take care of. 

26b. Robbin’ Hood Revealed 

Very very similar to 2aa, except for one odd trombone measure in the middle, and the substitution of Trombone 2 for Reed 4 to make time for an instrument change. 

27. A Tough Act Finale

Again, there’s ways to cut notes, particularly in measures 8, 23, and 24. You can cut the bottom note for the tenors and basses in measure 26 a d the top note in 27 and 28 if you like. 

The timing for the chorus here is unfortunately not the same as the other version, so you’ll have to work to get those two versions straight. 

TOUGH ACT DANCE: 

YOU and I

WE could be a

TOUGH act to follow

(rest) can’t you see?

TOUGH ACT FINALE

(one) You and I

(one) We could stay a 

TOUGH (rest) act (rest) to follow

(rest) in every way! 

If you run these back to back, particularly in the week before you open, things will go much better. 

28. Bows (short Version)

Photo Paola Nogueras

I remember the first time I conducted a group of pros in a pit and I came across one of these woodwind passages like we have here at the beginning of this number. I chose a midtempo because it looked hard to me. An old pro said, “You know, Peter, we play this lick all the time, it’s really easy. Go ahead and do it fast”. The nice thing about a cliche is that everybody knows it. 

These bows are set up to go with characters. The characters are listed in the Piano Vocal and not in the Piano Conductor Scores or Full Scores. Record this and let your director or choreographer know who is supposed to come in where. You can cut from 115-123 if your Cioffi isn’t a household name. 9 measures is a long time to bow if you’re not David Hyde Pierce. 

29. Bows Vocal 

The transition from 28 into 29 can be daunting. Everyone is amped up and they may miss the cue. You’ll want to drill measures 129 and 130 in no. 28. 129 is a big set of four upbeats to the big downbeat on 130. But remind the chorus that there’s one more note, in the bari sax, timpani, and floor tom on beat 2 before they come in.  

The last long note is one of the spots where I play the chord and tell everyone to pick a note in the chord that feels good and sing loud. 

30. Exit Music

Fast is best! 

Measure 41 is hard for the pianist, but if you can improvise at all, there’s other things you might do here. 45 is fun if you do it hand over hand. 

Pit Orchestra Considerations:

For Villanova’s production I was fortunate to be able to hire all the books for this show. Or perhaps I should say almost all the books. My keyboard 1 player took another job at the last minute and I had to conduct from the piano. This is totally doable, but if you are using the patches the Keyboard 1 book requires, you will have to cobble together a new score from the part and the piano conductor score, because the piano conductor score does not contain every note and patch change included in the keyboard book, and the keyboard book does not contain a great deal of the information you need to cue the show. It took me about 3 hours with the copy machine, tape, and scissors to make my book. If you don’t hire every other book, though, you will need to enhance the part to fill in some of the missing parts. 

The drum book is essential, but the percussion book is not critically important. We rented a malletkat, because bringing in all the mallet instruments would have taken up a third of the pit space. An acoustic bass is also pretty important in a dance show like this. Although the guitar book enhances the rhythm section considerably, particularly when the banjo comes in, the show would work pretty well without it. Reed 1 and 3 are full of very important things. Reed 2 and 4 are less critical. Reed 4 has bassoon in it, and reed 2 has oboe and english horn. I tried very hard to get doublers in Philly but couldn’t contract anyone, so I moved the oboe and english horn to clarinet and the basson into bass clarinet. I transposed them for the players, and I’m pretty quick, but it took a while. The books work well that way, but we miss that classical sound of the double reeds, especially in the absence of any strings. Someone out there is wondering why I didn’t ditch the clarinets and saxes in those books instead, but this show is really a sax clarinet show with a smattering of double reeds for character, not the other way around. If you were to hire two extra players to play the double reed parts of those books, they’d be very bored for most of the show. Trombone 2 has some important slides in various places, and although it’s marked to have a tuba doubling, that is in no way necessary. The horn parts are colorful and have some characteristic rips in the Kansasland sections. As always, you have to think about the brass as a unit; you don’t want a trumpet blasting away up high without anyone filling in things below. The balance is bad. 

I hope you have as wonderful a time in your production as we did! 

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore: A Rough Guide for the M.D.

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Following up on a Masterpiece

Signs of Decline Amid Flashes of Brilliance

The temptation with any post-Mikado Gilbert and Sullivan is to focus on how the partnership is on the rocks. (I’ve done so frequently on this blog and am about to do so again) This line of thought reveals a basic truth about Gilbert and Sullivan that cuts both directions. The strengths of each of them are aligned in opposite directions.

As David Russell Hulme eloquently puts it:

“Ultimately the conflicting creative intentions of author and composer have proved to be less a cause of weakness in the work than a source of individuality and strength.”

But not entirely. For the most part, in The Mikado and the operas before it, those oppositions tend to add depth and balance to their work. For Ruddigore and beyond, as their partnership grew more fraught, both men began to fall into excess or haste, and in Ruddigore in particular, flashes of brilliance are cheek by jowl with loose ends and placeholders. 

Gilbert’s strengths hardly need enumeration among enthusiasts, but some of you may be new to the party: He found a really original way of constructing plots that pulled together many cultural strands to deftly skewer the absurdities of Victorian English life. He was a skilled craftsman at light verse, and didn’t have much sympathy with the overblown emotionalism of many of his Victorian peers. When they were functioning perfectly, Gilbert’s strengths kept Sullivan’s creative energies focused and unsentimental, and when Gilbert was making fun of something that had an existing musical voice, he gave Sullivan a clear stylistic target to write toward. Yet Gilbert’s strong suits also could become liabilities. Sullivan grew weary of Gilbert’s reliance on the same plot devices over and over again, and only an unusual location or time period would keep Gilbert from ringing the same bells he always rang. Sometimes we sense that Gilbert never got around to making each part of the plot distinctive, and that some characters are simply sketches. Gilbert’s ear for the potential of a comic situation was unerring, but sometimes he would revel in those possibilities to the detriment of plot coherence or character consistency. We see these strengths and weaknesses here in Ruddigore.

Gilbert’s Work in Ruddigore

Gilbert had developed an effective way of organizing the chorus by gender and then playing them against one another comically, often emphasizing the differences in a quodlibet. Here, to get men on the stage, Gilbert has a group of ‘bucks and blades’ from the city hoping to find love among the commoners. But immediately following their first song, the men cease to have any characteristics at all, and are subsumed into a homogeneous mass of townspeople, celebrating the wedding of strangers, somehow managing to be even more generic than than your garden variety townsfolk in their boilerplate expressions of horror during the finale. 

Gilbert also has a habit of coming tantalizingly close but ultimately failing to give romantic male leads a distinctive character quality. (think of Ralph in Pinafore, who we are briefly meant to think has the soul of a poet) It’s important to the humor of Ruddigore that Robin be someone very ethically scrupulous, so that his transformation to statutory villain is comically opposite. But Robin’s most obvious character trait is his inability to stand up for himself. I almost wrote ‘modesty’, but in dialogue and song where Robin reveals that modesty, he undercuts it with pride for comic effect. Is he in fact modest? Is he prideful under a veneer of modesty? The confusion leaves us perhaps laughing, but ultimately unclear on who Robin actually is. And if we’re going to draw any conclusions about what this story means, we’ll need to know Robin’s character. Ultimately the humor in the scenes and songs was more appealing to Gilbert than drawing the character well. 

Richard speaks like a working-class character, except in The Battle’s Roar is Over, or worse, the first act Finale, where he has a very high poetic lyric that his character might not even understand, let alone invent:

Within this breast there beats a heart 

Whose voice can’t be gainsaid

It bade my thy true rank impart

And I at once obeyed

I knew ‘twould blight thy budding fate

I knew ‘twould cause thee anguish great

But did I therefore hesitate?

No, I at once obeyed. 

In the dialogue between Robin and Hannah near the end of act 2, there are repeated turns of phrase: “…to lay unholy hands on old Stephen Trusty’s daughter.” and “it would be impossible to desire” It doesn’t feel like parallel construction, it feels lazy. When I hear it onstage, I wonder whether the actor has forgotten the speech and is repeating something they have already said. 

Gilbert is also a little lazy in the internal logic of the story itself. Robin/Ruthven asks for his dead ancestors approval for his minor crimes, and then points out that they all had eventually quit sinning, by implication on principle: 

“…there came at last a day when, sick of crime, you, each and every, vowed to sin no more, and so, in agony, called welcome Death to free you from your cloying guiltiness”

But that reform seems not to have lasted into the afterlife, because the ancestors have no sympathy for his reluctance to sin, and are in fact driving him toward more severe crimes. If this shift is meant as a joke, the punchline is too far away from the setup. Why did Gilbert bring it up at all? To provide a premise for the song that follows surely. But if we are to believe Act I Despard, they generally won’t leave their descendants alone, and do not need to be summoned. If we are meant to view as heroic the choice not to commit a crime in the face of death, the attitude of these ancestors post-mortem is working at cross purposes.

In the second act, Despard and Margaret have become respectable, and they spend quite a long scene trying to convince Robin/Ruthven to reform and stop sinning. But surely if Ruthven reforms, he dies. And then wouldn’t Despard go back to being the bad baronet? The joke is funny, but it’s made at the expense of plot consistency. 

Gayden Wren’s chapter on Ruddigore has a whole paragraph of these loose ends, and they make for interesting reading. But don’t write Ruddigore off on that account, because it also contains some of the finest explorations of Gilbert’s favorite themes. 

Gilbert’s plots are powered by the disconnect between the person and the way society expects them to behave. 

As Carolyn Williams observes in her wonderful book about Gilbert and Sullivan: 

“Although clearly destined to marry, [Rose] veers from man to man all through Act I, crazily dissociated, embodying an exaggerated and highly gendered form of socialized self-division. Rose carries her self outside herself, searching for her actions and feelings in the etiquette book, which she also obsessively consults for advice about how to interpret the ‘moral worth’ of those she encounters in everyday life.”

It isn’t just Rose who delegates decisions outside of the self. It’s everyone. 

Robin/Ruthven is bound to allow his beloved to be married to another at the mere appearance of a British flag. In the first act finale, he tells us he won’t lie until he’s made a bad bart. His title determines his behavior. It’s Frederick’s statutory duty to the pirates all over again. Later, Ruthven wonders if his title means that he’s married to Mad Margaret. His personal feelings and even common sense have very little bearing on any of his actions. 

Old Adam, bound by a vow to serve as adviser to Ruthven, fulfills the instructions to abduct a woman, but his choosing Dame Hannah as victim a) betrays a misunderstanding of whatever purpose there might be in abducting a woman and b) contradicts the assertion at the beginning of the opera that he loves her like a boy of 14. The action is true to the letter of the law, but misses the spirit entirely, and runs against Adam’s self interest. 

Despard dislikes Margaret until he isn’t a Bad Bart anymore, then he adores her. 

Margaret is first compelled by an ‘Italian Glance’, then the safe-word ‘Basingstoke’ to one decision or another, her madness is really just eccentricity, comically brought in hand by a word chosen at random. She stands ostensibly most outside the order of the piece, but is in fact most bound by its world. 

Wren has a nice line: “Margaret is so mad she’s almost sane, while Rose is so sane, she’s almost mad”

The chorus of bridesmaids rejoices at the slightest provocation any hint of marriage between any two characters, because they are being paid to. The text at the end of Act I is doggerel, opossums aren’t native to that part of the world and so forth, but what meaningful thing could the chorus say in that moment, having celebrated in quick succession 4 potential unions grounded in nothing at all?

Richard is the only character who truly acts on impulse, but to justify his impulsive actions, he externalizes his heart and invents deliberations with that externalized heart on pressing matters. Comically, he is uninterested in the effects of those actions on others. The pressing question is instead whether it is proper for his externalized heart to refer to him by his nickname. 

Hanging over all these perverse ways of making decisions is a pervasive, invasive, and malignant social contract, which is the real engine of any Gilbert plot. Richard asks if it’s appropriate to tell Despard that his brother lives, but after he’s already done so. The act itself isn’t as important as the discussion of that act’s propriety. Ruthven’s instinct to avoid serious infamy is to focus on white-collar paper crimes, forging wills and checks, and when he asks his ancestors if this is sufficient, the arguments revolve around whether one can forge one’s own will or disinherit a son that hasn’t yet been born. When Despard and Margaret confront Ruthven on his crimes, they try to impute ethical responsibility for Despard’s crimes to Ruthven by legal proxy. Perhaps more than any other Gilbert and Sullivan opera, these characters live in a world of ethical abstractions, and the true ethical dilemmas they encounter are not in any way addressed. The conclusion of the opera is as arbitrary as the setup; through a different sophistry, virtually any outcome could have occurred. 

All this legal argumentation seems sometimes extremely tangible, even corporeal:

Mad Margaret: I once made an affidavit. But it died- it died- it died! 

The whistling clerk scratching a blot- is he making an affidavit?

Gilbert’s social critique is sometimes buried in so much irony that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who he’s skewering. But there is a place in Ruddigore that seems to be an indictment of the philanthropy of Robber-barons, laundering their reputations with donations:

Despard: I get my crime over the first thing in the morning, and then, ha! ha! For the rest of the day I do good! I do good- I do good! (melodramatically) I get my crime over the first thing in the morning, and then, ha! ha! For the rest of the day I do good! I do good! I do good! (melodramatically) Two days since, I stole a child and built an orphan asylum. Yesterday I robbed a bank and endowed a bishopric. Today I carry off Rose Maybud and atone with a cathedral! 

Ruthven even offers a biting critique of the ethical compromises of various stations in his Act II solo patter song. (usually omitted) I find the third verse on members of parliament particularly pointed! 

Ye supple M.P.s who go down on your knees

Your precious identity sinking

And vote black or white as your leaders indite

(Which saves you the trouble of thinking)

For your country’s good name, her repute, or her shame

You don’t care the snuff of a candle.

But you’re paid for your game when you’re told that your name

Will be graced by a baronet’s handle. 

Oh! Allow me to give you a word of advice

The title’s uncommonly dear at the price. 

I fancy some in the original audience may have been dismayed at this stanza. It’s a shame Sullivan didn’t give us his best setting here. Perhaps, having been knighted himself, his heart wasn’t in it. (Gilbert wouldn’t be knighted himself until 1907)

The title of Baronet is in fact not even in the peerage, the order having been created by James I to raise cash for the pacification of Ireland. At the beginning of Act II, the stage direction tells us that the portraits go back to the time of James I, which means the Ruddigores go all the way back. It looks as though Gilbert is trying to draw a strong connection to the powerful and titled people of his own time. 

I will argue later that the melodrama scene, in which Dame Hannah is abducted, throws sand in the gears of the traditional machine by which melodrama explores the dangers posed to the bourgeoisie by the landed class. 

We also have several places where Gilbert’s characters seem to break the fourth wall and acknowledge that they are in a melodramatic comic operetta. In his first conversation with Adam, Robin drops all pretense of normal conversation and flatly explains his complicated backstory to the one person we have met who already knows it. In our production, he simply turned to the audience and recounted it, as if it were an aside. 

Before Welcome Gentry, Mad Margaret makes fun of the concept of the chorus that’s about to enter:

Margaret: …Hide, hide- they are all mad- quite mad!

Rose: What makes you think so?

Margaret: Hush! They sing choruses in public. That’s mad enough, I think! 

It’s a great line, and always gets a laugh. But think about it. In the world of an operetta, do the characters know they are singing? Do they experience the music, or is the music for us in the audience, heightening our experience? Is this world we are watching like our world, really? If so, it would in fact be very odd for a whole group of people to start singing in harmony together. In this sense Mad Margaret is saying something very sane, but she has to step outside the world of the piece to do it. 

In Despard’s entrance number, he muses on the reasons why an audience would assume he’s a criminal because of his various signifiers and mannerisms, calling attention to the tropes of melodrama he represents.  

In My Eyes are Fully Open, Despard and the characters who echo him are clearly aware they are performing a patter number: 

This particularly rapid unintelligible patter

Isn’t generally heard, and if it is, it doesn’t matter. 

This is a very outside-the-box Gilbert, anticipating an aspect of modernist meta-theatricality by decades. 

Sullivan’s Work in Ruddigore

Turning our attention to Sullivan, we have another case of artistic strengths that perfectly counterbalance Gilbert’s weaknesses, except when they don’t. Sullivan is a rather serious and very ambitious composer with a fine mind for rhythm and melody. His ear for harmony is also very strong within conventional means. That is to say that harmonic color is very subtly and deftly employed everywhere, but we are unlikely to be shocked at any of his choices, merely delighted. (which is no small thing) In an era of iconoclasts and titans, Sullivan was ill-equipped to storm the castle of the music of the future. And although I am an enthusiast of Sullivan’s work without Gilbert, it is often diffuse, lacking focus and unsure of where to place its ambition. Gilbert essentially forces Sullivan to be a miniaturist, which is extremely difficult, and which is Sullivan’s true calling. 

Because Sullivan tends toward the sentimental, Gilbert’s most acerbic lyrics are given a warmth and joy which broadens their expression immensely. Sullivan’s deep understanding of musical rhythm in phrasing expresses a coherence that makes Gilbert’s wordplay feel inevitable and dignifies some of Gilbert’s less inspired words. 

But Sullivan’s portion of Ruddigore also isn’t as tightly constructed as some of his other scores, partly because he must have been utterly exhausted. He had visited the United States to establish The Mikado there and taken a grueling trip across the country, including a 30 hour slog from Los Angeles to Yosemite in ‘broiling heat and smothering dust’. When he returned to England, he wrote The Golden Legend, his most ambitious concert work, which lasts over 2 hours and premiered with almost 450 players. While he was writing this massive work, he had other duties to attend to, like attending to the aged Franz Liszt on his last trip to England. There isn’t much documentation of the music of other composers Sullivan conducted, but also must have been conducting the work of others during this time, and that requires score study and rehearsal. Any normal person would have been on the verge of collapse, and Sullivan’s case was complicated by chronic kidney problems. 

A lot of the operetta is in E flat or C minor. In fact, counting by measures, fully a third of the show is in 3 flats. If there were some sort of internal logic to which characters sing in three flats, or if Sullivan were trying to evoke the E flat Masonic music of Mozart, we might look at it differently, but there seems to be no unifying principle guiding proceedings; just a lot of E flat. 

In the opening chorus and at the beginning of the First Act Finale, Sullivan establishes a dominant pedal to get us into the vocal entrance, but it feels as though he has just barely made it to the tonic in time, In the opening number, E flat is established as the key, but an immediate, extended and emphatic episode in A flat makes us wonder whether we misread the situation, and he returns us to E flat in the nick of time. The Act I finale seems to be heading toward G, but then eventually and somewhat abruptly sticks the landing to C major. At his most inspired, Sullivan plays games with harmonic ambiguity near the end of a long number, breaking up a codetta and proving that there are still things to find even after a lot of musical exploration. Here he seems unfocused and meandering at the top of the number, right where we might really want clarity in establishing our tonal location. 

As you read this blog you’ll hear about many tiny changes Geoffrey Toye and Harry Norris made to the score. None of them are particularly drastic. They trim repeats, they tighten transitions, they eliminate places where a song has ended but the music has two or three more unimportant things to say. The collective impact of all these moments where things go on just a little too long has a cumulative effect on the audience. Ask any director who is trying to eliminate the spaces between lines. “Pick up your cues!” we say. Toye and Norris picked up Sullivan’s cues. 

Gilbert needs Sullivan to tell him not to do that same plot again and to give him an interesting idea to musicalize. But Sullivan desperately needs Gilbert to tell him a section is too slack and loses energy. 

In Yeomen, Gilbert would give Sullivan a libretto that would enable him to write music with greater breadth and dignity. And in the last masterpiece, The Gondoliers, there are virtually two different pieces; a comic piece for Gilbert, and an excuse for Sullivan to write some incredible Italian music. In Ruddigore we have an especially strong piece that shows the ongoing strains in the partnership. 

The reception of Ruddigore

It wasn’t until 1935 that the Savoy Company (the company I music direct for) first presented Ruddigore to the Philadelphia public. Our production is mentioned in Rickett and Hogland’s 1940 book Let’s Do Some Gilbert & Sullivan as an example of how it is in fact possible to put on this operetta successfully, despite its difficulties:

“…that long-established and competent amateur organization, the Savoy Co. of Philadelphia account it one of their most successful productions.”

Savoy waited until 1936 and 1938 to present its first productions of Utopia Limited and The Grand Duke, but those are famously the least popular of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. So Ruddigore took longer than any of the major works to catch on in the City of Brotherly Love. Today the question of whether Ruddigore works in Philadelphia or anywhere else for that matter seems to have been settled. Since that first production, Savoy has put on Ruddigore roughly once a decade, as frequently as The Yeomen of the Guard and even Trial by Jury, and it is regularly produced wherever folks do Gilbert and Sullivan. 

Before the 1920s, Ruddigore was considered a failure. It had not been a success in its very first run, partly because it came hard on the heels of The Mikado, an impossible act to follow. 

After that premiere production, the opera wasn’t presented by D’Oyly Carte until 34 years after the premiere, first on tour in 1920, and then in London in 1921. In the 20s, Chappell incorporated the changes I discuss here into a revised version of the published vocal score, which became the basis of the Schirmer score from the early 1950s many of you have in your music libraries.

The 1935 Philadelphia Savoy Company production was only one part of a general reappraisal of the G&S canon, but of these re-examined works, Ruddigore made the strongest comeback. D’Oyly Carte recorded it 4 times between 1924 and 1965. They presented it with a touring company in New York in 1934, 1936, and 1955. There were Broadway productions in 1927, 1931, and 1944. By 1953, Schirmer finally published a vocal score. In 1967 it was made into an animated film. The idea of a chorus of ancestors was borrowed in 1937s Me and My Girl, in 2009’s The Addams Family, and in 2012’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. My Eyes are Fully Open, easily one of the finest patter songs in Gilbert and Sullivan has even had a life outside the show. It appears with altered lyrics in Joe Papp’s version of The Pirates of Penzance and in Thoroughly Modern Millie. Not a bad legacy for a piece the New York Times had initially headlined: Their First Flat Failure; The First Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Not a Success

Some of the things that made Ruddigore a disappointment in the original production are the very things we love it for today. Gilbert disliked the music Sullivan wrote for the ancestors scene, but today it is considered one of Sullivan’s very finest stretches of music, showing just how adept he was at writing in the high romantic manner. 

The inspired lunacy of Gilbert’s plots masks surprisingly unified themes. Whether the play be set in fictional Japan, Venice, 16th Century London, or in Cornwall, Gilbert is concerned with the difference between the actual self and the impositions of social position and duty. As Carolyn Williams points out, the men in Gilbert’s libretti are often stymied by their professional roles, while the female characters are at odds with how they are expected to behave as women. As silly as Ruddigore is, it is one of the very best and most pointed explorations of these themes. The first audiences were unconvinced by the quick and preposterous conclusion of the work, but surely that’s why we love these endings so much. No great acts of heroism save us from the problems in G&S. We got into this mess on one bureaucratic technicality, we will extricate ourselves on another. All we can do about it is laugh.

In our fractured world, as we wonder about the difference between true self and imposed identity on the one hand and whether bureaucrats are heroes or villains on the other, Gilbert and Sullivan again appear perennially relevant, even as they insist that “it really doesn’t matter.”

The Musical Text:

Ruddigore has the most problematic text of all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Utopia Limited and The Grand Duke are often edited heavily, but there isn’t a standardized set of alterations to deal with; you simply have to make the alterations as you see fit. When Geoffrey Toye and Harry Norris amended Ruddigore for D’Oyly Carte around 1920, they didn’t just add a new overture and remove numbers. They made a number of internal cuts and alterations to tighten the action. These internal cuts and changes were reflected in the revised vocal score and the subsequent Schirmer vocal score that in the United States at least, became the new standard edition. It is a mark of the provisional status of Ruddigore in the canon that Schirmer released its edition second to last. Only Yeomen came later, the following year. Princess Ida, Utopia Limited, and The Grand Duke were never released by Schirmer. Like the other operettas, the Ruddigore parts and score you can get in various places (including IMSLP) are based on the corresponding parts that have been circulating for the better part of a century, and for those of us trying to ‘do it right’, those sources always seem a little suspect. We want to try and get it closer to what Sullivan originally had in mind, without the performance practices and alterations that have accumulated over the years. This drive for authenticity has led Sullivan experts to work very hard to make available the original text. We purists want to hear what got cut, what the original overture sounded like, and so forth. This is why the Oxford University Press critical edition is such a great resource, and David Russell Hulme’s excellent and illuminating essay about Sullivan editions in the Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan lets us in on many of the challenges involved. I used the Colin Jagger Oxford critical edition of Yeomen when I conducted it a few years ago, and found it worked well with the existing Schirmer score all my singers had access to. The Oxford scores also come in under a hundred dollars and are very readily available. The Kalmus scores of G&S run over $150 and can be tough to track down. Kalmus scores like these are also of varying degrees of quality. Many of them are put together from the parts themselves and contain whatever corruptions have accumulated over the years. The Kalmus scores I own are hand copied by a copyist, and some are not consistently well laid out. So generally, I try to get my hands on one of the 3 Dover G&S full scores, The Broude editions, or the OUP editions, and leave Kalmus for when I’m absolutely stuck. 

However, here we have an unusual situation. The OUP edition is trying to establish a text that represents as much as possible the opening night version of the score. This is critical to our understanding of the work and an invaluable addition to the scholarly literature. But in performance, I venture to say that Toye’s and Norris’s version is stronger, and that you will almost always want to retain their changes. 

David Russell Hulme essentially calls me out in his Cambridge essay:

“It … became clear very early in my involvement with professional productions, that although conductors and directors might be enthusiastic in principle about following more authentic texts, the familiar corruptions would often remain if they decided these better suited their ideas. One had to be consoled with the thought that at least they had made an informed choice.”

Choosing the ‘familiar corruptions’ proves difficult to do while conducting from the scholarly edition, which doesn’t track these changes consistently, and doesn’t include things like Toye’s overture or the reconfigured conclusion of the operetta. The internal changes Toye and/or Norris made to tighten up numbers themselves are not simply a measure or 2 cut here and there. A half a measure in one place will lead to the second half of another measure elsewhere. Toye and Norris made these cuts rather expertly, especially the 5 cuts in the first act finale and marking them in the critical edition to conduct from is very difficult. Fortunately, Ruddigore is one of the Kalmus scores which is really quite excellent. Tom McCanna’s excellent edition is a joy to conduct from. If you compare it measure for measure to the OUP, you will see that they differ in detail in many places, especially dynamics, but not wildly so. The Kalmus score almost exactly matches the Schirmer score your singers will be most familiar with. 

You could absolutely choose to music direct from the Oxford piano vocal score, which corresponds to the critical edition, but if you are conducting an amateur group, your singers will not be able to use their existing scores. Further, you will lose access to a number of the better ‘corruptions’. Whatever you choose to do, I really want everyone who can to go and pick up a copy of the OUP Ruddigore partitur, though, because the Gilbert and Sullivan community has to support the production and publication of these editions! Beyond issues of performability as a conducting score the only real quibble I have with the OUP edition is that it does not include in its collection of sources the Schirmer or Kalmus scores. Oxford’s Yeomen score includes the Schirmer vocal score in its sources and accounts for variants in the commentary. Because the critical commentary isn’t comparing the most authentic primary sources with the most popular corrupted sources measure by measure, the reader is often left to wonder whether dozens of variants are legitimate or whether something has been missed in the critical edition. (having edited from primary sources myself I can attest to the ease by which things can be overlooked) There are dozens of discrepancies between those the scores, many in the horns, that aren’t explained in the critical commentary, but really need to be addressed, especially because some of them are sensible lines of music. How would stray countermelodies find themselves inserted into an otherwise accurate score, for example? Other variants are so odd that one wonders how a source could be so badly misread, or to what end the variant was made.  I’ll note the variants I discovered below. There may well be others I simply didn’t see. I will also try to catch as many of the obvious errors in the Schirmer piano vocal score that I can find, since I was unable to find an errata list online. Finally, as much as I want to support the Oxford scores, I want to reiterate that I found myself much better off conducting my production from the Kalmus. If you have the stamina to read this entire blog post, you will see what I mean, particularly when it comes to the Finales of both acts. 

Before You Start:

A great place to start with any G&S Operetta is the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive page.The page for Ruddigore is pretty extensive, including interviews and reviews of early productions.

The most commonly used edition is the Schirmer vocal score, edited by Edmond William Rickett. There are a number of errors which I’ll try and cover as we go; the G&S archive seems not to have an errata list.  I linked to Amazon here, because most people these days buy from them. But do be aware that they sometimes lump together more than one edition of the same score, so you might accidentally get a rival edition when you order. If you decide you’d like to go with the Oxford critical edition, it is very good, with the caveats I mention on this page. 

As for the full score, you’re in luck. The handwritten Kalmus score is good, but hard to get your hands on. The new Oxford edition edited by David Russell Hulme is less than $90. The benefits and liabilities of these scores are discussed at length here. 

I believe in conducting chorus rehearsals from the vocal score until the chorus is off book, and then switching as early as practicable to the full score to conduct rehearsals. There is a real wealth of detail in the orchestration that you as a music director need to be aware of that is simply not present in the Piano Score. Some of these details can actually change the way you sing and rehearse the material! If you are renting parts, do check to see if you can get your hands on the score that goes with them to use as you rehearse. It goes without saying that conducting the operetta in performance with an orchestra from the Piano Vocal Score is an unpardonable infraction unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

Recordings:

As always, the OakApple Press page laying out all the major recordings is complete and fantastic. Many of these recordings are available on Spotify, but I encourage you to buy a hard copy. Looking to D’Oyly Carte for style or pronunciation help is a good idea, but I’m sorry to say that even in the case of vowels, you will find very little uniformity from one D’Oyly Carte recording to the next.

If you’re going to be Music Directing Gilbert and Sullivan, you’ll want to begin building a library of reference materials. I recommend getting these, as you are able:

The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan by Ian Bradley. You should probably get this one ASAP. There is a very expensive new edition I have not yet read. If it’s anything like its predecessors, it’s indispensable.

A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan by Gayden Wren: Good stuff, especially seeing the shows in the context of the whole output. I come back to this book again and again. Wren’s discussion of flowers as a thematic element is enlightening, and I am heavily indebted to his clear-eyed dissection of various moments of the piece. 

The Gilbert and Sullivan Lexicon by Harry Benford: in which you will find the definitions of all those words you don’t understand.

One of my favorite books is Carolyn Williams Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. Her discussion of this piece against the conventions of Victorian Gothic novels and gender constructions is just tremendous. 

After you have procured some of these, set aside a number of hours to do the following:

1) Listen to the soundtracks with the score in hand, marking things that strike you as interesting. I also made a pass at one point with a metronome and marked the tempi of all the sections from several recordings so that I would have a benchmark of speed. When a singer complains about a tempo, it helps to be able to check and say, “Ah, yes, we’re too slow” or: “This is within the range of generally accepted tempi.” or yet again, “I’d like to take it this fast, but currently our diction won’t allow it.” Sullivan doesn’t always notate phrasing or articulations, and while it’s easy to say, “Let’s just leave it up to the taste of the players”, it’s sometimes necessary to actually make clear decisions as a conductor so that the ensemble is telling the same musical story. I have developed a system with colored pencils, where I listen to a recording of a particular year with, say, a red pencil in hand and just mark interesting articulation, dynamic, or tempo choices for the key moments. Then I go back with a different color and enter another recording’s take on the same moments. Pretty quickly one begins to realize what is standard, what is done almost every time, and what is open to interpretation. You will also find your own preference in those places where there appears to be a wide range of opinion. To me, this is the beginning of discovering your own voice as a conductor; finding where the limits of expression have been in the past, and deciding what you are drawn to in answer to the points that are vague.

2) Take the Lexicon book and copy in pencil all the definitions into the score where you don’t already know the meanings.

As You’re Casting:

Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd/

Robin Oakapple

Note- This name is pronounced “Riven”.

A patter baritone, originally played by George Grossmith, who also originated Joseph Porter, the Major General, Bunthorne, the Lord Chancellor, Koko, and Jack Point. He should have great comic timing and be able to navigate fast text quickly and clearly. He must be able to hold a harmony part. Theoretically he should be older than Despard. (see below) We must root for him, he must be likeable, and the more innocent and guileless he seems, the funnier the show will be. 

You should hear part of ‘My Eyes are Fully Open’ in the audition.

Richard Dauntless

Originally played by Durward Lely, who had created Nanki Poo in The Mikado, among others. Lely sang most of the bel canto tenor roles before he defected to operetta, and eventually went back to opera, singing frequently with Adelina Patti. Give the role to your best tenor, hopefully one with a somewhat italianate sound. Should have good comic timing. Choosing an amiable and likeable actor makes Rose’s decisions easier to understand. Playing Richard as a despicable cad may be funnier. It would be wonderful if he has no chemistry whatsoever with Rose. Should be cast with someone who is a passable dancer, or you should cut the hornpipe. 

Sir Despard Murgatroyd

This was the Rutland Barrington part. Barrington created Corcoran in Pinafore, the Police Sargeant in Pirates, and Pooh Bah in The Mikado. Despard is technically a baritone, but has a rather large range, up to E natural on the top and down to a low F# on the bottom. As Rickett and Hoogland point out, it should really be a big voice, and an imposing person as well. Should also be adept at patter and have good comic timing. In the script we discover he is younger than Ruthven, but that’s inconsequential, because he’s been committing all manner of evil deeds for 10 years, which might well have blackened his soul like Dorian Gray. (which was only a few years from being written when this piece premiered)

You should definitely hear some of ‘My Eyes are Fully Open’ in auditions. 

Old Adam Goodheart

Adam has a low E flat and a critical harmony part. So apart from the bits of dialogue, which one naturally hopes are well played, the musical elements are paramount. Rickett and Hoogland have a good word in their chapter: “He is old and decrepit- take care that his be not also inaudible” There was originally a name change for Adam as well, but this plot point was dropped. The name “Gideon Crawle” appears in a line in Act 2 as a vestige of this old draft. 

Rose Maybud

Originally played by Leonora Braham, who created the title role in Patience, Phyllis in Iolanthe, and Yum Yum in The Mikado. Rose differs little from the other G&S soprani, except that she has very little coloratura and only a couple of truly challenging passages. All G&S soprano roles need a clear tone, intelligible diction, and the ability to play the irony of scenes. Some of these scenes, and her aria are exceptionally funny. 

Mad Margaret

Originally played by Jessie Bond, who had created Hebe in Pinafore, Iolanthe, Pitti Sing, and Tessa in Gondoliers. One of the truly great G&S roles, a large personality is necessary along with excellent musicianship and crystal clear diction at speed. Madness is a trope of Romantic opera, one which is expertly skewered here. Margaret is a role for a very skilled performer. In addition to the opening of the mad scene, you will want to hear the bottom of Schirmer score 123 and the top of 124 in auditions; that line is quite difficult. You may also want to hear a bit of ‘My Eyes are Fully Open’ Rickett and Hoogland correctly point out that unless you have a Mad Margaret, your production is likely to be, in Hamlet’s phrase, “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.”

Dame Hannah

Originally played by Rosina Brandram, who first played Kate in Pirates of Penzance, and Katisha in Mikado. Dame Hannah is very much like her sisters in the pantheon. She is ideally older and curmudgeonly, capable of convincingly wielding a weapon. She has an important harmony part in the first act finale, and should be a good storyteller with excellent elocution, since she has quite a bit of important exposition at the beginning of the show. 

Zorah

One of the smaller featured G&S chorus roles, Zorah nevertheless has some lovely music, including an important piece of recitative that needs to come off rather dramatically

Ruth

Ruth is a speaking part, a wonderful role for a chorus member you want to feature who hasn’t had a chance at a larger role. 

Roderic Murgatroyd

Roderic is a wonderful bass-baritone role, particularly suitable for an older member of the company, although ideally he has the optional high A. The original Roderic played the Pirate King and the Mikado. Needs to command the scene and pair sensibly opposite Dame Hannah in terms of age. 

Professional Bridesmaids

There is a chorus of an unspecified number of professional bridesmaids in Ruddigore. Their part is not terribly difficult, so you can choose these on other grounds, such as dancing ability, provided they can sing at all. Obviously a good soprano/alto distribution is desirable. 

Ghosts

The Ghosts are really all about singing in harmony. There are generally 7, in addition to Roderic. This is not really ideal for a number of reasons. Firstly, the number is almost by necessity staged upstage, which is not the best situation acoustically. There is quite a bit going on in the orchestra, so the balance will almost always be a problem. Sullivan has written the ensemble in 2, 3, and 4 part divisions. Some of these do not include Roderic. Divided in 2, we are balanced 4 against 3. Divided in 3, we are 3 against two groups of two. Divided into 4, we are 1 against 3 groups of 2. Some part will always be wanting. If you add an 8th Ghost, you have better luck, but your costumers will probably not take kindly to that addition, because the costume labor involved is very intensive for this scene already, every ghost having a different costume from a different era, reproduced as a painting on the stage. The middle part (2nd tenor or baritone) is the hardest to hear, as you might imagine. You will want 2 on that part if possible. I would say for the sake of hearing the parts and keeping them distinct to keep those two close enough to hear one another and away from the first tenors against whom they have a few seconds. Unfortunately, your staging almost requires that they be in isolation from one another. 

Chorus

If you remove the ghosts and bridesmaids, Ruddigore is one of the least intensive scores for chorus. In fact in our production, we added the male chorus to a few numbers. I’ll share where and how that’s possible below; if you don’t add them, the non-ghost male chorus has quite a bit of down time. 

General Pronunciation Advice:

I copy here general note from earlier G&S posts, with some slight emendations.

I am still no expert on RP English pronunciation, but I offer here a couple of basic pointers, to which I intend to add as I learn more:

1) Be aware of the Trap-Bath split. A fellow Savoyard in my tenor section made me aware of this chart, which is very helpful: trap-bath

2) ‘R’s that begin a word are tripped or rolled. ‘R’s that come before a vowel are tripped. ‘R’s that come after a vowel are generally dropped. At no point is the ‘r’ pronounced as we Amerrricans pronounce it. (although you may encounter different kinds of Rs if characters have regional British accents)

3) Mary, Merry, and Marry employ three different vowel sounds. Where I come from, they are pronounced identically. In Philadelphia, they are pronounced as three different vowels, but they aren’t the same vowels. Interesting chart on this matter:http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_15.html In G&S, you’ll want to say Mary with an eh as in air, Merry with eh as in get, and Marry with an ah as in cat. (someone will certainly correct me on this)

4) Many u vowels will need a y sound before them: duty becomes dyewtee, tuning becomes tyooning, new becomes nyoo, and institution becomes instityooshun.

5) Been becomes bean.

6) For words which in American English replace ‘t’s with a d sound, a true ‘t’ sound should be used. “Water” is not pronounced “wadder”, and certainly not wooder, my Philadelphia friends. But be careful not to overcompensate. I have noticed that some Americans are so anxious to Britishify their speech that they change to ‘t’ sounds that are truly ‘d’s. Lady should not be Laty, as I’ve heard people say when attempting to posh up their language. Not every ‘d’ needs to become a ‘t’, only the ones that are truly ‘t’s to begin with!

7) As I continue to conduct these pieces, and after continuing encouragement from the English members of our American company, I am beginning to become fixated on words like “all”, and the second syllable of “Doctor”, “Major” and “Sailor”. The British “all” has a darker vowel than the Americans use, almost to the point of sounding like ‘ole’, and the second syllable of the ‘or’ words is pronounced like ‘or’, not ‘er’, as Americans would say it. I am still conflicted about that particular one, because the D’Oyly Carte recordings are by no means consistent on that point, and especially at speed, it is very difficult to articulate a tall ‘o’ vowel in such a word. It is something to keep one’s ears open for.

This video may be of use to you.

That is by no means exhaustive, and I’ve probably gotten some of it wrong, but that’ll get you started. There are some places in this show where pronunciation will be governed by a rhyme. I will try and hit each of those points as we go.

Going through the show number by number:

Overture

We encounter the superiority of the 1920 revisions immediately with the overture. Hamilton Clarke’s original overture begins with music from the opening of Act II. That music works well enough to get people back in the mood to watch another act, but has very little momentum, certainly not enough for the very beginning of the opera. A mid-tempo cornet solo on Oh Why am I Moody and Sad? uses the less dramatic second section of that number and manages to remove even what drama remained. In the 46th measure, Hamilton finally uses music of a quicker tempo, but he uses Welcome Gentry, a partner song. The fun of a partner song comes in hearing how they overlap, so the overture steals the thunder of a nice moment later in the piece, and when those parts do come together here, they don’t balance well. The clarinets, oboe, and bassoon playing the faster melody in their mid-registers are no match sonically for the violins, trumpets, flute, and piccolo playing the other melody at the top of their ranges. After an interesting and rather beautiful transitional passage that seems to be new, Clarke gives us a section of The Battle’s Roar is Over, again, poorly balanced. At one point the entire woodwind section and the first violins play the melody, accompanied by long tones in the brass, with the only rhythmic impetus provided by the second violins, violas and cellos. The overture closes with music from the Act II finale “When a Man Has Been a Naughty Baronet” To Clarke’s credit, this idea is developed and comes to a sprightly conclusion that doesn’t overstay its welcome. I haven’t met anyone that thinks this is a more effective way to open Ruddigore. The 1920 version stands head and shoulders above Clarke’s.

Toye’s immeasurably better version also opens with music from the top of act II, but quickly cuts to the most interesting part of the opera, When The Night Wind Howls. When you get to the Allegro energico, you will want to pick a tempo that is not too fast for your woodwinds in measures 7-9, but fast enough that you get an exciting tempo for the melody that will follow. Toye’s scoring here is considerably heavier than Sullivan’s here, which is not surprising, since Toye was writing more than 30 years after Sullivan. The vocal melody that Sullivan had tenuously supported with pizzicato viola alternating with a single clarinet has been assigned to the cellos, violas, horns, and clarinets en masse. That’s a combination with a lot of body. We’ll discuss later how When The Night Wind Howls is tricky to balance even in its original context. The point here is that the violins are divided 4 ways, and thus may be drowned out by your winds unless you have a substantial string complement. Toye then combines the countermelodies from multiple verses to decorate the melody. If your orchestra is big enough, this is a wonderfully effective texture. In the second verse that follows, Toye leaves Sullivan’s original scoring and strikes out on his own. The flutes, oboe, and clarinets have a new accompaniment idea, which is much more pedestrian than Sullivan’s original scoring, but effective enough in its own way. The pizzicato strings that punctuate the melody here are wonderful, but are liable to be drowned out by the forte timpani rolls, so you might moderate that dynamic. When I see the cello and bass at letter C, it looks like evidence that this overture was written by somebody who has struggled with the lack of firm downbeat in the scoring later in the opera. The music from the opening of Act II returns, leading us to a section of I Know a Youth, with the vocal part very aptly assigned to the oboe where it was missing from the scoring in the opera proper. An extension takes us through a transitional passage to My Eyes Are Fully Open. 3 measures below the key change, I conducted a steep accelerando in 4, then took the last 2 measures before rehearsal H in 2. Toye preserves the original scoring for a long time, adding only a very idiomatic clarinet in the echoing phrases. Toye eventually breaks away from the original scoring and develops these ideas. This development isn’t at the level of the Yeomen or Iolanthe overtures, but it is a very workmanlike treatment indeed! The development in fact leads to a reimagining of “I Shipped D’Ye See”, complete with a new countermelody and a far more expansive scope. That in turn leads to an expanded hornpipe, which is also very well scored. The completion of the overture breaks no new ground, but is well made and closes satisfyingly in a very Sullivanesque style. 

ACT I

1. Fair is Rose

This is not the finest opening chorus by any means, but it does its job well enough. Work to get clear cutoffs from your singers right from the beginning. 

Your beat pattern will have to change in this number, and that isn’t indicated in all editions of the score. Essentially all of Zorah’s music is in 4, and the women’s chorus is in 2. 

‘Wind’ rhymes with ‘kind’. 

The word ‘passed’ should be pronounced as though it rhymed with ‘lost’. 

There is an error in the left hand in the second measure of page 19 in the Schirmer vocal score. There’s no such thing as a half note with a flag. 

FLOWER ALERT: The name Rose Maybud starts the flower imagery off with a bang. 

2. Sir Rupert Murgatroyd

The trickiest part for the chorus is the closing ‘d’ consonants. I put them on the 4th of 6 beats on page 24 for ‘enjoyed’ and the first ‘Murgatroyd’, then on the downbeat of the last measure on the page for the last ‘Murgatroyd’. On page 28, we made the ‘cloyed’ and ‘troyd’ as as short as possible, and put the last cutoff on the downbeat again. Incidentally, I really hope one day one of you out there explains to me the convention of tying the last note of a phrase to an eighth. Cutting off phrases on the 5th of 6 beats always feels needlessly precious to me, and I wonder if that’s what’s actually meant. 

If Sullivan (and many other composers who notate like this) means that the cutoff actually happens on beat 4 and not beat 5, why don’t we have the following tied to an eighth note in the next measure?

I suppose it’s possible Sullivan wanted the 5th beat in the first example and the downbeat in the second, but we often see this kind of thing happening at tempos where the difference would be impossible to distinguish and would waste quite a bit of rehearsal time. 

Honest question. 

The ending of this number is one of the places where Toye and/or Norris made a very shrewd cut, taking 3 measures out that add nothing to the number and slow the momentum of the beginning of the show. 

3. If Somebody There Chanced to Be 

This is a delightful aria for soprano that more people should sing more outside of the context of the show. The story is funny, the melody is lovely, and the technical demands aren’t odious.

Sullivan’s melody is a masterful chromatic descent followed by another going the opposite way. 

Then an even slower descent from G all the way down to E. 

Only C# and D# are missing from the inclusion of every pitch here. 

In the section that follows, a diatonic melody with a simple sequence is balanced with a yearning chromatic answer. 

In opera a chromatic line, particularly a descending chromatic line, often indicates the erotic. (see for example, the Habanera from Carmen or Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ from Saint Saёns Samson et Dalila, both about a decade older than Ruddigore) 

There is something very Gounod-esque about Sullivan’s tune to my ear, and the juxtaposition of this very oblique lyric with such a sensual tune is part of the joy of it. The luxurious instrumentation in octaves of the melody from measures 61 to 67 almost sounds like Massenet to me, which is hilarious since in both verses, she is singing the least sexy sentiment in the entire lyric. Gilbert’s melody veers from a diatonic sensibility to a rather erotic (for Sullivan anyway) chromaticism, and when the melody prosaically lands on the tonic, we can’t help but feel for our heroine, who has to keep her longings under the thumb of her rule book. 

The opening ritornello didn’t give me a moment’s pause in piano rehearsal, but when the orchestra arrived, I found the passage disorienting. 

Think about this melody in 2 measure phrases. It looks as though measure 5 is a dead spot, a lift, and that measure 6 begins a new phrase, shaped exactly like the previous one. But because of the vocal entrance, the 6th measure really must be an upbeat. Just think of the first 8 measures in groups of 2, with the 9th measure as the beginning of the tune proper. 

I conducted the whole thing in 1, except “Where can it be?” and “Now let me see”, which I conducted in 3. But that’s really about the timing of your singer. 

Toye and/or Norris took a cut in the passage that takes us back to the second verse, and shorten the ending. Again, although we would always want to consider Sullivan’s first thought, I think most people would find that Toye and Norris’s cuts help move the action forward and that the omitted passages don’t add anything significant musically to the proceedings. 

4. I Know a Youth

This is an example of a whole family of lyrics Gilbert wrote that lay the groundwork for Hammerstein’s conditional lyrics like ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’, ‘Only Make Believe I Love You’ and ‘If I Loved You’. This is a particularly fine and well-loved example. Were I Not to Koko Plighted from The Mikado is another. The tempo changes and fermatas are critical to the delightful storytelling in this very funny duet. 

There is a horn countermelody in the 9th and 10th measures that appears in the Kalmus score and parts but not in the Oxford score. The critical commentary doesn’t have any information about it, but it seems like a sensible musical idea; it may be legitimate. It appears in Malcolm Sargent’s 1931 and Isidore Godfrey’s 1950 and 1962 D’Oyly Carte Recordings, and in the 1966 BBC broadcast. Sargent’s 1962 recording and New Sadler’s Wells 1987 recordings do not include it.  

At the end of the number is another Kalmus horn part not included in the Oxford score or mentioned in the critical commentary. It opens up an odd line of inquiry, because the added horn line is rather exposed and somewhat hard to balance if you don’t have a lot of strings playing that pizzicato. 

Of course, it could very well be someone’s spurious addition to the score. But what an odd place to insert something! And how specific this idea is. 

This horn part is included in Isidore Godfrey’s 1950 and 1962 D’Oyly Carte recordings, and in the 1966 BBC broadcast. It is not played in Malcolm Sargent’s 1931 or 1962 recordings. New Sadler’s Wells Opera Recording in 1987 includes the horn with the other winds, but does not extend the line further than the other winds. 

This is the first of several examples of horn parts that seem to overstay their welcome in an unusual way. I’ll track them as we come to them. 

5 & 6 From the Briny Sea 

It is possible to add the basses and tenors to the opening chorus here, with the basses on the alto part (down the octave) and the tenors on the soprano (also down the octave, naturally) Be certain to drill the chorus on where the T of ‘it’ goes each time. 

‘Froggee’ is considered a slur, and is usually replaced by ‘and he’

I think it’s important to replace ‘lubberly’ with ‘cowardly’, which means the same thing and makes more clear to American audiences that we disapprove of domestic violence. 

In each verse, for both soloist and chorus, be sure your sixteenth notes are true sixteenth notes. Most performances devolve into eighth notes. 

There is a traditional ritardando at ‘And I’ll wager in their joy…’

There is an additional high note if you have a tenor who likes to sing them (is there another kind?) In the last verse, the last time you sing , ‘who had pity on a poor par-ley’, you can sing a high G on ‘ley’ with a fermata. If you do that, have your strings play to the end, just the quarter note length for the last note, coming back in on cue in tempo the measure after. The fermata for the chorus is only in the last verse. (that may also take some rehearsing to recall) 

Between 5 and 6, we again have a change (I believe from the 1920s), which may be one way or another in your edition. The third ending has cut directly to the chord, which is sung as a whole note with a fermata. In practice, this is an awkward moment. I don’t really feel that fermata is earned. But the quarter note ending also feels wrong, and either way, the transition to the hornpipe is even less salutary. We performed this section as written, but I wonder whether the whole note fermata measure might be removed entirely, the final chorus syllable on a quarter note, leading in tempo to the hornpipe. 

Speaking of the hornpipe, the Schirmer score specifies 4 times through it, at different volumes. The Oxford score only lists 3. This hornpipe was a late addition to the score, after the original Dauntless suggested to Gilbert that his character ought to dance there. The autograph score is marked by Sullivan with instructions as to which instruments are to play and which to remain silent during each verse of the tune. The Oxford score and the Kalmus score don’t agree, unfortunately, and the Kalmus score includes a part for cornet and trumpet that isn’t in the Oxford at all. The critical commentary doesn’t address this extra part, which does seem to work well in context. 

7. My Boy, You May Take It From Me

Again we are in well trod territory for Gilbert: A character giving life advice in essence, You have to just keep plugging away at it, or, go along to get along, or If you don’t stick up for yourself, who will? 

Other examples might include, When I Good Friends was Called to the Bar, from Trial by Jury, When I Was a Lad from HMS Pinafore, or When I Went to the Bar as a Very Young Man from Iolanthe. 

As with all patter songs, you have to go as fast as you can and still understand the words. 

The Schirmer and Oxford scores don’t explain why the caesura on page 48 is there in verses 2 and 3. 

In the second verse fermata, Richard traditionally says, “I don’t know!”

In the third verse fermata, Richard traditionally says, “No I didn’t!”, and then Robin replies, “Oh, I thought you did!”

Once again, Toye and Norris make some very good cuts; originally each verse went all the way back to the beginning of the number, and each verse included the repeat in the chorus. Again, Toye and/or Norris have cut sections from the number that are not missed and I think delaying the addition of Richard’s voice to the very end is more dramatically effective.  

8.  The Battle’s Roar is Over 

This number was deleted in the 1920 D’Oyly carte version, and not reinstated until 1977. That would indeed be a real loss, because this is a lovely number, even if the lyric is completely out of character for Richard. The music, particularly in the second half is clearly meant to evoke waves, and there is a really extraordinary Neapolitan harmonic shift, the first harmony so far in the opera that is in any way exotic. (I wonder why Sullivan chose it for this moment?) 

A second surprising harmony occurs in the coda. Is there some depth in these two characters we had missed? 

9. If Well His Suit Has Sped 

This is a modified reprise of the Opening number. The musical and punctuational question mark indicated in the last measure of the Schirmer score is obviously meant to indicate the bridesmaid’s curiosity. Is this indeed an accepted proposal? Funny stuff. 

There is an error in measure 10 of the Schirmer vocal score. For the first 2 left hand chords, the middle note is a C natural. It changes to a C flat on the third and fourth notes. 

The Oxford score includes the music for the extra bridesmaid interjections in the subsequent scene, but conducting them is in no way necessary. It’s a nice touch for them to lead this themselves. 

10. In Sailing O’er Life’s Ocean Wide

This is a brief but truly delightful number, one in which you will want to get a feel for Sullivan’s phrasing details that only come out in the orchestrational context. Wren complains that Sullivan hasn’t written his usual variation from verse to verse, but he’s mistaken. This is harmonically and rhythmically one of Sullivan’s most ingenious paradoxes. 

If you were looking at this text intending to set it, I dare say you would immediately think it should be in 4, (read it out loud and feel the stress of the words and I bet you’ll agree) but Sullivan has other plans. He sets Rose’s part with three notes on ‘heart’ and stresses an unstressed word in the men’s parts to get the lyric to behave in 3. 

The opening chorus manages phrase energy in a sort of aquatic way, ebbing and flowing like an ocean wave. 

Note further that the three voices are going in and out of sync with one another, as the three characters do in the story. 

This 3 measure phrase feels off-kilter, and is emphasized by nesting rhythmic patterns in the orchestra.

The figure in the clarinets and bassoon is adorable, and doesn’t appear in the piano vocal (how could it?) 

Phrasing with 3+3+3+3+2 measures (to equal a 14 measure period total) is a strikingly unusual and asymmetrical idea, which matches the perplexity of the situation. But this is made yet more effective by the fact that each singer has 2 phrases, then modulates to a version of the phrase that seems like an intensifier but in fact ushers in the next singer in a LOWER key. Richard’s verse begins in Eb, on an Eb. Robin’s verse begins in Db, on a Db, and Rose’s verse begins in Cb, on a Cb. Yet the downward modulations aren’t a carbon copy. They begin the same, but each verse heads in a different direction after the initial phrases. Interestingly, Richard’s heads toward Bb minor, but Robin and Rose both go toward Eb minor. Coincidence? Or is this underlining the relationships again? Sullivan manages to get Rose into the highest range of the central section, even though she’s in the lowest key.  

The net effect is that each singer seems to be getting more excited, even as the trio modulates down and down. Sullivan manages to get us into Ab with an ingenious modulation. For those who carp about Sullivan using diminished chords reflexively whenever a crowd is surprised, he uses them here for an impressive bel canto sleight of hand to prepare the dominant to our home key. Any composer would be proud to have written such a subtle and natural piece, especially since its dimensions are rather perverse.  

In the context of the increasing musical complexity of 19th century music, the modern listener sometimes forgets to listen for the right things. This is after all, the year Verdi’s Otello and Bruckner’s 8th symphony were written, and if we are listening to Sullivan as though we expected Iago’s Credo, mysterious, complicated and murky, we will be disappointed. Instead we want to listen to him as a bel canto composer, and in that context we discover Sullivan balancing and joining these small ideas in ways that distinguish him and his music from virtually all of his contemporaries. This isn’t a lagoon of murkiness, it’s a house of cards perfectly balanced in a way that doesn’t seem possible. 

In a work that is making its arguments based on volume, we might well assert that the composer is making the most emphatic statement when the most players are playing. But in a work like this, we want to notice where the composer is most carefully balancing, and that’s here. For Sullivan, we are clearly at the heart of the act. 

11. Cheerily Carols the Lark

This is of course, a parody of innumerable mad scenes, especially the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor and Ophelia’s Mad Scene from Thomas’s Hamlet. An opening night review specifically mentioned Donizetti, Gounod, and Meyerbeer, so we know the original audience got the joke. 

Lucia‘s Mad scene didn’t originally include it, but the now traditional cadenza with flute obbligato is full of the same kinds of scales and arpeggios that we find in the flute cadenza at the beginning of this aria, and it’s in the same key. Romana Margherita Pugliese makes a pretty compelling case in a 2004 article in the Cambridge Opera Journal that the Lucia cadenza we know now comes from an 1889 production, so I think that Sullivan was not especially referencing that cadenza. But in the same article, Pugliese explores the way the mad scene became more and more important in the public perception of Lucia over the course of the 19th century, and how performances began to be colored with audience expectations of vocal production they had come to expect from Meyerbeer and other contemporary composers. This also coincided with changing ideas about madness, particularly feminine madness.

Madness came to symbolize the dangerous potential of women who are outside the social order. I can’t properly summarize Pugliese’s article (The Origins of Lucia di Lammermoor’s Cadenza, Cambridge Opera Journal Volume 16, No. 1) here, but she quotes a fascinating passage by Susan McClary in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality as it relates to the audience’s experience of the novelty of these vocalisms in fresh cadenzas.

“If one reads Lucia’s behavior as a manifestation of the sexual excess the nineteenth century ascribed to madwomen, then these ‘decorative’ and ‘euphoric’ details make strong dramatic sense… If the performance of conventionalized ornaments is potentially effective, imagine the impact if a performance were to invent new roulades- if she were allowed to rage at will without our being able to predict her every move in advance! “

Our inability to predict any of Margaret’s actions is key to her scenes as well, of course.

It would be silly for me to say here that Sullivan was consciously accessing a musical language deeply enmeshed in European attempts to make sense of female sexuality. If anything, the fact that in this number Mad Margaret does not sing with the flute and has no vocal pyrotechnics represents a simplification of the operatic language of madness. And yet, these enmeshed codes of meaning are the language of music theatre, and Sullivan was listening and synthesizing the world he knew, as we do when we listen to this music.

Gilbert’s contribution is easiest to see when comparing the text of Ophelia’s aria from Thomas’s Hamlet: 

OPHÉLIE.

To your games, my friends, allow me, of grace, to take part! …

No one has followed me!

I left the palace at the first light of day …

Already the bird was singing in the woods around …

The morning breeze was shaking the leaves

A long thrill of love! …

The tears of the night the earth was wet

And the lark, before dawn awake,

hovered in the air ...

making them sign to approach.

MAD MARGARET

Cheerily carols the lark 

Over the cot

Merrily whistles the clerk

Scratching a blot. 

But the lark 

And the clerk

I remark 

Comfort me not. 

Over the ripening peach 

Buzzes the bee

Splash on the billowy beach

Tumbles the sea

But the peach 

and the beach

They are each

Nothing to me. 

If you were in Ruddigore’s opening night audience, you would have seen a woman come out with sticks in her hair and heard some erratic music and known you were about to get a mad scene. Her intelligibility in that capacity is very important to Gilbert. The stage direction informs us that she is “an obvious caricature of theatrical madness”. Mad scenes often begin with the singer noticing things around them and imputing significance to them, or hearing or seeing things that aren’t there at all. Margaret includes a records keeper (clerk) among the natural phenomena, which is funny, of course. But this intrusion of bureaucracy into the world of madness is very much in keeping with Margaret, who we will soon discover ‘made an affidavit, but it died’ 

At the risk of overstating my central point here, this intrusion of prosaic rules into a sensual musical landscape is the same game he had played with Rose in her aria, but here bureaucracy has intruded even into the realm of the mad woman.

If an exploration of Margaret’s Madness intrigues you, you will want to immediately get your hands on Carolyn Williams Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. She points out that Margaret’s singing of fragments of folk songs is part of the trope as well, calling back to Shakespeare’s Ophelia among others. But of course, Margaret can’t even remember the words to the tune she’s singing. 

You will want to budget some time to work with your Mad Margaret on timing in this first passage. There are three places where a new tempo begins following a fermata that need to be coordinated. 

‘Clerk’ is pronounced ‘clark’ 

‘Cytherean’ is pronounce Sith-er-ee-un

The song form ‘To a Garden’ portion of the song wasn’t written for Ruddigore, but appeared on Christmas 1881 in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. It is in this section that you will be grateful for having chosen not only a fine comic actress, but a singer with a good line and beautiful tone. 

The sudden switch from a comic characterization to an oddly touching one reminds me of Sad is That Woman’s Lot from Patience. 

The Kalmus score misprints the first four measures of the Allegro vivace as 16ths instead of 32nds, 

This is another example of a horn part that sort of sticks out late in the Kalmus, but not in the Oxford. It looks from the critical commentary that the silent measure after “Don’t call!” and before “No crime” was added by an indication in the score that seems to have been interpreted more than one way. As it appears in the Kalmus score and the public domain parts you’re likely to find, it’s a pretty ineffective moment. The fact that the bassoon and clarinets are playing the chord before the pause with them makes it sound as though the horn has simply missed the cutoff. 

The Kalmus has clarinet and horn pitches at the beginning of the Andante that do not appear in the Oxford. The discrepancy isn’t explained in the critical commentary in either score, and D’Oyly Carte’s 1931, 1950, and 1962 recordings and Sargent’s 1963 recording do not include this extra note. 

As you work on this number with piano score, note that the first flute and first clarinet join Margaret in her descending line for ‘posies he would gather’ and ‘posies Only roses’. Any liberties in that line, including a breath will need to be joined by those instruments. The vocal score is somewhat misleading in this measure, and the rallentando in the vocal score is not indicated in the full scores at all. Of course a moment like this makes a lot of sense to take time with. But if your rallentando is very pronounced, and if you take a breath where that comma goes, it will be trickier to coordinate with the winds. 

FLOWER ALERT: Posies, flowers, roses, violet, petals. 

12. Welcome, Gentry

This is not the finest partner song in Gilbert and Sullivan, but it does the job. The piano accompaniment in both Chappel editions, carried over subsequently to the Schirmer version is somewhat awkward to play in places. The octaves are not necessary to get the point across. 

There are variants in the various sections that are difficult to remember. The first time through, the altos have 

Then later, they sing

Even a very astute G&S audience will never notice the difference, but you may very well drive yourself mad trying to get the altos of the chorus to remember those two iterations. 

Be careful as you teach in the section ‘ladies of gentle degree’ and ‘charms intramural’ for the tenors and basses and in the ‘people of lowly degree’ and ‘clumsy clodhoppers’ for the sopranos and altos. That melodic contour is not easy to hear. 

Be sure your singers cut off the short notes at the ends of phrases. 

There is an error in the alto part on page 78 of the Schirmer vocal score. It should read:

The dynamics at the end are a very nice touch. 

The trumpets in this number are delightful and their figure is not in the piano reduction, so they may come as a nice surprise to your singers. I instructed my orchestra to maintain a very strict beat even when it seemed that the patter was slow. If the orchestra slows down for the singers, the singers will slow down for the orchestra, and then where will you be?

At the end of the number Toye and/or Norris haven’t cut any notes, but have foreshortened the rhythm in a way that tightens the action and makes it much cleaner and easier to conduct. This is the way it appeared on opening night:

And here’s how the 1920/21 D’Oyly Carte production tightened it up:

The moment just doesn’t need as much time as Sullivan originally gave it. This is better. 

The fortissimo chords are rather like their counterparts in With Catlike Tread from Pirates. We are clearly meant to hear sudden double chords as a thematic idea, because they first appear at Despard’s first entrance,

Double chords close his song that follows. 

FLOWER ALERT: Gayden Wren references a staging in Gilbert’s original prompt book where Despard offers flowers to the ladies and then tramples them when they are refused on these very chords. 

There is a similar idea at the top of his entrance in the first act finale.

Then when Robin has assumed the role of bad baronet, he gets single sudden fortissimo chords emerging from a quiet passage:

When Richard and Rose are going to ask for Robin’s blessing, the double chords are a part of the introduction. 

The ghosts actually sing the chords:

And later: 

13. Oh, Why am I Moody and Sad?

The orchestral introduction recalls a number of related musical ideas, like the opening of Va Pensiero or the Jupiter Symphony. It really is quite a winning and hilarious number your audience and performers will enjoy. 

I spent a great deal of time working cutoffs for the chorus, and I think it paid off in performance. If all the chorus parts are quite short, it makes for a nice effect. I asked my chorus to sing their echoing phrases short even when the mode changes and everything is staccato. Your chorus will want to sing, “Oh my!” and “No, no!” with a long second note. I think that’s less effective. 

‘Can’t guess’ has a tall A sound. 

I requested a sharp t separate from the d sound in ‘It do’, instead of the elided consonant we might say casually. 

Virtually every recording I heard sang ‘At least it does so in my case’ with pitches different than notated. 

Those three sets of two chords at the end are meant to be a kind of jump scare. If you work with your orchestra, you can get a crisp forte without telegraphing to the audience that you are cueing them. 

14. You Understand?

This duet feels perfunctory, as though we’re buying time for the stage to be reset behind the curtain, and yet in addition to the difficulty of singing the patter at tempo, there are some interesting things to note.

One is the way Sullivan has built the tune to emphasize Gilbert’s rhyme scheme, which is really clever. It is also a fine example of how Sullivan uses repetition to build rhythmic momentum, which he releases on the long notes. 

A perplexing detail is the long last note for the singers, which is notated lasting three measures. Your singers will naturally want to cut it off at the logical place, after 2 measures at the seam with the returning ritornello. I don’t know what benefit comes from bridging that seam. It struck me oddly. 

15. Hail The Bride (Act I Finale)

I’ll begin here with the textual difficulties, so you can go through your score with them one by one. 

In the first act Finale, we encounter at least 6 passages where Toye and/or Norris have really improved the pacing. This is one of the places where the Oxford score would be rather difficult to conduct from. 

The Oxford score has the men singing “You will all be bridegrooms some fine day” as the women sing “You may all, may all be brides someday”, which I think makes the passage more difficult to understand. 

The Oxford score and the Kalmus score also disagree about when the orchestra plays with the chorus and when they do not during the madrigal. The critical commentary doesn’t address it. 

I find the acapella sections more effective, especially since my chorus was quite fine this year. 

The gavotte is laid out differently in the Oxford than in the Schirmer/Kalmus scores, and although all the notes are there, it is complicated to notate it for yourself on the page, and again, the Schirmer/Kalmus solution is much better. If the Oxford version is Sullivan’s original idea, then this must be another of Toye and Norris’s good cuts. (the discrepancy isn’t explained in the critical commentary) The Oxford score has a timpani roll after the gavotte has reached its natural cadence, which takes away the surprise of the diminished chord tutti. The Schirmer/Kalmus version cuts off the gavotte mid-phrase and makes for a really exciting moment. 

Following that passage is another Toye/Norris truncation that is far more effective. Compare the two sections below:

Compare this revision:

I can only imagine there was some rather involved stage business here. The direction is merely: (He comes Center. Rose and Robin separate). The longer version would sap all the momentum from the scene.

In the original libretto 4 additional lines appeared after this, which it seems were never set. 

At the Vivace, Toye and/or Norris shorten the intro from 4 measures to 2. I can’t think why anyone would want to reinstate the two missing measures. We want to get right to the point. To accomplish this cut, Toye and/or Norris make orchestrational choices that are hard to write into your score, so this is another example where the Oxford score would be very tricky to conduct from. 

Toye and/or Norris make a terrific cut in the measures before the andante, one that speeds up the transition by eliminating the central phrase. 

The original:

This is shortened to:

The 1920 D’Oyly Carte production also makes a great cut at the allegretto to bring the women in earlier. 

This becomes:

This is just funnier when it comes in faster, there’s no two ways about it. 

Toye and/or Norris cut four measures before the Allegro con spirito and added a new transition, and a comparison will show that the revision is much much stronger. 

Moving along to rehearsal and performance concerns: 

As it’s scored on page 93 of the Schirmer score, ‘Sev’n’ is a single syllable on two notes, not ‘sev-’ and ‘-en’ on two separate pitches. The descending tritone may challenge your altos on ‘smiling summer’ and ‘shedding every’ further down the page. I added a little crescendo and decrescendo on page 95 for ‘maidens greet her’ and ‘kindly treat her’. 

When The Buds are Blossoming is one of the finest Sullivan madrigals. (and one of only two officially designated as madrigals in the score, the other being in Mikado) In the balancing soprano and tenor phrases in both verses, I asked the chorus singers to sing the second phrase quieter, as an echo. “Spring is green, summer’s rose” etc. Plan those cutoffs carefully. For the phrases “Leaves in Autumn fade and fall” and ‘Winter is the end of all’, I introduced another crescendo-diminuendo pair. This sets up the last 11 measures of the chorus to begin at a piano dynamic with a true crescendo. The little sforzandi in the soprano part are a lovely detail, as is the little accented FA in the altos at the bottom of 100. At the end of the chorus section at the top of 101, I had my singers breathe between the two half-note ‘la’s, but NOT to slow down. I wanted a true ritardando in the second verse only. This takes a little drilling, but paces the entirety of the madrigal better. You have to decide where the principals join the chorus, because it isn’t indicated, and it’s odd to have them stand there mutely as the thing reaches its climax. I chose to have them sit out the two short phrases (The 4 bars beginning ‘leaves in Autumn’ and ‘Spring and Summer’ respectively) and then join in the crescendoing phrase. As this number is being staged, you will want to make certain folks have given you good sight lines to everyone in the chorus. 

If the opening instrumental music of this finale seems to wander in its key, here Sullivan has brought his A game, modulating deftly to key areas that delight and serve the text. G major as we introduce the flower motif that runs straight through the opera, modulating brightly to D as the fa la las begin. Then at the close of Summer, Sullivan takes us to a darker B minor. That idea then closes in C, which locally feels rather Phrygian, but quickly becomes the subdominant to the G major that brings in the full chorus. The year, and the harmony comes full circle. 

The Gavotte that follows is really exquisite. 

At the Piu lento on Schirmer page 109, you may want to ask the cellos and basses to emphasize the upbeats and play out. That passage is important, and can easily get lost.

For all these interjections, ‘Oh Wonder!’ and ‘Ah, Base one’ and so forth, you will have to find your own way of getting the chorus entrances and cutoffs crisp, clear, and in tune. They invariably have a diminished chord in then, but Sullivan knows how to prepare such things. At ‘He is that Baronet’ I had the chorus cut off on beat 2, even though every recording seems to cut off on the and of 1. At ‘He’ll recklessly deny’, a rolled R is a nice touch, and the quicker you get off the second syllable of ‘deny’, the better it will sound. 

Remind your chorus not to say the ‘r’ in ‘Bart’ or ‘part’ , that ‘very’ is pronounced ‘veddy’ and to cut off the last note of each phrase as quickly as possible. The dynamics in this passage are really an important detail. From the last measure of 117, have them drop down to piano, then crescendo to the end of the phrase. Again we encounter one of these dotted quarters tied to an eighth. I initially had them get rid of the eighth note and put a very hard ‘t’ mid-measure, but then realized that it would be far better use of my time to have them make ‘part’ a full measure long and cut it off on the downbeat of the next measure. I believe this is also how most recordings manage this moment. In such places you have to ask yourself- how much work will this take to get to where it is on the page, and will it make any discernible difference? I think the cost benefit analysis here works very much in the direction of cutting this off in the intuitive spot. 

The L’istesso tempo that begins Zorah’s passage is in 2. The Molto vivace is in 4. Richard’s next 4 measures are a quick recit in 2, and then the next 2 measures have to be in 4, so you can keep the ensemble together. 

On 119, I think the best approach is to conduct the first 2 measures in a fast 4, despite the marking of cut time, then the next 4 in 2, then the final 2 in 4. Otherwise the string figurations are really too fast OR Richard’s line too slow. 

Richard’s lovely bit of bel canto here is one of his only moments of real lyricism, marred only by the fact that his character would never say any of these things.  

‘Gain-sayed’ is the pronunciation by the way, and ‘bade’ is pronounced ‘bad’. 

When the chorus enters on the bottom of 120, be sure to be faithful to the  dotted eighth/sixteenth rhythm. It’s meant to have a more martial tone. 

Rose’s subsequent arioso is again a welcome moment of true lyricism, interrupted by yet another bridal chorus. Despard’s line ‘and I to Margaret’ is timed oddly, and the countermelody that Despard’s odd bar of rest is more audible in the orchestra than in the piano reduction.  Margaret’s line at the bottom of the page 123 and the top of 124 is awkward for both singer and violins. You might budget time to work it, and again, you will be very happy that you chose a good musician at this moment to play Margaret. 

The passage that begins before Rose’s line “Richard, of him I love bereft” is difficult to get clear, particularly if you don’t have a large string section. (please forgive the cramped score layout)

When you accompany the passage on the piano, it tends to sound like a polka, which has a strong rhythmic pulse. But when the orchestra accompanies, particularly in the 2nd through 4th measures of this example, there isn’t enough separation in the violin parts to make that rhythm crisp. The cello part plays quarters, but if you’ve balanced your orchestra well, I’m guessing you probably have one player, not quite enough to strongly establish the beat against which the other strings are playing. I asked our cellist to get rid of the slurs, to get distinction on each of those notes, and I got rid of the ties over the barline in the other strings to get a real pulse going, at least until the double bass comes in to make that pulse very clear. (your players may have a tendency to rush here too with all those upbeats) 

These kinds of passages are not uncommon in opera in the 1870s and 1880s. 

From Act I of Tales of Hoffmann comes a similar passage:

This passage works a little more effectively I think. Note how Offenbach (I assume Offenbach completed this passage before his death) has just left a passage where the strings are clearly establishing tempo with separation in the offbeats, so they’re just making more fluid a rhythm they already have in their bodies. The quarter notes grounding things in the bass are frequently doubled, and where the triplet in the vocal part threatens to obscure the rhythmic pulse, the violas rhythmically articulate the center of the measure right as the countermelody in the double reeds enters. Most importantly, the Offenbach re-establishes the downbeat for the offbeat players every 2 measures. 

Verdi occasionally does this, but the examples I found were in the 1850s and 1860s, usually involving only the violas or 2nd violins playing the offbeats, not the entire section, and never for more than a couple of measures at a time. I imagine Verdi’s determination to have a clear pulse would make this device unappealing. Somebody can correct me, but I couldn’t find it in any bel canto scores, I suspect it’s a Parisian opera bouffe device. 

You may have no problems here; I wouldn’t change things pre-emptively. But should you encounter problems, consider making the edits I suggested above. 

As with all these fast closing G&S stretti, the patter should be as fast as you can make it and still understand the words. And to be perfectly frank, these words are, as I have said before, doggerel, so intelligibility may not be of primary importance. On Schirmer page 132, I chose to place the ‘d’ of ‘bride’ on the second of the three beats of 12/8, and on page 133 on the third of the three beats of the last line of the top system. The 12/8 meter made me constantly feel as though I was both too fast and too slow, because the foreground melodic idea moved at quite a clip, but the larger metric structure felt somewhat slow for dancing. I think this disconnect is part of what makes this ending for both acts less than perfectly satisfying.

FLOWER ALERT: Buds are blossoming, lily, flowers that blossom in June, (and on the lea)

ACT II

16. I Once Was As Meek 

This number originally had 2 verses, the second explaining that Adam’s name has been changed to Gideon Crawle. This plot point has been dropped, so the appearance of that name in dialogue later doesn’t make sense. 

On Schirmer page 139, Ruthven is now pronounced as written. Hence “without the elision…” Elsewhere it is pronounced ‘Riven’.  

There is some leeway with how the ‘ha! ha!’ interjections are played. Choose one that matches your staging and characterizations.

Before letter A there are a number of ‘jump scare’ tutti hits that should come as a surprise. Coach your orchestra to play them strongly without your cuing them strongly, so that you don’t telegraph the surprise to the audience. If your beat is small, you can actually get more accurate results, in fact. These are clearly meant to be a part of some stage business. 

The Kalmus score has a horn 2 pedal concert C flat under the line “The dickens may take him, I’ll never forsake him…” that isn’t in the Oxford or clarified in the critical commentary. I couldn’t pick it out in any recordings, but it’s possible that it just isn’t audible in the texture. 

This is the place where Adam has a low E flat. If you have no one who can sing that note when you’re casting, it is possible to put the second ‘his valet’ up an octave and continue in that register to the end of the number. But this is obviously not ideal. 

17. Happily Coupled are We 

The 1920 version of the opera deleted Rose’s verse, which is unfortunate because it fleshes out her character and is also quite funny. The dotted eighth-sixteenth rhythm is tough for the singers to maintain, as is the Bright-Tight-Slight-Light-Trim-Prim pattern. If you like, you can make it part of the warm up. You can add the non-ghost tenors and basses to this chorus easily. The basses take the alto part, the baritones the middle part of the three, and the tenors the top line. 

‘Craft’ is pronounced ‘croft’, my fellow Americans. 

Plan your choral cutoff carefully. 

Rose has an “Ah!” in the vocal score that the Oxford score debunks. If you like it, keep it. If you don’t like it, cut it.

3 from the end there is a rhythmic discrepancy between various versions. 

The Oxford and Kalmus scores read

The Schirmer and Chappel Vocal scores read

The Oxford notes posit that the lower reading is a mistake due to the preponderance of the other rhythm throughout the score. I like the straight eighths, it’s a nice variety near the end of the number. Whatever choice you make here naturally also applies to the end of the next number. 

18. In Bygone Days

This arietta with its unusual phrase lengths seems like it’s on the verge of being a beautiful number, and so we are intrigued to find that a second verse was cut after the original production opened. We then discover that the second verse doesn’t fulfill the promise of the first, and we are content that it now abruptly transitions into a reprise of the previous chorus. 

The tempo change into the Allegro vivace is difficult to establish. You may want to run that transition a few times with the orchestra. One potential solution is to choose an andante tempo after ‘grant thou her prayer’ in which a quarter note will be roughly the same as then new dotted eighth of the Allegro vivace. That l’istesso tempo is probably much easier to feel than the new tempo fresh out of the gate. 

19. Painted Emblems of a Race

The second act is where the original production lost the sympathy of the audience, but in a modern production, it is the moment where we begin to hear something truly distinctive, unlike any of the other Savoy operas! With the exception of Mad Margaret’s Aria, Rose’s Aria, and the first act trio, most of what we’ve seen thus far has been very standard, even unexceptional Gilbert and Sullivan. But what happens here in Act II we have hitherto only heard shadows of. In The Sorcerer there was an inkling of this music, but it was working very hard to sound like Weber. Opening night reviews found this version a little too vivid, one reviewer saying that Sullivan “treats Mr. Gilbert’s grotesque spectres as if they were a dread reality coming straight from the charnel house.” 

In the first production, there were evidently some technical issues, and they must have at least partially involved lighting, because there is a story about Sullivan needing a phosphorescent baton. This makes particular sense when you spend time with the movement itself, which you will discover requires a changing beat pattern that is not particularly intuitive. The first 4 measures really need to be in 6, so you can articulate the 4th measure. The next 13 measures have to be in 2; the musical idea falls flat in 6. The chorus continues in 2 through the beginning of the text “Baronet of Ruddigore”. 9 measures before that entrance, this figure needs a strong upbeat from a small group of instruments. You may need to change the dynamic. 

Incidentally, the opening of this melody is like a minor version of Onward Christian Soldiers, which Sullivan wrote some 16 years earlier. I have no idea whether this was intentional. 

Your first violin and your two clarinets will likely ask if the 32nd measure has a typo. It is indeed concert A, B natural, and C natural. That’s dorian, not melodic minor. Your singers may have this question too. (Oddly nobody seems to ask about the other modal passage, the Phrygian section on Schirmer page 158)

The Schirmer score on the third system of 156 indicates that the dotted quarter equals the new quarter at the time signature change. This is incorrect. The eighth stays the same. You can conduct the 2/4 measures in 2 or in 4. The section continues alternating 6 and 2 (or 4 as you see fit)

The portion beginning “Coward, poltroon…” is by rights getting a little faster bit by bit. The lack of a strong downbeat makes that hard to coordinate, and unless your group is very strong, you may lose ensemble here. Tell your the bass, cello, and horn to emphasize the strong beats and have the oboe, clarinets, and bassoon emphasize the first of their pairs to give your group a fighting chance at hearing the tempo properly. I began in 6, and accelerated, switching to 2 where it felt appropriate. 

Two measures before Sir Roderic’s second entrance, you will need to switch back to 6.

The Kalmus score has another dubious horn 2 pedal on a low concert E flat at the a tempo before “I am the spectre…” that doesn’t appear in the Oxford and isn’t mentioned in the critical commentary. I believe I hear it in the D’Oyly Carte 1962 recording, but can’t make it out in any of the other recordings I referenced. 

At ‘Alas poor ghost’, you will want to be in 2 again. 

20. When the Night Wind Howls

We read in all the literature that Gilbert disliked Sullivan’s setting, and I, like everyone else, shake my head that he could have missed the glory of this wonderful music! But it makes a little more sense when you consider the line that precedes it:

Roderic: The pity you express for nothing goes

Ghosts: We spectres are a jollier crew than you, perhaps suppose. 

This is followed by music that is anything but jolly. It would be criminal to remove this beautiful music, but Gilbert’s point actually holds. Sullivan’s music has made Gilbert’s lyric nonsensical. 

The literature compares this music to Erlkonig, The Flying Dutchman Overture, and the Danse Macabre, but the details are Sullivan’s alone. Harmonically the polarity between D minor and A flat major is particularly piquant, a mode change at a tritone’s difference. Particularly creative is the double bass playing pizzicato in unison with the violas in a very high register. I can’t help thinking if Sullivan had the luxury of more players, he might have divided the lower strings and fleshed out some of the lower end. 

In establishing a tempo here, you will want to be quite brisk, to the point where your woodwinds may seem unable to keep up. But truly, if you favor them in the opening 3 measures, you’ll curse the slowness for the remainder of the piece. 

As I alluded to when discussing this music where it appears in the overture, there is a balance issue to be managed, and it’s not easy to manage. 

A savvy accompanist will instinctively emphasize the left hand in the passage below, since it doubles the singers melody, and is clearly the important idea of the passage:

But that left hand melody is actually only played by pizzicato violas, likely one of the weakest sounds in your orchestra. In addition, the right hand figure is not what the violins actually play. Their actual figure is not really playable on the piano, and is harder to track aurally. So the singer’s rehearsal picture of what happens here is, unavoidably, inaccurate. (the original piano vocal score was an even more inaccurate reduction, if you can imagine) 

The string figure needs to be crisp and separated, even slightly accented. If you’re really feeling daring, you might add cello pizz. to the viola pizz. to give them a fighting chance at being heard. Counsel all the winds to play under the singer until the ends of each verse when the men’s chorus joins the proceedings.  

For advice about the vocal parts here, scroll up and see the comments on the Ghosts in the casting section of this post. 

I prefer the ‘Ha!Ha!’s of the other ghosts to be on the actual pitches, but many productions and some of the recordings just shout them, which I think grows from a desire to make those voices heard. Staging basically necessitates these actors being fairly far upstage, and with only one or two on a part, and that puts them at an acoustic disadvantage.

Don’t slow down at the end of the verses until the end of the number. If your singer has the high A, he should do so in the fermata. 

There is more music that was cut from this scene, but as David Russell Hulme notes in his essay in the Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan,

“It was wonderful to hear all the excised music from the Ghost Scene restored at the Buxton Gilbert and Sullivan Festival production of Ruddigore in 2005, but the experience also confirmed my view that, in the context of the opera as a whole, the scene really does work better in its revised form.”

The A flat orchestral bell that appears in the third verse in the Kalmus score is another addition from the 20’s that I find salutary and picturesque, despite not being authentically Sullivan’s. 

21. He Yields!

You have to take this number pretty quickly for it to come off. Musically the joke is the music hall triviality of the first melody interrupted by the whole tone darkness of “Perish in unheard of woe” sections, intensified later by the “Or Die!” interjections. If you can find a way dynamically or texturally to highlight these differences, do it! 

The 1920s D’Oyly Carte production cut two measures of tremolo, one after each iteration of “I pardon you.” Again, apart from any stage business that this may cover, I can’t see how anyone would want to reinstate them. 

You will have to make a decision on Schirmer page 177 whether to be in 2 or 6. It’s right on the cusp. 

22. Away, Remorse! 

If your production is really leaning in the direction of social commentary, I’d include it. Gayden Wren points out that if you cut it, you have two slow songs in a row, which mars the energy of the act.  This number does not appear in the Kalmus score, but the act actually moves along very well without it, and there’s already a lot of patter in the show. For more commentary on this, see the passage on Gilbert in the introduction above. This number has a troubled history; Gilbert didn’t care for any of the music in this section, Sullivan made two versions of the patter song. Oxford has a 1st, 2nd, and then a separate 3rd ending that’s musically the same as the first two. It’s a little bewildering. 

23. I Once Was a Very Abandoned Person

Gayden Wren points out that the introductory passage here:

Is a sort of quote of Adam’s earlier line:

His thought is that this indicates that Despard hasn’t fully reformed, but I think it’s just a bleary eyed Sullivan, likely writing at 2 in the morning whatever thing in E flat struck him at the moment. He happened to light on something he’d already done. 

There isn’t much to hang a good tempo on here, since it isn’t until measure 5 that we encounter a phrase perceptibly in 6. I beat a measure for free before we began to establish a brighter tempo. We also have some orchestral spacing issues, since the clarinets play with the violas, and the bassoon with the cello. These players may be on the opposite side of a crowded pit from one another. 

I think in the original production, the religious and social implications were very clear, and this must have been a funnier number than it is today. Contemporary productions, particularly in America will need to stage it well to make the essential jokes clear. 

24. My Eyes are Fully Open 

Truly a pinnacle of patter. 

The 4th beat before the quarter note accompaniment pattern begins is another of the same pitch in the Oxford, but it’s a rest in the Kalmus and the Schirmer. There’s a note in the Oxford critical commentary, but only about the absence of the bass, not the rest of the strings. I think the rest helps set off the new section. 

The first edition of the vocal score has the upbeat:

The second edition and the Schirmer edition that is based on it eliminate it.

At the end of each verse, Despard drops down to a low F# and Robin to an A. These border on being inaudible pitches for anybody you’re likely to cast in those roles, and they amount to a kind of muttering as a transition. 

Half-penny is pronounced ‘haypenny’

The faster you can get this number, the better it will come off, provided the pronunciation is clear.  

25. Melodrama 

As the Schirmer score indicates, this music is generally omitted. That’s understandable on practical grounds, but it’s also a shame, because this is one of the places where Gilbert and Sullivan are deeply engaging with the theatrical works of their time. 

In the 18th century, melodrama as a musical form combined spoken recitation with musical accompaniment. The incantation scene in Weber’s 1821 Der Freischütz is a famous later example. But melodrama was also a kind of dramatic story not uncommon in the Victorian Era with sensational storylines. It is mostly in this sense we use the word today.  The kind of melodrama Gilbert is specifically lampooning was out of fashion in the time of this piece, but this world of melodrama was very familiar to his audience, and it functioned as one of the ways society processed the changing landscape of economics, gender, and class.

Susan Hayward writes in “Melodrama and Women’s Films” in Cinema Studies; the Key Concepts:

“The melodrama… can be seen as a response to the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and modernization. In the early 1800s the post-Revolutionary bourgeoisie sought to defend its newly acquired rights against the autocratic aristocracy- including the droits de seigneur…The melodrama focus is essentially on the family and moral values and not on the dynastic and mythic deities (as it was in Greek tragedy) Thus- the melodrama- at least in these earliest stages- pitted bourgeoisie against feudalism. Many a tale related the ravishment of the middle-class maiden by the villainous rich aristocrat. In this respect, class conflict was repressed sexuality and manifested itself via sexual exploitation or rape.”

Melodrama is used to indicate the genres that use these tropes today, like Soap Operas and Melodramatic films. Often these stories today deal with the same topics and to the same function. 

We have here in Ruddigore an example of both senses of the word simultaneously, a sensationalistic musical accompaniment to a dramatic scene of abduction. But Gilbert has muddied the ethical waters here beyond any conceivable moral or hope of resolution. 

Carolyn Williams (quickly becoming one of my favorite scholars) lays out some of the stock figures of melodrama in The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, including:

The virtuous, suffering heroine

The earnest and dutiful (sometimes naive) hero

The villain, the active force driving the plot. 

The villain’s accomplice, who often converts from bad to good, swinging the plot’s resolution along with him. 

Robin, heretofore our hero, is now nominally the villain in this scenario, but his hand has been strongly forced by Roderic, and the crime itself has been committed by Adam, the sidekick. Adam has been thoroughly bested by his victim, and immediately flees, so in his function as sidekick, he is not able to swing the resolution of any plot. The heroine is virtuous, that much is clear, but unlike our traditional heroine, she is not desired by many, not at all demure, and in fact quite threatening. Everyone involved immediately realizes that her abduction has been a mistake. The question of whether her virtue has been stained is discussed briefly, for laughs. The fact that Hannah has never been in sexual jeopardy because she is not seen as a sexual object by these people in this story removes the carnal motive from the proceedings, but anyone watching in 2022 will laugh uncomfortably at this. The scenario kicks up dirt and raises uncomfortable questions.

“And this is what it is to embark upon a career of unlicensed pleasure.”, quips Robin. The men in the Victorian audience perhaps nod. It isn’t worth it. But did we need to calculate the odds that way?

This older woman is in fact, no victim, but rather the most dangerous character in the entire operetta, perfectly capable of defending herself. Mad Margaret only made threats, but Hannah has a knife. Our villain Roderic quickly becomes the hero by sending the villain (who we have seen thus far as our hero) away. To keep us from even attempting to draw a moral from this mess, Gilbert has Robin reprove his uncle and deliver a moral:

“Now I hope this will be a lesson to you in future not to-”

But Roderic cuts him off. 

“Hold your tongue, sir.”

“Yes, uncle.”

Underneath Gilbert’s silliness on a surface level is a gnawing nihilism. In a normal melodrama, the audience is presented with a clear sense of right and wrong, and life’s injustices are understood as moral dilemmas we attempt to maneuver with whatever agency our station affords us. The consequences are the result of our character. In a Gilbertian story, though, there is no lesson, the consequences are detached from our actions, and one senses that the only reason this is a happy ending is that we have chosen to stop telling the story at this moment. We might just as easily be on the utterly unjust end of this scenario given one more senseless twist of fate. 

Gayden Wren makes a case in A Most Ingeneous Paradox for the morality of the ending, and I admire his argument, but disagree. The winner of a story like this is not the person who makes the most ethical moral choice, but the person who can find the most creative loophole. 

The original audience wasn’t impressed, but this is really a stunning passage that skewers a whole genre of literature in a way only Gilbert could have executed. Your audience doesn’t have the patience for you to explain all that to them, so if you were going to use this music, you’d have to rely on the vestiges of the form that still exist in our culture. Snidely Whiplash, perhaps? Telenovellas? 

We used the last 6 measures to underscore Adam bringing Hannah on, and cut the rest. Otherwise you have to figure out how this music lines up with the dialogue. The Oxford edition has made an educated guess that’s as good as any other interpretation. You don’t need me to tell me that you have to keep the orchestra under the dialogue. Your director will do that. 

26. There Grew a Little Flower

FLOWER ALERT: Flower (obviously)

If you’ve been following Gayden Wren’s argument about flowers in Ruddigore, this number is the payoff of that thread, and Wren names this the sister song of To a Garden Full of Posies. It’s also one of the places where Gilbert uses the word ‘mickle’ in two consecutive operettas. (the other being in Yeomen) Folks who know such things seem to think he misuses it here. The number is fairly straightforward, and if you have cast the couple well, a fine example of one of Gilbert’s favorite devices: an odd couple singing a duet near the very end of the show. Oh, I Have Wrought Much Evil from The Sorcerer or There is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast from Mikado. 

Rickett and Hoogland point out that the singers here have “the unenviable task of making the languid strains… interesting to an audience which is by now about ready to welcome a lively finish to the opera.”

27. When A Man Has Been A Naughty Baronet (Finale) and

27a Oh, Happy the Lily (alternate finale)

I’m going to try and be more clear than the sources I waded through here. It’s somewhat confusing, and it’s possible I still have it wrong. As I read the sources, the original finale as it appeared opening night does not actually appear in the Schirmer score, despite what the Schirmer score says on page 216. On January 24th, 1887, Sullivan revised it, adding a coda in augmented rhythm with a harmonic richness we normally hear in a Sullivan first act finale. He also moved the vocal part into 4 against the compound meter (now in 12) of the orchestra. That revision is No. 27 in the Schirmer score. I don’t find the revised Oh Happy The Lily in that second version an improvement, and to me it’s an unsatisfying way to end the opera. Toye and/or Norris must have thought so too, because they found a third solution. In my opinion, one of the only missteps in revising the score is removing the music for the principals and inserting a straight reprise of the end of act I. That version is in the Schirmer vocal score as 27a, with a marking that doesn’t make it sufficiently clear that 27a is not Sullivan’s revision. 

I wanted to maintain Sullivan’s delightful music for the principals, which makes musical sense of and adds dramatic weight to the end of the show. But then, right at the beginning of Schirmer’s page 214, I skipped to the other version, beginning at measure 3. Playing measure 3 twice as a transition. This is closer to what Sullivan originally intended for this moment, as it happens, although we retain the beautiful extension he added before the last ‘Oh, Happy the Lily’ that wasn’t in the first version. 

When you do this, though, you have to wade through a mess of score errors and omissions! 

	Schirmer Vocal Score	Kalmus Full Score	Oxford Critical Edition	IMSLP parts
Original Finale January 20, 1887	No	No	Yes	No
Original Finale Revised January 24, 1877	Yes	No	Yes	Yes, but 100% inaccurate and comically bad
Toye/Norris Version  December 1920	Yes	Yes	Sort of. (Dance section at the end is shorter then Schirmer score)	Yes

If you are using the Oxford edition, you’re basically fine! (except you don’t have access to the better overture or the dozens of good cuts in the rest of the opera)

If you are conducting from the Kalmus score, you don’t have access to the better version of the second act finale. 

And unless you’re using the Oxford orchestral parts, you REALLY have to check the parts for the Original Finale revision. Until newer editions like the Oxford became available, score and parts were assembled from the rental parts or bootleg orchestra parts, and it appears that those editions did not have access to the original manuscripts or scores for this section. People just made their own makeshift orchestrations from the piano vocal score. And in the case of the IMSLP parts, they did it quite poorly. Here’s a page with score and parts of the original: https://gsarchive.net/ruddigore/score/score.html

If you want to spotcheck your score:

The first 2 measures are played by flutes, clarinets, basson, and strings, with no bass

The melody in measures 5 through 12 are in first flute and first clarinet.

The violas in measures 9 and 10 play repeated 8th notes on B flat. 

Horns and timpani don’t enter until measure 13. 

Cornets don’t enter until measure 30. 

If your parts don’t line up, you probably have a fake. 

In the original Act 2 finale, the Oxford score has 2 clear typos. The first beat of the viola in measure 35 should be an A natural, and the third beat an E flat. At least that’s my suspicion; what’s there doesn’t work harmonically. 

The Oxford version of the dance at the end of Toye and Norris’s version does not match the Schirmer or Kalmus endings. They are longer, including the entire dance break we hear at the end of Act I. 

As far as rehearsing this section goes: In the echoing passages, ‘Etiquette’, ‘you en-jye’ and ‘-dent and meek’ should be short and crisp. (same goes for the ends of phrases in the chorus that follows) I do think that accelerando is very important on Schirmer page 213. Having a full chorus of soprani on the A flat is a little much. You may want to have some sopranos drop down and join the altos when the whole notes begin, for the sake of balance and the likelihood of tuning issues up there. If you switch to 27a in the Schirmer, you probably should change out the first word to ‘For’ rather than ‘Oh’, the way the other finale goes. And however you managed cutoffs in the first act Finale, you should do the same for the end here, for consistency’s sake. 

Your Orchestra:

With modern musicals I sometimes counsel music directors not to hire all the players, but with G&S, you’re dealing with a true orchestral color, so I think it best to hire as much of the orchestra as you can afford with good players. The original orchestrations are available here at a reasonable price or here for free. Sometimes with IMSLP, you do in fact get what you pay for. Reductions can be found here and here, but I’ll wager the best one is probably this one.

The oboe part is somewhat less exposed than is often the case in Sullivan’s scores, the first flute has a very important cadenza, and all the woodwinds have some very fast passage work.

Better that you do G&S than that you ignore it, but do try and do it properly if at all possible, with Sullivan’s magnificent orchestration in full color! Have fun with your production of Ruddigore! I will be including more G&S as I music direct them! I will be updating my guide for Pirates next year as I realize my errors and discover new things. I am also planning a post about vocal and character types (fachs to use the operatic terminology) in G&S. I hope those posts are useful to you!

Richard Rodgers part 3: Chromatic Lines

Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard: A Rough Guide for the M.D.

A Word About the Piece:

The Yeomen of the Guard is special. To state the obvious, it is the most serious Savoy Opera, the piece with the highest artistic ambition, the work susceptible to the greatest number of interpretations. It was as far as Gilbert was willing to go in the direction of Grand Opera. Sullivan would head on to Ivanhoe without him. (and without much success)

Sullivan is balancing several opposing aims in Yeomen. He is attempting to reference 16th century music and the Old English styles in particular in order to place the action in time and location. We hear these threads clearly in Here’s a Man of Jollity, I Have a Song to Sing, O, I’ve Jibe and Joke, and Strange Adventure, and perhaps other places I am not noticing. The Times recognizes this in their opening night review:

“The forms of early English music- the madrigal, the part-song, the glee – are as second nature to him, and he produces their modern counterparts with a freedom and faithfulness which alone would account for his unrivaled popularity.”

Against these references to older English styles, Sullivan is trying to elevate the musical language of the piece closer to high music drama, perhaps as exemplified by his favorite Wagner opera, Die Meistersinger, which also takes place in the 16th century. The tension between old Folk England and up to date musical storytelling accounts for a lot of the charm of the opera.

Sullivan is also trying to keep the piece from sounding like a set of discrete numbers. Gayden Wren talks about Sullivan’s frequent use of ‘big endings’, elaborate codas sometimes longer than the numbers to which they are attached, where the music takes the fore, as in the coda of How Say You, Maiden? We certainly feel this elevation in many places in the score, not merely where they normally occur in the finales. And yet as I read Yeomen, Sullivan also seems to downplay the endings of numbers in a curious way, including in the very number Wren uses as an example of his elevated codas. Perhaps Sullivan is attempting to avoid breaking up the action with obligatory applause. Numbers 3,4,8,13, and 20 all end without really asking for applause, number 18 has an instrumental coda long enough for the exit of the character who has just sung an extremely impressive patter song before he can acknowledge audience applause, no. 6 goes without pause into 7, and no. 21 at one point rolled directly into the 2nd act finale with no pause for the audience to acknowledge a moment of purely crowd-pleasing silliness. In no. 18, we also see Sullivan connecting moments in a different way, when he eliminates the first 2 pickup notes of the Tower theme to drop us into the action more abruptly after a gunshot. We also find Sullivan on a smaller scale extending musical phrases past their expected terminations. He had been doing this in other operas for some time, but never more beautifully than in numbers like “A Man Who Would Woo a Fair Maid”

Sullivan also connects material in the opera in a more subtle way that most people miss. For example, this figure, sung by the Yeomen at the top of the Act I finale uses what are sometimes called ‘horn fifths’ because they are playable by 2 natural horns.

This association gives the idea a regal, military, or hunting connotation historically, which is appropriate to the Yeomen. The Act I finale also ends with another theme based on horn 5ths:

At the end of the First Act Finale, as Elsie falls into Fairfax’s arms, the orchestra plays a figuration based on the Here’s a Man of Jollity motive, which was Elsie’s entrance music earlier in the act.

At the end of Hark! What Was That Sir, when the chorus seems to have moved on to a brand new hymn to the greatness of Shadbolt, you may notice that the violins are playing Shadbolt’s patter theme under the coda!  

It is tempting to join the many Victorian enthusiasts and even modern Gilbert and Sullivan scholars in calling these references leitmotivs, but I think that’s an error.

Firstly, it misidentifies the technique. Sullivan does not weave these tunes into the texture of an ever evolving musical tapestry; they function as callbacks or reprises. If these are leitmotivs, we may as well call Reno Sweeney’s reprise of I Get a Kick out of You at the end of Anything Goes a fine use of the Du Trittst Mich Motiv in Das eigentliche Gesamtkunstwerk von Kohl Porter.

Secondly, identifying these musical ideas in that way is an example of the kind of musical chauvinism that caused Sullivan’s identity crisis in the first place. When these ideas are tagged as leitmotiven, we are being asked to applaud Sullivan for transcending the simpleminded populism of his operettas by using his tunes more than once, in a German manner. Let’s allow Wagner to be Wagner and Sullivan to be Sullivan, and not insist that Sullivan’s extremely effective musical dramaturgy be constantly compared against the benchmarks of the Neudeutsche Schule.

Much is made in the literature about how critical Gilbert’s libretti are to bringing out Sullivan’s best talents musically. Less acknowledged is the way Gilbert’s demands for rewrites and cuts pushed Sullivan in the direction of pacing and audience appeal. After this opera, the two are no longer on good enough terms for this kind of relationship, which is why The Gondoliers is so discursive. But more on that later.

For all this high ambition, the British public had made up its mind about what the two men were about. The masses had enjoyed their prior work, and wanted more of the same.

As for the opinions of the enlightened , we may look no further than this withering dismissal by George Bernard Shaw, who was at that time writing under the pen name of Corno di Bassetto. As The Gondoliers was just beginning its first run, a year and two months after the Yeomen premiere, Shaw wrote this in The Star:

“A new Savoy opera is an event of no greater artistic significance than- to take the most flattering comparison- a new oratorio by Gounod. We know the exact limits of Mr. Gilbert’s and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s talents by this time, as well as we know the width of the Thames at Waterloo Bridge; and I am just as likely to find Somerset House under water next Easter or autumn, as to find The Gondoliers one hair’s breadth better than The Mikado or Gounod’s promised Mass a step in advance of Mors et Vita. The Savoy has a certain artistic position, like the German Reed entertainment, but it is not a movable position… I am already as absolutely certain of what The Gondoliers is as I shall be when I have witnessed the performance.” 

In the next two paragraphs Shaw lists every other operetta Gilbert and Sullivan had written in the previous 15 years with the glaring exception of Yeomen of the Guard. Shaw is delighted to inform us as he denigrates their work that he hasn’t seen any of it apart from The Mikado, under duress. Yeomen seems not to have even made enough of an impression to join the pieces Shaw dismisses. In such a climate, no work the men could have written would have made any sort of surprising impression. 

Gilbert and Sullivan: A partnership on the brink

It’s dangerous to read an artist’s work as a set of Freudian meditations on whatever he or she may be working through while writing, but Gilbert’s librettos for Sullivan sometimes feel as though they want to be read as a code for something else. Probably the most obvious example is Gilbert’s scenario for The Pirates of Penzance. Writing for Americans who had been pirating productions of HMS Pinafore, Gilbert invented a group of bumbling pirates who are dreadful at pirating, eventually bringing them back into the fold by reminding them that they’re actually English subjects.Was Gilbert inviting the unruly colonies to begin behaving properly again? An examination of the deteriorating relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan before, during and after the writing of The Yeomen of the Guard suggests a similarly pointed commentary.

I’m about to make an argument with which two of my favorite authors on Gilbert and Sullivan completely disagree. Gayden Wren argues that if Point is meant as a stand in for Gilbert, then he would never have written him as such a self-pitying plagiarist. And Carolyn Williams argues that if there’s a relation between the two, it’s figurative, not literal; that Gilbert is depicting an outmoded form of comedy that Gilbert is supplanting.  I’m trying to argue something slightly different here, although Williams and Wren have a much better track record for insight in this area, so perhaps you should trust them when they contradict me.

Gilbert was a man who ruminated on perceived injustices and nursed grievances. In writing any dramatic work, the author reaches into his or her mind over and over again to depict the way people think and behave, the way they interact, and the way they express themselves, in short: the way the world is. Of course Gilbert doesn’t intend Point to be a literal self portrait. But having established a doomed comedian as his protagonist, and needing that protagonist to speak in favor of comedy, we are apt to see some insights into Gilbert’s own opinions on the topic, because while he was writing the opera he himself had been advocating comedy to D’Oyly Carte and Sullivan as though his livelihood depended on it. I think I can back that up using Gilbert’s own words. By the same token, in setting up the love interest who would reject Point, and in writing the man she would choose in Point’s stead, Gilbert would naturally find in his own mind the characterizations that reflect his own wounded pride in his ongoing disagreements with Sullivan.

After the initial flush of success, Sullivan began to chafe at the kinds of pieces he was expected to write with Gilbert. After the opening of Princess Ida in 1884, he told Richard D’Oyly Carte he didn’t want to write any more Savoy operas. A composer friend had recently suffered a paralyzing stroke, he himself was suffering from health problems, and he had been knighted by the Queen for his service to British music. Time was short. Why was a man with his gifts wasting them on trifles? Sullivan’s expressions of discomfort with the situation precipitated a set of negotiations to try to get him to fulfill his contractual obligation to continue writing operas for Savoy. A sampling of their correspondence reveals the fundamental disagreements.

On April 1, 1884, Sullivan wrote to Gilbert:

“I will be quite frank. With Princess Ida, I have come to the end of my tether- the end of my capability in that kind of piece. My tunes are in danger of becoming mere repetitions of my former pieces… this very suppression [of music in favor of words] is most difficult, most fatiguing, and I may say most disheartening, for the music is never allowed to rise and speak for itself. I want a chance for the music to act in its own proper sphere- to intensify the emotional element not only of the actual words, but of the situation.

I should like to set a story of human interest and probability, where the humorous words would come in a humorous (not serious) situation, and where, if the situation were a tender or dramatic one, the words would be of a similar character. There would then be a feeling of reality about it which would give a fresh interest in writing, and fresh vitality to our joint work.”

Gilbert wrote back that he was deeply offended. He had always written in this way:

“It is inconceivable that any sane author should ever write otherwise than as you propose I should write in the future.”

The exchange deteriorated from there, Sullivan objecting to the ‘charm’ plot he was so tired of, and Gilbert accusing Sullivan of treating him as a servant. Eventually the impasse was broken when Gilbert proposed the plot of The Mikado. As it turned out, Sullivan’s insistence that Gilbert push in a new direction spurred both men to the faux Japanese opera that is often called their greatest achievement. Somehow the plot of Ruddigore was also picturesque enough to overcome objections and fire Sullivan’s imagination once more. But when, late in 1887 they set out to write their next piece, he rejected Gilbert’s first proposal as mechanical, ‘a puppet show, and not human’. And that’s when Gilbert proposed what would become Yeomen. A scenario that would allow Sullivan many serious moments, a Meistersinger inspired overture, an expanded orchestra, and some of his most glorious music. It is as close to Serious Opera as Gilbert was willing or perhaps able to go.

For all that, there were many difficulties. Sullivan asked for the second act to be reconstructed less than 2 months before the opera opened, and on the morning of opening night, Gilbert angrily insisted several numbers be removed because they slowed down the action.

Knowing as we do that Gilbert had been trying very hard to give Sullivan the ‘serious’ libretto he wanted, with very human characters, it’s hard not to read Jack Point’s character as a proxy for Gilbert’s own position. They are both comedians who hide their truth telling in humor. Point’s very first line begins making a case for comedy:

“My masters, I pray you bear with us, and we will satisfy you, for we are merry folk who would make all as merry as ourselves. For, look you, there is humour in all things, and the truest philosophy is that which teaches us to find it and make the most of it.”

This wisdom will shortly be thrown back in his face by two rustic would-be molesters.

Point will go on to sing about his methodology in not one but two further numbers. It is difficult not to hear Gilbert speaking about his own work when the jester sings:

I can teach you with a quip; if I’ve a mind

I can trick you into learning with a laugh;

Oh, winnow all my folly, folly, folly, and you’ll find

A grain or two of truth among the chaff.

Or:

When they’re offered to the world in merry guise,

Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will,

For he who’d make his fellow, fellow, fellow creatures wise

Should always gild the philosophic pill.

In Oh! A Private Buffoon is a Light-hearted Loon, Point (again perhaps speaking Gilbert’s mind) makes an even more specific case for knowing your audience, as he was making to Sullivan in their correspondence:

Though your head it may rack with a bilious attack,

And your senses with toothache you’re losing

Don’t be mopey and flat- they don’t fine you for that

If you’re properly quaint and amusing.

Compare this passage from Gilbert to Sullivan after the production had successfully opened in 1889:

“I think we should be risking everything in writing more seriously still. We have a name, jointly for humorous work, tempered with glimpses of earnest drama. I think we should do unwisely if we left, altogether, the path to which we have trodden together so long and so successfully.”

Again, I’m not arguing, as some do, that Gilbert is deliberately setting out a case for his own methodology like some kind of legal defense. I’m proposing that while he is writing the libretto, Gilbert’s mind is constantly turning these ideas over, justifying his position to himself and nursing his wounded pride. Whether the author intends the writing to be autobiographical or no, the characters speak something on the author’s mind.

If we read Point as Gilbert, then his singing companion Elsie must be Sullivan’s stand in. Elsie makes clear their relationship in terms that might apply obliquely to Gilbert and Sullivan:

“May it please you, sir, we are two strolling players, Jack Point and I, Elsie Maynard, at your worship’s service. We go from fair to fair, singing, and dancing and playing brief interludes; and so we make a poor living.”

But of course, Jack values their relationship more than she does, and for a price, Elsie decides to marry another man, an alchemist who is as good as dead, just as Sullivan was anxious to leave Gilbert for the ephemeral prospect of English Grand Opera. Recall that Sullivan was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship at 14, which led to his study in Leipzig and his subsequent rise to prominence. Then note that Queen Victoria, 5 months before Yeomen opened attended The Golden Legend, telling Sullivan afterward, “You ought to write a grand opera, you would do it so well!” Then consider Gilbert’s lyric for Fairfax in Act II (in my far-fetched scenario trying to woo Sullivan away from Comic Opera to the more respectable Grand Opera)   

He should ‘prentice himself at fourteen

And practice from morning to e’en

And when he’s of age,

if he will, I’ll engage,

He may capture the heart of a queen

The heart of a queen!

Death hangs in the air through Yeomen. In the last moment of this, their most ‘serious’ work, this comic figure falls insensible to the ground, having been rejected by his partner. Controversy remains about whether Point is actually dead, which reflects a much more tangible reality: would Gilbert ever write with Sullivan again?

I know I am stretching these comparisons, but when read in this way, the central musical idea of the opera, I Have a Song To Sing O! is even more meaningful, as the words of the rejected comic are continually rewritten and recontextualized by the woman who wants out of the relationship. They both have a song to sing. But it’s not the same song. She will not sing the words he has given her. The fact that Sullivan had so much trouble writing it and ultimately needed Gilbert to sing for him the simple folk song it was based on makes the irony even more poignant, as does the fact that it would become one of their most beloved songs, the one most requested by Autograph seekers.  

Ultimately, of course, Gilbert and Sullivan did write several more operas together. Their last masterpiece The Gondoliers, which followed the next year, paints in its convoluted plot an even more bold picture of their artistic rupture: Two casts barely appear together onstage. One cast has a very involved musical characterization, the other a much simpler comic framework. Furthermore, the story revolves around two jointly ruling kings, unable to figure out which is in charge, and doing menial work as everyone else lives like royals, a mirror of Gilbert’s idea that others were profiting at his expense. At the conclusion of the opera, we find that neither of them are truly king, and the crown goes to the attendant to the Duke of Plaza Toro.

Following the Carpet Quarrel, a similar situation would unfold for D’Oyly Carte, who would be scrambling to search for composers and librettists to fill the gaping hole left when the partnership finally collapsed.

But let’s leave that story for another time and simply marvel that an opera grew out of the friction of an artistic impasse that is one of the greatest pieces of music theatre in the 19th Century.

Before You Start:

A great place to start with any G&S Operetta is the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive page.The page for Yeomen is pretty extensive, including interviews, reviews of early productions, higher keys for Phoebe’s two songs, and an extremely helpful list of errata.

The most commonly used edition is the Schirmer vocal score, edited by Edmond William Rickett. It’s good, and is accessible to most of your singers. I linked to Amazon here, because most people these days buy from them. But do be aware that they sometimes lump together more than one edition of the same score, so you might accidentally get a rival edition when you order. You may decide you’d like to go with the Oxford critical edition, which is very good, if more expensive, and connects perfectly with the full score you’re going to want to purchase. On that note:

As for the full score, you’re in luck. The old handwritten Kalmus score is $165, which is appalling, considering that the brilliant new Oxford edition edited by Colin Jagger is less than $90. The critical material at the beginning is stellar, and I only found a couple of head scratchers that couldn’t be clarified in the notes.

I believe in conducting chorus rehearsals from the vocal score until the chorus is off book, and then switching as early as practicable to the full score to conduct rehearsals. There is a real wealth of detail in the orchestration that you as a music director need to be aware of that is simply not present in the Piano Score. If you are renting parts, do check to see if you can get your hands on the score that goes with them to use as you rehearse. It goes without saying that conducting the operetta in performance with an orchestra from the Piano Vocal Score is an unpardonable infraction unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

Recordings:

As always, the OakApple Press page laying out all the major recordings is complete and fantastic. Many of these recordings are available on Spotify, but I encourage you to buy a hard copy. Looking to D’Oyly Carte for style or pronunciation help is a good idea, but I’m sorry to say that even in the case of vowels, you will find very little uniformity from one D’Oyly Carte recording to the next.

If you’re going to be Music Directing Gilbert and Sullivan, you’ll want to begin building a library of reference materials. I recommend getting these, as you are able:

The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan by Ian Bradley. You should probably get this one ASAP. There is a very expensive new edition I have not yet read. If it’s anything like its predecessors, it’s indispensable.

A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan by Gayden Wren: Good stuff, especially seeing the shows in the context of the whole output. I come back to this book again and again.

The Gilbert and Sullivan Lexicon by Harry Benford: in which you will find the definitions of all those words you don’t understand.

I have recently added to my collection Carolyn Williams Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody. I had been skeptical at first of this kind of treatment of G&S, but I was very much mistaken. This book is just wonderful, and I found the chapter on Yeomen quite illuminating. Williams is the only writer on G&S I can recall reading that confronts difficulties in the works in their historical contexts. Most books either deny that there are problematic passages or approach them as though the authors should have been thinking then as we do now. I can tell that I’m going to learn quite a bit from the insights in this book as I continue to do Gilbert and Sullivan.

After you have procured some of these, set aside a number of hours to do the following:

1) Listen to the soundtracks with the score in hand, marking things that strike you as interesting. I also made a pass at one point with a metronome and marked the tempi of all the sections from several recordings so that I would have a benchmark of speed. When a singer complains about a tempo, it helps to be able to check and say, “Ah, yes, we’re too slow” or: “This is within the range of generally accepted tempi.” or yet again, “I’d like to take it this fast, but currently our diction won’t allow it.” Sullivan doesn’t always notate phrasing or articulations, and while it’s easy to say, “Let’s just leave it up to the taste of the players”, it’s sometimes necessary to actually make clear decisions as a conductor so that the ensemble is telling the same musical story. I have developed a system with colored pencils, where I listen to a recording of a particular year with, say, a red pencil in hand and just mark interesting articulation, dynamic, or tempo choices for the key moments. Then I go back with a different color and enter another recording’s take on the same moments. Pretty quickly one begins to realize what is standard, what is done almost every time, and what is open to interpretation. You will also find your own preference in those places where there appears to be a wide range of opinion. To me, this is the beginning of discovering your own voice as a conductor; finding where the limits of expression have been in the past, and deciding what you are drawn to in answer to the points that are vague.

2) Take the Lexicon book and copy in pencil all the definitions into the score where you don’t already know the meanings.

As You’re Casting:

Sir Richard Cholmondely

Sir Richard is a role for a bass-baritone, hopefully an imposing one, since his character hasn’t much of a sense of humor and arrives to deliver important news at nearly every entrance. In How Say You Maiden, he not only begins the number, but has some extremely challenging passagework, and a nearly impossible passage in the Act II finale. Note that Lieutenant is pronounced ‘leftenant’ in England.

Colonel Fairfax

Fairfax is a tenor with a thankless task. Other characters tell the audience that he is brave and valiant, but we will see him behave in precisely the opposite manner in the piece, cavalier about the feelings of the people around him, and self-pitying in the face of mild annoyance. If the audience is to like him, he has to be terribly charming, and his devil-may-care attitude needs to read as sophistication, not egotism. He also has two arias that rely on beauty of tone. A harder role than you might at first think.

Sergeant Meryll

Meryll performs critically important plot functions in Yeomen, delivering important exposition and bridging several storylines. He must credibly be Leonard and Pheobe’s father. He must be able to hold the bass part of Strange Adventure, the fast section at the end of act II, (with the Lieutenant and Wilfred) and be rather adept at counting, since he has awkward entrances in two numbers. A role for a solid performer.

Meryll used to have a song between Nos. 3 and 4. It was cut on Gilbert’s insistence, and Sullivan was annoyed at being bullied into cutting it, although he agreed it was unnecessary to the plot. Apart from giving Meryll something interesting to do, it isn’t missed, especially since Meryll has plenty to do in the piece itself.

I suppose this is as good a place as any to point out the confusion you may first have as you begin working through the materials. Meryll is the last name of three of these characters, and the false last name of a fourth. In the score Sergeant Meryll is always referred to as Meryll, his real son as Leonard, Phoebe as Phoebe, and Fairfax as Fairfax, even when disguised as a Meryll.

Leonard Meryll

Leonard exists to set up the plot, disappears for a long time, then provides information necessary to end the opera. In the interim, he can go back to being a chorister if that works with your staging and costuming. In fact, you should be casting a very fine tenor in this part, and you can’t afford to lose any chorus tenors, since you need several good ones as Yeomen, and you don’t want your chorus of townspeople to be tenorless. Leonard needs a high A flat.

Jack Point

Jack Point is one of the best and most challenging roles in the canon. He must have an extraordinarily good memory, for the ever changing I Have A Song to Sing O!, the many monologues, and the verses and verses of patter. He plays comic for most of the piece, but there must also be a slight sadness, or the ending simply will not play. Vocally the role is not terribly rangy, and could be played by a tenor or a baritone, but it must be someone who has crystal clear diction and the intelligence to understand what he’s doing and saying throughout.

Wilfred Shadbolt

Shadbolt must first of all have a wonderful stage presence and great comic timing. He must be adept at patter and have a good sense of timing.

Shadbolt had a number between When Maiden Loves and Tower Warders that I love. When Jealous Torments Rack My Soul was supposedly cut because it was serious in tone, being the second such number in a row at the beginning of the opera. I think my modern sensibility is differently calibrated, because I find both numbers musically light, if lyrically dark. Shadbolt’s cut number is in fact, full of truly delightful detail, with flutes imitating birds, the violins trilling a meowing cat, and a truly hilarious bassoon line. It also makes the reference to Shadbolt’s jealousy near the end of the opera resonate even better, since this number establishes jealousy as his central feature.  

The Headsman

Pick your tallest/biggest actor. He wears a mask, so having somebody who is imposing and can wield an axe credibly without doing any harm to himself or those around him are the primary criteria.

First Yeoman

The First Yeoman is a Tenor or a Baritone who can sing a high F briefly.

Second Yeoman

The second Yeoman is a rangy tenor, or at the very least a baritone with a sustained high F. Be sure he can sing the passage in Tower Warders, but also check in on the Low Bb in the First Act Finale, where he seems to be more of a Baritone  

First and Second Citizens

These characters have no given vocal parts, they act like dangerous creeps in one scene. Choose them accordingly.

Elsie Maynard

Elsie is one of the best soprano roles in G&S, despite the fact that she only has one aria proper. The role requires a strong actress with a very flexible voice, and real punch at the top of the staff. There are several places that are rather heavily scored. Conversely, she needs to be able to float some things as well. She also needs a very good memory. In I Have a Song to Sing, O!, the words and timing are very difficult to remember. And finally, she needs to be able to play comic scenes and several moments of pathos. It’s quite a meaty role!

Phoebe Meryll

Phoebe opens the show and appears at every important juncture. She’s really a mezzo, but you can cast a soprano if you move her two arias up a step. Both the lower and higher keys are legitimate choices sanctioned by Sullivan. She has a lot of lovely scene work, so cast a sensitive actor who can play comedy.

Dame Carruthers

Dame Carruthers initially appears to be a different kind of Contralto part, as the noble protector of history, but shifts somewhat awkwardly in Act II to fit the scary-contralto type to frighten poor Meryll and make us like him less. Carruthers needs a good ear for the various part work she sings, good diction for the patter, and a formidable stage presence.

Kate

Kate is an impossibly small part with a critical vocal line in Strange Adventure! A wonderful role for someone in your company who is building experience for larger roles, or for a soprano with a beautiful voice who for whatever reason wasn’t cast in the other roles.

Chorus

In The Pirates of Penzance, Sullivan had split his male chorus into tenors and basses. Here we have a much more complicated demarcation, because you must have a full 4 part men’s chorus of Yeomen and a functioning section that hopefully balances the women’s chorus. The chorus of townspeople does not appear all that often, but when they do, it is extremely rewarding material to sing! This means you can afford to really finesse your choral rehearsals; you will have the time. It’s possible to cover all the chorus material in 2 well paced rehearsals and then move on to fine tuning details.

Here’s my suggestion for filling the yeomen positions: Put one of your strongest chorus singers on each of the yeomen parts: 1st Tenor, 2nd Tenor, Baritone, and Bass. Add them to Sgt. Meryll and the First and Second Yeomen you cast as principals, since there are times Meryll and those two yeomen are not able to sing the choral parts. Once you’ve set up that core group, be certain your remaining chorus of townspeople has a strong tenor and bass to ground the section. In all likelihood, you will be short on tenors, as we were. Don’t send them all to the group of Yeomen, or you’ll be in a bind.  If you should have chorus singers to spare, start doubling out the Yeomen with other singers. Meryll is likely a bass, your first Yeoman is probably a first tenor, your second yeoman a baritone or second tenor. So if you’re augmenting beyond those 7 men, add another 2nd tenor or baritone to make an evenly balanced 8 when everyone’s singing together. Then add one each of the other parts. I think 11 is probably too many, and if you can afford 11 yeomen and still have enough strong tenors to balance the chorus women in the remaining scenes, I want to talk with you about your recruiting. I also want to know about your costume budget. For the record, there are 37 warders in real life.

Your sopranos have a G above the staff, your altos an E flat above treble C, going down to middle C. Chorus tenors need the G above middle C, and the basses need the A below bass C.

The Yeomen First tenor tops off at an A above middle C, the second tenor The A flat above middle C, the Baritone needs an E flat above middle C, and your Basses need the F below the bass staff and the E flat above middle C.

General Pronunciation Advice:

I copy here general note from earlier G&S posts, with some slight emendations.

I am still no expert on RP English pronunciation, but I offer here a couple of basic pointers, to which I intend to add as I learn more:

1) Be aware of the Trap-Bath split. A fellow Savoyard in my tenor section made me aware of this chart, which is very helpful: trap-bath

2) ‘R’s that begin a word are tripped or rolled. ‘R’s that come before a vowel are tripped. ‘R’s that come after a vowel are generally dropped. At no point is the ‘r’ pronounced as we Amerrricans pronounce it. (although you may encounter different kinds of Rs if characters have regional British accents)

3) Mary, Merry, and Marry employ three different vowel sounds. Where I come from, they are pronounced identically. In Philadelphia, they are pronounced as three different vowels, but they aren’t the same vowels. Interesting chart on this matter:http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_15.html In G&S, you’ll want to say Mary with an eh as in air, Merry with eh as in get, and Marry with an ah as in cat. (someone will certainly correct me on this)

4) Many u vowels will need a y sound before them: duty becomes dyewtee, tuning becomes tyooning, new becomes nyoo, and institution becomes instityooshun.

5) Been becomes bean.

6) For words which in American English replace ‘t’s with a d sound, a true ‘t’ sound should be used. “Water” is not pronounced “wadder”, and certainly not wooder, my Philadelphia friends. But be careful not to overcompensate. I have noticed that some Americans are so anxious to Britishify their speech that they change to ‘t’ sounds that are truly ‘d’s. Lady should not be Laty, as I’ve heard people say when attempting to posh up their language. Not every ‘d’ needs to become a ‘t’, only the ones that are truly ts to begin with!

7) As I continue to conduct these pieces, and after continuing encouragement from the English members of our American company, I am beginning to become fixated on words like “all”, and the second syllable of “Doctor”, “Major” and “Sailor”. The British “all” has a darker vowel than the Americans use, almost to the point of sounding like ‘ole’, and the second syllable of the ‘or’ words is pronounced like ‘or’, not ‘er’, as Americans would say it. I am still conflicted about that particular one, because the D’Oyly Carte recordings are by no means consistent on that point, and especially at speed, it is very difficult to articulate a tall ‘o’ vowel in such a word. It is something to keep one’s ears open for.

This video may be of use to you.

That is by no means exhaustive, and I’ve probably gotten some of it wrong, but that’ll get you started. There are some places in this show where pronunciation will be governed by a rhyme. I will try and hit each of those points as we go.

Going through the show number by number:

Overture

This overture is one of the finest in the Savoy canon. Various commentators have suggested that it is modeled on Wagner’s overture to Die Meistersinger. One recent writer even insinuates that Sullivan chose to take this overture seriously for a change on account of the seriousness of the topic. A casual glance at his overture to Iolanthe shows that when Sullivan had the time to write his own overtures, he always did so with great care and diligence.

Those who see the Meistersinger connection are probably responding to the brass opening and subsequent episodes, and the appearance near the end of the Wagner of the King David motive with busy strings throughout. Sullivan loved Die Meistersinger, but if he was inspired by the overture, the differences are frankly more interesting than the similarities.

Wagner’s overture is built on a number of that opera’s main themes, just as Sullivan’s is. But Wagner’s orchestration is elaborate and thick, and the themes tend to spin out into sequences, each dissipating into the next idea. Sullivan’s language closes out the musical ideas and makes quite clear which instruments are melodic and which accompanimental. The Wagner at its best is a flurry of counterpoint; he dazzles us with his complexity, and when he denies us cadence, we find we have already moved on to the next busy episode. The Sullivan at its best is contrapuntally sound but always simple, clear and directionally oriented. The strongest case for comparison between the two overtures is also the strongest case for what makes them so different. Below I’ve reduced the four measure phrase at the return of the King David motive in Die Meistersinger, followed by the analogous passage at the close of the Yeomen overture.

Wagner:

Sullivan:

The old orchestration rule that there should never really be more than three distinct things going on at once is held in perfect clarity by the Sullivan example, whereas Wagner has three heterophonic versions of the bass, a brass idea that is beautiful, but lacks a strong profile, and a terribly busy chromatic figure in the second violins and violas that doesn’t so much add excitement as muddy the waters. By comparison, Sullivan’s passage is a perfect model of clarity.

Once you leave these grand and gilded brass passages, the development of these ideas is not at all Wagnerian, but displays the welcome influence of Mendelssohn, especially as the “All Frenzied With Despair” motive is nimbly passed between sections.

The overture is also in Sonata form, a form Wagner viewed with skepticism. I see people online describing this overture as being distinctive because it’s in sonata form rather than being a potpourri of tunes from the opera. I see this as a potpourri of tunes from the opera organized in Sonata Form. The same could be said of the Iolanthe overture. Unless you’re trying to write a Wagnerian music of the future, there is no shame in writing in Sonata Form; it is the tried and true way of organizing contrasting ideas! The introduction is the Tower Theme, followed by the Primary Theme, When a Wooer Goes a Wooing in Eb. (chromatically altered from its appearance in the opera so that it can be better used in this context) a transitional passage modulates us to the Secondary Theme area Were I Thy Bride in the Dominant, Bb. A development section is built on All Frenzied with Despair from the Act I Finale, with snippets of When a Wooer and Were I Thy Bride. After 44 measures of modulating passages with no full statements of any theme, the Tower Theme sneaks back to prepare the recapitulation, with artfully deployed Primary and Secondary themes in the tonic key and a further statement of the Tower Theme as a powerful coda.

The reduction of the full orchestration in the Schirmer piano vocal score, held over and cleaned up from the Chappell edition, leaves a lot to be desired; one wishes a very playable reduction occupied 2 main staves, with a smaller stave supplying other details above, as happens from pages 9 through 11. Much of this overture is laid out in a way that would be difficult for most accompanists who are not concert pianists. Of course, this is only really a problem if you’ve staged the overture, something that was not done very often when this edition was released in 1954.

The greatest difficulty I found in conducting the overture was establishing the proper tempo. The Tower Theme, heard immediately at the opening of the work, appears in three other numbers in the opera, and not always at the speed one finds optimal for the Overture. My mental picture of the theme happens to be too fast for the figure in the violins in the 7th measure, but I found I also ran a danger of over-correcting to the point where the brass figure in measure 16 was too slow. Once I discovered that the brass idea in measure 16 is the most critical passage to get in the right tempo, I used it in my mind to calibrate the opening. The overture basically moves at that tempo throughout. With Yeomen, Sullivan finally has the larger orchestra he wanted, and we will see how beautifully he uses the extra players. He also seems to favor the clarinet in lines he might have given the oboe. I wonder if the Savory orchestra had a personnel change.

The development section, which begins around measure 59, is a wonderful spinning out of the stretto at the end of Act I, in deftly modulating passages. Ask the strings to articulate it in the same way the brass do when they play it in measure 65.

ACT I

1. When Maiden Loves, She Sits and Sighs

This is the only Savoy opera to open with a solo, and if this weren’t G&S, we might think Phoebe is the main character in the piece. She does in fact appear subsequently at nearly every important juncture. The spinning wheel flavor of the song should help you establish your tempo. There are two traditional keys for this. If you cast a higher voiced Phoebe, she may well want the piece in Eb. Both are sanctioned by original performance practice.

This is the number where you will be glad you hired competent violists. The spinning wheel figure, which at first feels like a simple trill, terminates several times in a very specific and somewhat exposed way, which needs to be clean. Be careful 5 measures before B. (as it appears in the Schirmer score) There is a viola line absent from the vocal score that makes sense of the long pause before Phoebe begins singing again. With piano alone, one wants to start the next phrase too early. Write the line in, or work with your Phoebe to understand how the passage works.

The aria also presents a small conducting challenge. If you play the piece as written, you will quickly discover that the 4 measures before B and the 4 measures before the first ending seem very fast, and don’t in fact represent the way the piece is performed on recordings. Colin Jagger’s edition takes the position (as I read his critical commentary) that the meno mosso and subsequent a tempo are not sanctioned by the author, and that Sullivan did not intend these measures to be performed at half speed. I agree with him that Sullivan knew his mind and knew how to notate rhythm. And yet, as we rehearsed the song, we simply could not find a musically convincing reading of the passage as notated in the score. The 4 measure passages feel rushed to no dramatic end. I was also unable to locate any recording that played those passages at speed. Should you choose to be academically correct and perform the score as written, I tip my hat to you, and your orchestra will have no trouble following you. But if you choose to do it the traditional D’Oyly Carte way, you will either have to have a potentially long and confusing conversation with the orchestra at the sitzprobe, or you will want to re-bar the passages. I include parts and score below for you in both keys rebarred for ease of conducting.

This is a PDF of the low key and the high key of the Piano vocal. I’ve added cue sized notes for the viola passage I mentioned earlier, and I’ve changed the measures so you don’t have to wildly change your tempo to do it the way it appears on most recordings. I’ve also removed a rolled chord marking that Schirmer used to use whenever there was pizzicato. It may sound more like a badly coordinated orchestra playing pizz. to roll the chord staccato, but we hope our orchestra actually plays the pizz. simultaneously!

1. When Maiden Loves Rebarred Both Keys

Below is a document with all the orchestra parts so you can conduct it that way as well (in each key). I used the Schirmer rehearsal lettering and repeat format, which is different from the Oxford version. I conducted using these parts, marking the time signature changes in my score, and all was well.

When Maiden Sighs Original Key Barlines Adjusted Orchestral Parts

When Maiden Sighs Transposed Barlines Adjusted Orchestral Parts

2.Tower Warders, Under Orders

This wonderful number shows Sullivan at a high level of musical pageantry, and will reveal to the audience immediately whether your chorus is big enough, and whether you distributed your tenors properly. If you don’t have enough in your chorus, they’ll know when the chorus begins singing. If you don’t have enough in the Yeomen, you’ll know when they have their very exposed part.

The rocketing triplet scale figure has been in several previous G&S operas, notably right before the recapitulation of the primary melody in the March of the Peers in Iolanthe, and it provides an identical function here in contrasting the martial duple figure preparing the entrance of the first theme.

The chorus of townspeople need a staccato articulation, which is difficult to maintain throughout the piece and prone to rushing. Keep an ear out for that in rehearsal. In the 18th and 22nd measures of rehearsal B,  the Yeomen split into 5 parts. Meryll has not yet entered, which means you are one Bass short. If you don’t have enough Yeomen to do that doubling, eliminate the lowest part, and let the second bassoon carry it. The horns, bassoons, and sometimes even clarinets double all these parts beautifully, particularly when the two choruses come together at the end. There is a slight danger that the tendency of the Yeomen to sing their legato phrases a little languidly and the larger chorus to rush the detached parts will create some phasing between the two. Tell your chorus to listen for the triangle at the top of the number, which plays every quarter note like a metronome, and at the end to listen for the flutes and oboes, who are also playing cleanly and staccato (one hopes)

There are several word changes in the Colin Jagger edition you will want to take note of, especially if you are rehearsing chorus from the Schirmer score, and conducting from the Jagger full score. One is in measure 32, where Jagger’s edition reads “We rejoice in talking over”. The Schirmer has “telling”. Jagger’s note clarifies the situation well. I mention it because when I switched to conducting rehearsals from full score, I found myself continually making notes to correct word errors that were not actor mistakes, but discrepancies. I’ll try and note them as they occur.

3. When Our Gallant Norman Foes

Carruthers defense in her dialogue and subsequent paean to the Tower sets her up as the protector of tradition in the piece, and it’s truly a wonderful, very English moment.

A bugaboo for me was the word ‘twist’ in the Yeomen’s part, which needs to have the ‘s’ delayed, attached to the beginning of ‘and’. Of course Dame Carruthers can close to the ‘s’ as soon as she likes, but chorally, we don’t want to hear that.

Our director didn’t want to see a chorus of townspeople standing mute as the yeomen feebly echoed, so I assigned the first 2 phrases (‘The screw may twist’ through ‘men may burn’) to the full chorus. Going further would have drowned out her solo line.  

This is the first of the numbers in the opera to end with music underscoring the exit of the singer in a way that discourages audience applause. In performance I found this dissatisfying, but again, I think perhaps Sullivan was trying to keep the action moving and avoid the feeling of music hall construction

4. Alas! I Waver To And Fro

This first of many principle ensembles is tricky stuff, especially considering that you are likely to have cast your most experienced ensemble singers in other roles. The tempo is quick, Leonard’s part is high, and Meryll’s part is acrobatic. The cutoffs when 2 or 3 sing together are also awkwardly written, in the British manner, notated to stop ⅔ of the way through the measure beat quickly in one. I recommend adjusting those cutoffs for the sake of accuracy to the nearest sensible barline. Once again, the audience is denied a traditional ending with an extended coda that sneaks out the door as the characters do.

5. Is Life a Boon?

Much is made of the trouble Sullivan had setting this text. He wrote several versions, this final version having been completed 4 days before the premiere. In looking at the earlier version which still exists, available in the Oxford edition, I have my own observations:

The original version is much sprightlier and more vocally and musically interesting. It sounds more ‘English’ and more self consciously archaic to me. It also starts the second verse in the minor, which is better suited to the text, and the ending combines ideas from both verses. To my ear, it places Fairfax as a character far more specifically. The standard version has been much admired from the beginning, but I find the aria a little generic and perfunctory, rather like Fold Your Flapping Wings, which was cut from Iolanthe. The introductory measures do little more than establish us in Db major; Sullivan declines to use a number of melodic ideas that would have suited that opening moment, the melodic line follows the poetic meter without any of Sullivan’s inspired creative manipulation, and the vocal line is not very adventurous. Gilbert ostensibly rejected the earlier version because it resembled tenor arias from earlier operas, being in 6/8. Others have speculated that Gilbert wanted to deprive a tenor he disliked of a strong moment. But I wonder whether his real reason was that the joke is so hard to understand in the earlier version. Sullivan seems to have taken the sense of the lyric somewhat too seriously in the earlier version; in the final version, Fairfax simply tells the joke straight.

There is to my ear an obvious disconnect between Gilbert and Sullivan’s ideas about what should be happening here. With that disconnect in mind, consider the fact that Gilbert chose part of this lyric to appear on Sullivan’s memorial in 1903:

“Is life a boon?

If so, it must befall

That death whene’er he call

Must call too soon.”

That memorial and its Goscombe John sculpture of a partially nude young woman representing grief dramatically mourning under a bust of Sir Arthur are considered either the sexiest or most sexist memorial in London. The text is, of course, totally appropriate for a memorial out of the context of the opera. And yet considered in context, sung by a character who immediately thereafter says, in effect, “If I’m going to die, I may as well die now as any other time” seems mildly inappropriate to a memorial. And their disagreements about the setting of this text were surely on Gilbert’s mind, because when the statue was unveiled, he gave a speech, in which he remarked that:

“…he should like to bear testimony to the abnegation and self-effacement to which Sir Arthur was always prepared to submit himself whenever he had reason to believe that any part of his share of their joint work was inconsistent with the effect intended to be achieved by the whole design.” -as reported in The Musical Times, August 1, 1903

Anyone who has read their letters knows that Gilbert is stretching the truth here.

If you use the Jagger full score, you will notice a discrepancy in the pickup to the second verse. Jagger’s note explains the situation. I didn’t have a preference between the triplet version and the dotted eighth sixteenth version, but you might want to choose one yourself for clarity’s sake. If you take time at the end of the first verse, be prepared to cut off the strings in measure 40. Plan similarly in cutting off the strings 7 measures from the end.  

6. Here’s a Man of Jollity

This chorus number is wonderfully inventive musically. Sullivan is trying to evoke the rhythmic fluidity of Renaissance music here, although 5/4 would have been quite unusual. What is really striking here is how Sullivan builds a melodic rhetoric from motives which he repeats in various configurations. Some melodic patterns happen at the quarter note level, falling irregularly over barlines. Others are re-ordered in performance. The opening consists of just three ideas:

But the ideas come in this fanciful order:

1,1,2,2,3,2,2,3

The chorus is essentially monophonic and in the Lydian mode (!), with chords appearing only in the mixed meter passages to help establish the cadences. It’s also striking that Sullivan writes an underscore for important dialogue, something he had not done in earlier operettas. It’s yet another sign that he was aiming for a more thoroughly connected musical drama.

Unless you’ve separated the sections on stage, I don’t see much point in splitting the groups antiphonally in their vocal parts when the chorus enters. At letters A and B, the high F may be too high for some of your altos and basses, in which case they can enter on the second notes of those phrases.

I think the faster the tempo the better. Conduct the 4/4 measures in 2, and the 3 and 5 measures in 3 and 5. If the dialogue is read quickly, you should be able to get through the repeated passage 5 times before moving on to No. 7.

Colin Jagger’s notes in the full score explain the bizarre situation between numbers 6 and 7. Here’s a man of Jollity clearly ends preparing us for D major, and yet in the Schirmer score, I Have a Song to Sing, O! Is in E flat. As I see it, you have 3 options: 1) take the last 14 measure repeated section of No. 6 up a half step and do No. 7 in Eb. 2) move No. 7 to D, as it will appear at the end of the opera or 3) Go from A7 to Eb major and hope nobody is paying attention. In truth they probably aren’t. I think the crossfade you encounter in one or two of the recordings is the most bizarre way to solve the problem, making an unusual harmonic moment in a Romantic Era opera into an outtake from Charles Ives’s Country Band March.

7. I have a Song To Sing, O!

In its profound simplicity, this song captures the central couple of the opera in their pre-fallen state. Gilbert has created something rare in his work: A text that refers to the character’s situations ironically, but not comically. It is also wonderful theatre that we know something will go wrong, but they don’t realize they are singing about themselves.

I don’t know that anyone truly sings every note of the melody as notated, and some places are rather awkward as written, such as “Who loved a lord, and who laughed aloud”, which is all quarters except for ‘lord and’. ‘And who’ eighths is much better prosody. You will need to decide for yourself how much of a stickler you intend to be about these moments.

The chorus that comes in at letter E sings on an Oo, then on an Ah! 8 measures later. When this moment is echoed in the Second Act Finale, the score indicates Oo! all the way. I thought Oo was unlikely to carry at a Forte dynamic, and that my chorus singers would perhaps not keep straight the two versions, so I made the last iteration an Ah! both times. Midway through that last choral phrase, it is effective to speed up to the end.

Incidentally, you must choose a sprightly tempo here, or your orchestra will fall asleep and/or lose their places. This is also a very fine reason to do no. 6 as fast as you can manage, because then the transition will be more or less l’istesso, and you won’t have to drive the orchestra ahead in the opening ritornello. One final point (pun intended) about the tempo: If your orchestra is good, they’ll be listening to the singers, and since there is so little going on in the orchestra anyway, it turns out to be very hard to get the tempo to move without the singers cooperation. They are in some way in charge of keeping the tempo moving themselves.

8.  How Say You, Maiden, Will You Wed

Choose your tempo based on the ‘head over heels’ stretto. Elsie will want it faster, probably, and the men will likely want it slower. The three characters are so beautifully depicted in the music of their solo sections, and the ensemble work has the most delightfully witty orchestration. Beginning at the second ‘head over heels’ passage, Sullivan sets up a dialogue between the tutti woodwinds and the strings, which quickly becomes a game of tag or leapfrog between the two bassoons. The tutti, once again anticlimactic, continues the game, this time alternating flute/clarinet with horn/bassoon, until the pizzicato strings get the last word.

Practice cueing the bassoon entry in the last 6 measures of vocals and be prepared to explain the flute/clarinet pickup that follows to the rest of the orchestra.

9. I’ve Jibe and Joke

A standard Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, which is to say: perfection.

The opening is a jig, with a wonderful sixteenth note figure, made even more wonderful in the 15th measure when Sullivan runs the figure into D minor ominously.

You may want to practice indicating the tempo with a blank bar, to align bassoon and low strings. It’s difficult to coordinate the very first measure. It turns out there are several versions of the woodwind passage here, and Sullivan’s preference seems to be unclear. Have a look at the parts your orchestra is using, and make sure they agree (ours did not) Enjoy the sforzandi. They are wonderfully fun.

Generally the last time through the chorus, singers slow down for “always gild the philosophic pill” This is tricky to conduct, so be sure to have a game plan.

10. ’Tis Done! I Am A Bride

This aria is some particularly fine writing, although this is one of those introductory 2 measure ritornelli that I do not find very inspiring. Pay attention to the 2nd violins, violas and cellos more than the rest in the opening there; they need more guidance than the others in establishing the triplets.

Choose a good fast tempo for the Allegro, and start small, so that the cresting waves in the strings have something to crest above! At 2 before C, you can let the singer take time, but get back into tempo at rehearsal C. The key to this number is forward propulsion that opens out into lyric long notes. We know this because Sullivan broke up Gilbert’s rhyme scheme to accomplish it.

Though tears and long-drawn sigh

Ill-fit a bride

No sadder wife than I

The whole world wide!

Ah me, ah me

Yet wives there be…

Sullivan pulls ‘Ah me’ back into the previous stanza, and we as an audience no longer hear any rhyme at all. But Sullivan is drawing the urgency of the situation in that moment, an urgency that can’t be achieved at a slower speed. Gayden Wren goes into much greater detail on this point, and I encourage you to read his chapter. In The Gondoliers, Sullivan would ignore rhythmic schemes even more, to the point where he makes Gilbert sound as though he doesn’t know how to rhyme at all.

The Allegro un poco agitato is perhaps the place in the score where you will most wish you had more violins. The writing isn’t always easy, and passing the passagework back and forth between players (as they will probably do) reveals quickly both the facility of the players and the depth of the sections. I told my section I was most interested in measures 23, 30, 43, etc, where the rocketing passages jump out from the texture and drive the piece forward. Keep in mind that conducting a sensitive rehearsal pianist to push and pull the tempo around the cadences is much easier than doing the same for the entire string section. I found it useful to conduct the cadenza once for the orchestra with the singer while they weren’t playing, so that they could hear the way it’s constructed. It’s also worth noting that the end of this is scored rather heavily for Sullivan. Listen for that balance so that your singer doesn’t need to oversing the cadenza.

11. Were I Thy Bride

Again, there are two key choices here. Both keys are available in the IMSLP orchestral parts, by the way. Be sure to choose a sprightly tempo, and note the character of the orchestration. As I hear it, Phoebe’s coyness is depicted in the way Sullivan mutes and divides the violins, first into 2 groups of 2 notes each, then eventually four groups of 2 notes each. More and more notes per chord, fewer and fewer players on each note! Under that is a tick-tock bed of pizzicato, and above it the occasional pad of woodwind coloring the flavor of the phrases. Students of composition note how Sullivan usually brings the winds in mid-phrase before a cadence and bridges into the next phrase. They’re a musical glue!

12.FIRST ACT FINALE: Oh, Sergeant Meryll, Is It True

It isn’t as much of a thrill ride as the Finale to the first act of Iolanthe, and yet, I found this absolutely exhilarating to conduct, particularly the funeral march and the final stretto.

The first page of reduction is again pretty unsatisfying. The section in E major at the top of Schirmer page 97 is awkward passage work for both rehearsal accompanist and strings, but even allowing for that, the sense of what is happening on the first page of the Finale could have been conveyed much better.

Meryll’s entrance is actually quite difficult, because he’s essentially performing a canon with the trumpet at a beat’s delay. It is a wonderful line once you get it timed out, but budget some rehearsal there.

The violin sixteenth coming out of the fermata on the way into E (as lettered in the Schirmer score) is really difficult to cue! Your pianist will simply do it, but you need to plan for a section of violins. I actually got it wrong every single performance. As I’m thinking about it now, I think you need to say a prayer and give a strong 4 out of the fermata.

The Andante allegretto reinstates a repeat during the 1st and 2nd yeomen solos and a second verse in the Oxford Full Score that isn’t in the Schirmer score. I don’t think it’s worth reinstating, but you should note it so it doesn’t catch you by surprise.

The transition into H in the Schirmer score is prefigured in the syncopation in the previous measure. In fact, you could also make it l’istesso. You will almost certainly need to finesse this moment with your orchestra.

At rehearsal G in the Oxford Full Score (8th measure of H in the Schirmer vocal score), there is a passage that is pretty tricky for the orchestra. Your pianist will be fine in rehearsal, but the orchestra is coming out of 2 brief phrases and 2 unaccompanied recits, so they have no real bearing on the new tempo. When we come out of the recit, the tempo needs to be established on the downbeat of the cellos and double basses, who are marked piano. Every other instrument is primarily offbeats for quite a while, which adds to the confusion. Have the cellos and basses mark the singer’s text coming into that passage, and in the fermatas that follow a few phrases later, and have them bump that first downbeat up to forte. You may find yourself paying attention to the strings and flutes, but that’s a mistake. The main thing is the downbeat. Establish that, and the orchestra will have something to latch onto.

8 measures before J, you will note that the orchestra has a pickup quarter, but Wilfred has an eighth. The same thing happens 2 measures later. You may find it advisable to drop directly into tempo at the downbeat that closes Wilfred’s rather free recit so that things line up. Alternately, you can cut the clarinet and bassoon upbeat and let Wilfred take you into the next measure by himself.

I recommend you tacet the first notes in the trumpets at the top of the Allegro non troppo (full score measure 216, Schirmer 2nd measure of J. It’s hard to coordinate otherwise. You’ll thank me later.

The funereal march to mourn the condemned is situationally and mildly musically similar to the auto-da-fé sequence at the beginning of Act 3, Part 2 of Verdi’s Don Carlo (5 act version) Possibly Gilbert and/or Sullivan saw the first production of that opera in Italian at Covent Garden in June 1867.

At the Andante you will need to solve the problem of who plays that bell and who plays the timpani. They can’t be played by the same player, and the rest of the orchestra is occupied. See Colin Jagger’s note for some interesting backstory regarding the tempo. If you choose a backstage bell ringer, you’ll run into some problems with coordination, especially if they can’t see you. If you choose a visible onstage bell ringer, it draws focus from one of the most important moments in the show. If you hire a second percussion player, they will be doing nothing for almost the entire show. And for heaven’s sake don’t do it yourself. Your orchestra and chorus need you to shape this passage.

Work on those cutoffs at “The prisoner comes” This is an absolutely breathtaking passage, maybe the most beautiful moment in Sullivan’s work, but only if it’s clean, in tune and has beautiful vowels. Note where the diminuendo is and don’t anticipate it.

It turns out to be difficult initially to get “He is not there!” to come in correctly. Budget some time.

The patter passage when it’s first introduced has a wrinkle that you have to solve. “We hunted high” and “We hunted low” are both thirds, just as they are when the chorus sings it. There were originally four yeomen returning empty handed. Now there are only three. So your options are: 1) do it as written in the Schirmer score. 2) Get another yeoman in on the action. 3) Have Fairfax sing in both sections.

Budget time to align the girls entrance in “Now, by my troth the news is fair…” It will feel early.

In your choral warmup, spend time learning the “as escort for” passage in tempo. Work the words separately from the notes for clarity and consonants. Tune the word ‘sought’ the first time it appears and the word ‘with’ the last time it appears. These will be out of tune at first. There is another version of the lyric here in the Oxford edition you may want to use.

At T, the accompaniment is tossed between strings and woodwinds just as the Lieutenant sings. The last  time we had this kind of antiphonal interplay was in How Say You, Maiden, his first number.

The grace notes in the passage after T (in the Schirmer score) are among the most difficult parts of the opera for the strings. You may want to tell your less experienced players to play only the downbeats if they can’t tune it. The next passage should have a light touch, even as everyone is very agitated. This sets up the big tune well. Note that Sullivan brings in the timpani and horns as a pedal 4 before rehearsal V (in the Schirmer score) and then has the chorus join 2 bars later. Note also the chorus enters piano and swells to make the entrance of the big tune.

Jack and Elise have a completely different set of lyrics here NOT included in the Schirmer that they will likely want to use, because they’re specific to character. No audience member will hear them, but they are far more sensible for the characters to sing. You can see them in the Oxford score:

ELSIE:

All frenzied, frenzied with despair I rave

My anguish rends my heart in two

Unloved, unloved to him my hand I gave

To him unloved bound to be true.

Unloved, unseen, unknown, unknown the brand

Of infamy upon his head;

A bride, a bride that’s husbandless I stand

To all mankind forever dead

To all man-kind forever dead

(she does not participate in the ‘thousand marks’ passage)

Forever ever dead forever ever dead to all man-kind forever

Ever dead.

POINT:

All frenzied, frenzied with despair I rave

My anguish rends my heart in two

Your hand, your hand to him you freely gave

It’s woe to me, not woe to you!

My laugh is dead, my heart, my heart unmanned,

A jester with a heart of lead!

A lover, lover loverless I stand,

To womankind forever dead

(he does not participate in the ‘thousand marks’ passage)

To womankind forever dead

The Lieutenant sings the chorus lyrics with ‘my’ replacing ‘his’

33 measures from the end, at letter X in the Oxford score, 25th measure of Y in the Schirmer score, the high winds, horns and strings have a triplet figure against an eighth note pattern in the lower instruments. I suggest you ask the winds to play that figure detached. (the strings can’t really do that in their figure) The two ideas play off each other well, but can be muddy.  

I put a quarter rest in between the two iterations of “A Thousand Marks” in the Sopranos and Altos, and cut the downbeat tied over from the first ‘alive‘, to make room for breath. You may want to bring the chorus dynamic down on a-LIVE just a hair, so they can properly get a crescendo there to the sforzando.

The very end of the first act feels wrong in the piano reduction, as though you’ve suddenly struck the wrong tempo somehow, but just trust that when the orchestra is there, the bandwidth of sound, with the strings playing full chords and everyone in the optimal parts of their range justifies the extremely slow augmentation of the main theme.

ACT II

13. Night Has Spread Her Pall Once More

Gilbert knew well how effective it is to begin a second act in the moonlight. The Sorcerer, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, and Utopia Limited also begin Act II at night. And yet in no other case did Sullivan capture the moonlight as beautifully as he does here.

Gayden Wren hears this as a reworking of the funeral march from Act I, but I don’t hear that. I do hear an exquisite depiction of moonlight worthy of Tchaikovsky. Have the strings play that unison melody fully and expressively, but also observe the dynamics, which are very specific.

It’s odd that Sullivan asks for the altos to sit out the whole first section. I treated the first phrases as normal, with all women singing the unison parts and the altos going down for the lower passages as needed. Aim for very strong ‘K’ consonants as they appear.  

If your Yeomen are not quite loud enough to pull off their passage alone, you can add the chorus men, changing all the ‘we’s to ‘ye’s. I know this isn’t Sullivan approved, but I don’t think he would have been happy with a weak men’s chorus there either. Avoid the temptation to slow down the penultimate measure of the chorus as though it were the last night of our Vegas floor show residency.

The piano score has a tremolando in the first 2 measures, but that’s really just so that the pianist can approximate the crescendo/decrescendo in the woodwinds. Don’t go too crazy. The IMSLP parts have a rearticulation in the winds in measure 2, but the Oxford score has it tied over (with no note in the Critical Commentary) I don’t know what to tell you there. The doubling of the tenor and basslines at 76 in the horns is extremely effective. I asked them to play out there, it makes the men’s section sound fuller. 

14. Oh, A Private Buffoon

Another perfect Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, after a perfect Gilbert scene. The traditional colla voce rit. in the 23rd and 24th measures may not be in your orchestra parts. They are very easy to cue. If only the lyrics were so easy to remember.

15. Hereupon We’re Both Agreed

The faster the better for this fantastic duet. The words are likely to induce giggles in a modern American audience, and that’s fine. Note the words at “I to swear to, you declare to”, where the two swap lyrics. It’s actually pretty tricky! If your company does encores, you can begin at the beginning and take the second ending. It’s a nice effect to speed up the ending if you’ve done the encore.

There’s an odd bit I’m pretty sure is an error in the Oxford full score. The 2nd violins have a sixteenth rest at the end of measure 62 that should really be an A. I suspect that Sullivan asked the copyist to duplicate measure 58 in measure 62. In 62, the A is missing to facilitate the string crossing to the upper octave, but in 62, that’s no longer an issue. Probably your parts are correct; I’m not sure what is in the Oxford parts available for rental.

16.Free From His Fetters Grim

I like this aria much better than Faifax’s first act song. It has a wonderful melodic profile and a classic mock-bel-canto accompaniment.

The Oxford score has a half note and 2 eighths in the vocal part at measure 11, where the Schirmer vocal score has three quarters. There is nothing in the critical notes to explain the discrepancy. The Oxford score also reveals that there’s an error in the Public Domain parts. The woodwinds are tacet in the first verse from measure 3 through measure 22. The passages you hear are only for the second verse. Something the Oxford full score doesn’t explain is in measure 11, where the critical edition has a half note and 2 eighth notes in the vocal line, instead of the three quarters we find in the Schirmer score. 11 measures from the end, I recommend subdividing for the sake of clarity.  

17. Strange Adventure!

This is an exceptional Glee or Part song, which in Sullivan’s operas gets lumped slightly inaccurately into the Madrigal category. Sullivan was so good at writing this kind of music, and this is one of his very best. The orchestra serves only to make clear the key, and to correct the key after each verse if it has gone out of tune.

Pay attention to Sullivan’s delightful and specific dynamics and articulations and work hard to tune the piece; the delight is in the details, which allow the lyric to be as funny as the tune is beautiful.

18. Hark! What Was That Sir?

This musical scene is meant to come on the heels of the gunshot so quickly that Sullivan doesn’t bother with the pickup to the Tower Theme! It’s also an odd hybrid; a very dramatic scene that abruptly becomes an extended double patter song.

The Men’s chorus entrance turns out to be somewhat difficult to bring in. Rehearse it repeatedly from the beginning of the accompaniment pattern. (12th measure of A in Schirmer, A in Oxford) When the antiphonal passage begins, slowly work the melody while playing simplified chords underneath. When the women come in, play the downbeat chord, then the downbeat of the next measure and so forth until they hear how their melodies interact with the harmony. The men are not really echoing the ladies. It’s trickier than you think, so you’ll save yourself time starting there and learning it right the first time.

Your Wilfred may need to backphrase some of the patter to get the words out clearly. If that’s the case, the accompaniment should NOT slow down with him, and the chorus should not adjust to the slower speed. Take time to get both the notes and the dynamics when the chorus comes back in for “Down he dived into the river, it was very brave of him”

The stringendo before H in the Schirmer (before J in the Oxford) is great. Don’t miss it.

The tremolando passage has a detail that is awkwardly laid out in the Schirmer score at H. It looks as though the left hand drops down for the F natural and the E, then comes up for a measured set of sixteenths, but the whole 5 measure passage is really unmeasured tremolando, and those bass notes are pizzicato double bass punctuations, not part of any figure in the low strings.

The Oxford score has an extra three measures at the end. Cut 152-154 to get the Schirmer Vocal score version.

19. A Man Who Would Woo A Fair Maid

The melodic phrasing of this number is exquisite. Hopefully you have sensitive singers, as I did!

There is one rather tricky melodic contour that you will want to examine. As the melody begins for Fairfax and Elsie, it dips down again and again to E, as the top of the tune climbs up to the higher octave. Then the static parts of the tune are in the middle of the range, as the melody teases the TOP E. Two repeated phrases follow, and then the melody grounds the TOP E as the moving part becomes the G#, F#, E motion. It’s easy to mistake the last phrase as another version of the previous repeated section.

Don’t let the ends of these verses slow down too much, and if they happen to slow, pick it back up again in the instrumental passage before the chorus.

The phrase below shows how sophisticated Sullivan’s musical rhetoric is in the realm of melodic contour and phrase length.

I think it’s a wonderful effect to plan the breathing so as to connect ‘Jill’ with ‘If’, to underscore Sullivan’s felicitous extension of the phrase.

Be careful to manage the timing in the colla voce Pheobe has at the end of her verse. Remember that you have to bring the strings in with her.

The triple trill at the end is really great, and you’ll want to choose a manner of execution that suits all three singers and terminates properly. There is more than one way to do it.  

20. When A Wooer Goes A-wooing

This is a personal opinion, of course, but I think this lovely number suffers somewhat from being directly after a minor masterpiece. In order to help it speak, I think we have to note and emphasize its special charms. The key, I think is in Jack’s line, “Oh the happy days of doing”. We discover its function when we see how it’s paired with the horn. The idea sounds slightly Viennese to me, although I can’t think of an analogous example. The horn call leads us gently into the chorus, and I think it’s stylistically appropriate to give it a slight ritardando, provided we pick up the tempo again into the chorus itself. At first the Point-horn duet leads us into the chorus in the same key. Then it bridges us from the minor into the major mode out of Phoebe’s verse. Then finally, the horn plays the line without Jack out of Jack’s verse back into the chorus. This is in fact, Point’s number, and Gilbert has arranged the text so that each singer has a more rueful take on the happy days of doing. I don’t know if this was Gilbert’s original intention, but it’s remarkable that all four characters echo Jack’s suicidal cri de coeur. It strikes me as out of character for Fairfax to consider Jack’s pain and for Phoebe to recognize Jack’s stake in the situation at all. It must be one of those moments where the logic of the choral moment supersedes the logic of the drama itself.

Appreciate the chromatic descending passage under Jack’s “Food for fishes”, which sounds like a body drifting to the bottom of a river. Make the most of Sullivan’s accents and the hairpin dynamics at the top of the phrase. Then note that Sullivan is getting quieter and quieter, as though the piece were turning into a miniature. And once again, Sullivan papers over the possibility of applause by underscoring their exits so that they are offstage when the music stops.

An earlier version of this post suggested there was a grammatical error in Jack’s line: “Jester wishes he was dead”, but a kind grammarian has set me straight. ‘Was’ is correct. 

21. Rapture, Rapture

I read somewhere that someone took Gilbert to task for writing the word ‘coyful’. “How can anyone be full of coy?”

To which Gilbert apparently replied:

“I don’t know, but for that matter how can anyone be full of bash?”

It’s interesting to me that Sullivan didn’t raise an objection to a number like this coming directly before the end of the opera, since this kind of number had become a mannerism in their work. Perhaps he did and Gilbert got the last word. One of the reasons it strikes me as so old-school Gilbert and Sullivan is that the rhymes and gestures are very similar to their earliest surviving work: The Sorcerer. Sgt. Meryll and Dame Carruthers are suddenly and unexpectedly John Wellington Wells and Lady Sangazure . 

You will perhaps have some difficulty choosing the ideal tempo here. Faster is better in terms of breathing for the patter, but slower is better in terms of the dancing. Pay attention to the singers and attend the blocking rehearsal to advocate for a space to recover from the dancing and singing.

22. SECOND ACT FINALE: Comes The Pretty Young Bride

From the piano score alone, you’d miss the lovely rustling flutes that continue the sixteenth notes in through the choral entrance here. Again, I think you’d be silly not to use the Altos here, even though Sullivan indicates only Sopranos. The phrasing in this melody is unusual, especially at the ‘love and obey’, for which your ladies will certainly need a strong sense of the beat.

The trio of the ladies is a marvel. The simplicity of the string line underneath is intentional. Note their dynamic is not always the same as the women’s. The Oxford edition clarifies that the forte dynamic for the women properly belongs at the first ‘with happiness’, right where the strings say sempre piano. At letter C in the Oxford full score (10 before C in Schirmer Score) make sure the chorus tenors and basses are really watching, and tell the horns and violas to really play out. It’s tough to establish that new tempo with so little going on.

The free for all at “Oh Day of Terror” is one of the more difficult fracases in the G&S canon. The tenors can get their B flat by moving a half step down from Elsie’s last pitch, but the G of the other singers takes a lot of drilling to land in tune. The Sopranos need to keep their half steps small in these phrases or the E at the next downbeat will tend quite flat. For the record, in the Schirmer score, Phoebe is the higher of the two lines on the same stave, Carruthers the lower. The C# line for the Lieutenant, Meryll and Wilfred is hard for the singers to hear, because it’s a tritone away from the G sung by Kate, Carruthers, and the Sopranos, Altos, and Basses of the chorus. It’s also hard for the audience to hear because it’s so low in their range. The extremely fast passage in the fourth measure is nearly impossible at the speed that seems sensible for the rest of the chorus and orchestra. If you feel ambitious, budget a lot of time to work that section, but it is indeed a lot of work for something likely to get lost in the shuffle of a general melee. If you elect to omit it, you will be none the worse for wear. 

Elsie’s last great solo here is substantial enough to offset her lack of a proper second aria. It is easy to get carried away on the piano and miss the essence of what’s happening here, a very quiet, hushed accompaniment, leading to a well timed crescendo from piano to forte in 2 measures, and then a further crescendo to fortissimo in the following 2 measures. It should feel like walking on eggshells until the crescendo, and then it opens out into a big glorious moment. There’s an odd difficulty in measure 126 if your soprano is taking liberties with the timing of this passage. (as I think she should) It comes down to how the flutes and first violins are bowed/slurred in opposition to the soprano word division, where she really should breathe. It’s slurred this way in the vocal score as well. If you tell the first flute and the first violins to watch and listen carefully, you may just manage to get it clean. Otherwise, I recommend you alter the instrumental slurring to match Elsie’s.

The choral passage that follows the duet is pretty standard, except for one detail you may miss. The orchestra drops to nothing abruptly in the second beat of the last measure of the chorus, but the chorus keeps on with their forte dynamic until the end of the note. They likely will do this anyway until the orchestra joins, and then they may be startled by the lack of accompanimental support. 

The reprise of I Have A Song To Sing O! Is at a much slower tempo than before until at least Elsie’s verse, if not later. The Oxford score has an animato at what is rehearsal J in the Schirmer score. There is also a crucial lyric change that did not make it into the Schirmer score. Elsie sings:

It’s the song of a merry maid nestling near

Who loved her lord but who dropped a tear.

This is a far less callous thing for her to sing at the conclusion of the opera.

Add your first sopranos to the melody line at the top of 236 in the Schirmer score, as they are in Act I. It appears so in the Oxford edition, and seems to be an oversight in the Schirmer. As I mentioned before, this is where you want the chorus to sing Ah instead of Oo, I think. (although Oo is what Sullivan wrote)

Your Orchestra:

With modern musicals I sometimes counsel music directors not to hire all the players, but with G&S, you’re dealing with a true orchestral color, so I think it best to hire as much of the orchestra as you can afford with good players. The original orchestrations are available here at a reasonable price or here for free. Reductions can be found here and here and here, but I’ll wager the best one is probably this one.

This score is the first of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to have a third trombone and a second bassoon. Sullivan uses these to spectacular effect throughout. The third trombone allows the brass section to have a full bass sound with no admixture of Bassoon, which is critically important for the principal motif of the piece, where a bassoon doesn’t pack the right punch. The second bassoon is less critical, but still masterfully employed, both as it helps make an imitation choir of 4 french horns, (to spectacular effect in the Act I finale) and as it combines with the other woodwinds in a much more varied palate. With the smaller orchestra, Sullivan would often put the oboe above 2 clarinets and the bassoon for a reedy texture with 3 timbres. But here, he can combine clarinets and bassoons in 4 parts, (which he does frequently) and occasionally make a three part texture with the oboe, for a completely double reed timber with no clarinet admixture. He also writes pedal tones in octaves in the woodwinds, an effect unavailable to him before, since a clarinet at the octave on the pedal is too distant a tonal combination to read correctly to the ear. In the first act trio, the bassoons play a wonderful game of leapfrog in a range and dexterity unavailable to any other instrument in the orchestra.

If your company is used to hiring the standard sized orchestra for G&S, you’ll have to shell out some extra money for the extra two players. You can’t really just elect not to use the extra players, and go with the standard size, because important lines are covered there. If you use a reduction, it will cut out more than those 2 players.

Better that you do G&S than that you ignore it, but do try and do it properly if at all possible, with Sullivan’s magnificent orchestration in full color! Have fun with your production of Yeomen! I will be including more G&S as I music direct them! Ruddigore appears to be next!

Edmond W. Rickett

Last week I wrote about Gilbert and Sullivan Vocal Score editor Bryceson Treharne. Today I will bring you information about the other Schirmer G&S editor, Edmond W. Rickett, who edited Patience, Ruddigore, Yeomen, and The Gondoliers. Like Treharne, he was born in the UK and emigrated to the US in the early years of the 20th century. Like Treharne, he was an accomplished pianist, organist and composer who seemed to have enjoyed working with amateurs and had an ear for the poetic. But whereas Bryceson Treharne had spent his young adult years looking for truth in literature and doggedly composing in a German prison camp, Rickett was a working music director who collaborated briefly with W.S. Gilbert himself. As we will see, he had a great deal to say about the experience. From the beginning, we see Rickett combing through old music, often rearranging it for use in a production. And as a composer, he seems to have been very interested in tailoring his music for performer and audience.
Edmond William Rickett was born in 1869 in Birmingham, England about 10 years before Treharne. I found no information about his early childhood. Bryceson Treharne had studied at the Royal College of Music, but Rickett studied at the Royal Academy of Music, the oldest conservatory in the UK. To those of us on this side of the pond, this is somewhat confusing. Arthur Sullivan studied at the Royal Academy of Music and was briefly the principal at the National Training School for Music, which later was reconstituted as the Royal College of Music. So both institutions have a Sullivan connection.
I had difficulty tracking down any information about his school years, except that he seems to have gotten married to a student named Alice Hastilow in 1895. They would have two children, Harold (b. 1896) and Helen Margaret (Peggy). The trail picks up considerably right at the turn of the century, when for about a decade, Rickett became the music director for the Garrick Theatre on the West End. His young wife played in the orchestra with him. In his capacity as Music Director, he worked with the finest actors of the early century and wrote incidental music for many Shakespeare plays.

The Garrick Theatre around the time Rickett was music director

For our purposes though, we want to focus on his time in 1904 writing music for the last full length play W.S. Gilbert ever wrote, The Fairy’s Dilemma.

In April 1934, Rickett told the New York Times about his association with Gilbert:
“My task was to provide an overture, a ballet, and much ‘incidental music’ all of which was to be selected either from the music of the sixties or in the manner of that period. The play was based upon that old-fashioned ‘harlequinade’ which is the traditional epilogue of the English Christmas pantomime- an entertainment, which, I may say for the benefit of the uninstructed, is more in the nature of a ‘revue’ and which has traveled a long and disastrous road away from its pantomimic origins.
I instituted a sort of house-to-house search of the old-established music-publishing firms, and I shall not forget Gilbert’s delight when at last I dug out of a dust-covered shelf in Charing Cross Road a parcel of long -forgotten melodies which included such gems as ‘Champagne Charlie’, ‘Villikins and his Dinah’, and others of the sort, which formed the basis of the music of the piece. Nor shall I forget the first night. I never before or since saw in a theatre such a concourse of gray-beards and bald heads. I can only suppose that the gathering consisted of all those old admirers of Gilbert and Sullivan who had followed their work from their first association more than thirty years before. Never were there such rapturous receptions of mere tunes as those old songs received. Indeed the eclat of that first night could only be equaled by the puzzled silence of their reception by subsequent audiences, who had not the least idea what they were or why they were.
Gilbert, at any rate, was pleased, and later asked me to write some music for his brilliant little skit on Hamlet entitled, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the occasion being a benefit performance for some charity, in which performance all the parts were taken by well-known dramatic authors. Gilbert himself played the King; Captain Marshall, the author of that delightful comedy, “A Royal Family” played Hamlet, while our own American Writer, Madeleine Lucette Ryley played Ophelia. Afterward I received a charming note assuring me that much of the success of the play was due to my ‘charming music’ which was very gratifying, but quite untrue. This fact remains: that for some reason- perhaps my devotion to the antiquarian research work above mentioned- I was one of the very few people who ever ‘got on’ with W.S. Gilbert.
It must be regrettably admitted that he was not easy. I had ample opportunity during rehearsals of studying his methods, and to tell the truth, they were not endearing; in fact, I soon came to comprehend why he was probably the most dreaded director in London- for he invariably directed personally and autocratically the production of his own plays and operas. Nor does this apply merely to the spoken word. He planned the scenery, the lighting and ordered not only the groupings of the chorus, but practically every inflection of the voice and every gesture of the actors. And there was no argument and no appeal from his decision. And when I add that he was invariably right, and in the habit of telling you that he was, one may imagine that he was not exactly loved.
His faculty for composing stage pictures was extraordinary, as anyone who remembers the Savoy productions will agree. Those charming groups of girls in ‘The Mikado’ so blended with the composition of the scenic background as to form a new and delightful picture with each change of pose, the masterly handling of large groups as in the combination of peers and fairies in ‘Iolanthe’, that never to be forgotten scene of the fight in Princess Ida- all were his and his alone. As to the poor downtrodden actor; I recall the sad fate of that very clever performer O.B. Clarence. ‘O.B.’ had made a name for himself in old man parts, but for some reason Gilbert had selected him to play the young curate in The Fairy’s Dilemma. The rehearsals were one long agony for him. At every sentence, nay, every word, he was pulled up with: “No, Mr. Clarence, too feeble. Please be a little manly.” Or: Mr. Clarence, will you please try to remember that you are not playing a doddering old imbecile.” And to me, aside, “These actors! I chose that young man because I thought he would be teachable. God knows I don’t expect intelligence.” Which was quite unfair, because “O.B.” was really an extremely clever actor, if perhaps a little unadaptable.
As to Gilbert’s autocratic manner, I remember a day when for about three hours he had the company repeating one short scene until every one was utterly weary, and the words had lost completely any meaning they might be supposed to possess. At last, when, for perhaps the thirtieth time, the author said, “We’ll go through again, please” the actor-manager Arthur Bourchier stepped forward and said, “If you don’t mind, Gilbert, I’d rather not do that any more now; let’s get on to the next scene.” “Very well!” said, Gilbert, and without a word picked up his hat and cane and marched gloomily out of the theatre. Whereupon the business manager was sent hastily out with humble apologies, and the assurance that there was not the least thought of opposing his authority. So he came back, majestically, and continued to rehearse the same scene for another hour.

Bourchier, looking terrifying in The Fairy Dilemma

The very appearance of Gilbert was forbidding at these rehearsals, even terrifying to his victims. He was tall, with a florid complexion and a drooping moustache and- at these times- he wore a general expression of complete and utter disgust for the whole business and a very thorough contempt for his human material. However, when we came to the period of dress rehearsals, he professed himself satisfied, sat back in the orchestra surrounded by a bevy of ladies invited by himself, and to the huge relief of everybody, proffered not one word of criticism. On the first night, throughout the performance, he stalked gloomily up and down and would talk to no one.
It will be gathered from the foregoing that the mental picture one has of W.S. Gilbert as the leading fun-maker of his day was not ever present in the minds of those who worked with him. Still, that is just what he was, and the tales of his caustic repartees are many, and so good that they have been often repeated and credited to many other wits. It was Gilbert, for example, who, when asked by Tree how he liked his “Hamlet” replied, “Oh, I like it Tree. Fun, without vulgarity!” It is told also that once he met F. C. Burnand, who was chosen as editor of Punch in preference to himself, and said to him: “You must have some uncommonly clever and funny things sent to you for insertion in your paper, Burnand. Burnand answered, “Why, yes, we do. You’d die laughing if you could see some of them” Said Gilbert, “Well, why don’t you put ‘em in?” And one could go on indefinitely.

F.C. Burnand is now best known as the librettist of Cox and Box

The tragedy of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership was that neither of them ever realized how completely dependent on each other they were. Hence an endless squabble which, at last, not even the diplomacy of D’Oyly Carte could prevent coming to a final rupture. Afterward, they both had some disappointing experiences. Sullivan produced ‘Beauty Stone’ at the Savoy, and it failed; Gilbert wrote several comic operas with other composers and achieved only one comparative success, this being the delightful ‘The Mountebanks” with music by Alfred Cellier- an opera which, one would think, it would pay some enterprising manager to revive. Only together could they achieve success, and as ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’ they have become, and will remain two of the really great figures of stage history. ”
There is a letter from Gilbert to Rickett written in 1904 that is in the Morgan Library that I have not been able to access. Perhaps one of you will be able to visit and see what it says, and if it is in fact the letter he mentions in this interview.
In 1910, in his early 40s, he moved to the US to become the director of the music faculty at the Bennett School for Girls in South Millbrook, New York. The Bennett School’s main building was designed as a luxury hotel and retreat, but the hotel closed in 1901. 7 years later, the Bennett school moved into the facility.

Bennett School in 1910

I have no way of knowing why he chose to migrate, but a few years later on faculty at the Bennett school were the mystical Christian pacifist playwright Charles Rann Kennedy and his wife, the actress Edith Wynne Matthison, both of whom he had worked with professionally in London. They seem to have arrived at the school just as he was leaving in 1918 or 1919, and Rickett’s musical replacement was another young English composer; Horace Middleton. So there seems to have been an English connection to the school.

The setting was idyllic. Rickett must have performed programs in this hall:

Which now looks like this:

The school has been closed since the 1970s, and is now a very frightening ruin much admired by abandoned building enthusiasts! But at the time, these picturesque surroundings must have inspired Rickett, because he wrote a lovely poem that was printed in Harper’s Magazine in 1911.

Rickett’s position gave him a reason to write for young people, which led to the composition of some wonderful music. His Twenty Nursery Rhymes Set To New Tunes was published by Oliver Ditson in 1911.
One reviewer wrote, “If all musical works for the use of children were as good as Twenty Nursery Rhymes Set to New Tunes, the work of the reviewer would be much more pleasant.”
In 1916 the songs were recorded on Victor by the prominent American singer Kitty Cheatham:

In 1913, Rickett wrote music for a Fairy Tale Play of Snow White, which was subsequently performed by many amateur organizations.
The inspiration of nature is also evident in a piece he wrote for the commencement exercises in 1914 called “A Masque of Spring”, for children’s voices and a small chamber ensemble. The piece included dances and was ultimately published by Schirmer. The advertising for the school around this time emphasized how beautiful the area was in the winter, and the story of this masque involved the progression of Winter into Spring.
Rickett felt at home enough to become a US citizen with his family in 1917. He appears to have gotten a divorce in 1918.
Following his divorce, (it seems to have been around 1919) Rickett moved to New York and began to connect with a circle of people who were interested in bringing high culture to the Lower East Side, or rather, to bring high culture out of the Lower East Side. The group had recently opened the Neighborhood Playhouse, where they offered dance and drama training to children and teenagers. Rickett joined the faculty of the Henry Street Settlement and of Yvette Guilbert’s school of the theatre and allied arts, teaching the chorus and becoming Guilbert’s regular recital accompanist. Guilbert was a French Cabaret singer and actress who had been the subject of Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster works. He researched music history for her, in particular for her Medieval programs. In 1926, he completed 2 volumes of French songs with Ms. Guilbert that were published by Heugel. The Neighborhood Playhouse had wanted to respond to World War I with an ambitious theatrical event called Salut au Monde inspired by the words of Walt Whitman, and they had commissioned a score by Charles T. Griffes.

Charles T. Griffes

When Griffes died at the age of 36 in 1920, Rickett completed the score to Griffes’s Salut au Monde, which was ultimately presented in 1922. Rickett’s completion is disapproved of by Griffes scholars and enthusiasts, but it must be remembered that he was trying to assemble enough music for a theatrical event, and Griffes had not completed very much music. Rickett remarried actress and playwright Joanna Roos, (32 years his junior) who had attended Yvette Guilbert’s schools in New York and Paris, where she and Rickett met. The two appeared together in The Grand Street Follies of 1927.

Rickett’s second wife Joanna Roos

In 1923, Rickett had another son, Peter, who attended Juilliard and became a conductor, helming the Greenville Symphony for 34 years.
Edmond Rickett spent some time in the late 20s producing and acting in some plays in New York, receiving the following review in the New York Times for his small part in the play Stigma in 1927:
“Mr. Rickett and Mr. Duff, who are also the producers, make little of their parts”

Roos also appeared in Stigma.
In 1930, now in his early 60s, Rickett finally and firmly connected with the Gilbert and Sullivan community. He began a long association with the Blue Hill Troupe, which was at that point only a few years old. Rickett’s arrival seems to have coincided with a new stability in the company. The Blue Hill Troupe had first performed HMS Pinafore on the deck of a yacht lit by automobile headlights in 1924, but moved to New York in 1926. They did not perform in 1929. In 1930 they elected a Board of Directors and performed The Pirates of Penzance. In 1937 Rickett would lead the company in the second production of The Grand Duke in the U.S. (the Savoy Company, which I conduct, performed the third U.S. production the following year)
The thirties proved to be a very productive decade for Rickett.
In 1933, Rickett wrote a score to Moliere’s The School for Husbands, based on 16th and 17th century airs which was produced by The Theatre Guild, two years after they produced Green Grow the Lilacs and two years before they produced Porgy and Bess.

In 1935, he became Organist and Choirmaster at Church-in-the-Gardens Forest Hills, Queens, where, among many anthems, he set The Lord’s Prayer to music in a way that delighted the parishioners. Some of these anthems were published by Schirmer. I was unable to find a photograph of Rickett that I could verify was in fact him, but I found this description from one churchgoer during this time:
“He was a short, somewhat stocky man, with grey hair and glasses without frames.”
He would continue to play multiple services at this church well into his 80s.

Around 1940, Rickett wrote a book with Blue Hill Troupe director Benjamin T. Hoogland called Let’s Do Some Gilbert & Sullivan: A Practical Production Handbook, which did for Gilbert and Sullivan companies in the mid-20th century what I’ve been trying to do in my own modest way with this blog. Rickett’s authority at that time was extremely high, having known and worked with Gilbert, having worked both at the highest professional level, and with amateurs, and having a great deal of experience with the operas themselves. The book has held up very well. Each Gilbert and Sullivan operetta is covered in chapters that describe the relative levels of difficulty for every role and potential pitfalls for production. The general advice at the end of the book is fabulous, and includes the following note about watching the fellow down front:

“Watch the conductor. After all he is there to conduct you as well as the orchestra and its really better to let him do so. You need not stare at him–a little practice in keeping his baton in the corner of your field of vision will suffice. The spectacle of an enthusiastic chorus taking the bit between its teeth and galloping gaily all over the musical score is undoubtedly exciting, but has not yet been known to soothe the ear.”

I can’t be sure, but I believe it must have been around this time that Rickett made orchestral reductions of The Gondoliers, HMS Pinafore, Iolanthe, The Mikado, Patience, The Pirates of Penzance, Princess Ida, The Sorcerer, Trial By Jury, Utopia Limited and The Yeomen of the Guard for G. Schirmer. These allowed companies to perform the scores with smaller orchestras. It strikes me that he may have tried these reductions out with the Blue Hill Troupe. Ironically the only surviving G&S operas he seems not to have reduced were Ruddigore and The Grand Duke.
And so after the death of Bryceson Treharne in 1948, there was no person in America better suited to edit the last four Schirmer vocal scores than the octogenarian Rickett, who did yeoman’s work completing the Schirmer set.
He died in 1956 at the home of his daughter Helen Margaret Ramsperger in Madison Wisconsin at the age of 88.

I was able to piece together quite a lot of information about Mr. Rickett. If I’ve missed important information or have somehow mis-characterized any facts here, please let me know, and I’ll do my level best to correct it!

Richard Rodgers Part 2: Turnarounds

Bryceson Treharne

The G. Schirmer Vocal Scores of the major Gilbert and Sullivan works are in every enthusiast’s library. At the first rehearsal of nearly every production of the 9 most popular G&S operettas all over the English speaking world, the singers open their Schirmer scores, some brand new, some yellowed with age, and on the title page, they see one of two names:

OR

 

Treharne edited Trial, Pinafore, Pirates, Iolanthe, and Mikado.

Rickett edited Patience, Ruddigore, Yeomen, and Gondoliers.

(Schirmer never released editions of The Sorcerer, Princess Ida, Utopia Limited, or The Grand Duke.) 

In this editorial capacity, Treharne and Rickett are surely two of the most significant figures in Gilbert and Sullivan of the 20th century. It turns out they also led extraordinary lives.

Today I’ll tell you what I discovered about the editor of the five most popular scores: a brilliant musician who had a passion for amateur theatre and a man whose experience in the First World War would define his entrance into the American musical scene. I will cover the equally fascinating Rickett next week. 

Bryceson Treharne was born in Merthyr Tydfil, 23 miles north of Cardiff in Southern Wales, either in 1877 or 1879, about the time Gilbert and Sullivan were writing their first successful pieces together. He displayed musical talent early, working with the organist Thomas Westlake Morgan. Bryceson started studying music seriously at the age of 12 and became an accomplished pianist and organist with a mop of unruly hair. At the age of 16, he won the Erard Scholarship, which paid for three years tuition to the Royal College of Music in London and the loan of an Erard grand piano. In his case, the scholarship was extended by a year. The audition required him to play Beethoven’s 3rd piano sonata, a Chopin piece of his choice, and to sight read for the judges. Preliminary rounds were held in 12 cities, and the finals were held in London.  He must have been an exceptionally fine pianist.

At the Royal College of Music, Treharne studied with some of the greatest English musicians of his time. He studied organ with Walter Parratt, who was Master of the Queen’s Musick for Queen Victoria. Parratt was a genius who could sight read complicated organ music while simultaneously playing chess. Treharne studied piano with Franklin Taylor, who had worked with Clara Schumann, and he also worked with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. His classmates would have included a young Gustav Holst, John Ireland, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Like many of his countrymen, Treharne then went to Europe to study in Paris, Milan, and Munich, finally returning to Wales to teach at Aberystwyth University College from 1900-1901. He had music published in Aberystwyth, but he must have been restless, because in 1901, at the age of 22 (?) he moved to Australia to take a teaching position in Adelaide at the Elder Conservatorium.

In Australia, he played recitals of Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, and Bach, he preached a ‘sermon’ on Brahms, and he met Muriel Matters, who would become an important activist for women’s suffrage. The two of them would later be romantically linked and briefly engaged, but the match was a poor one. Matters biographers speculate that Treharne’s ideas about women were not progressive. They clearly shared a great interest in the latest developments in poetry and music. (Please do yourself a favor and spend some time looking into Muriel Matters)

Bryceson Treharne  was fascinated by the latest developments in the world of drama. In 1902 he started a discussion group for students interested in singing, literature, and drama, and in October, Muriel Matters read Tennyson’s Enoch Arden while he accompanied with a score written for the poem by Richard Strauss. At that time, the score was only 5 years old. Years of literary and dramatic exploration in Treharne’s class culminated on September 24, 1908 with a performance of Shaw’s Man of Destiny, and Yeats’ Land of Heart’s Desire. Interest was immediate and overwhelming, and soon a fledgling theatrical company had over 500 subscribers paying 5 shillings a year for two tickets. He advocated strongly for the importance of theatre, writing in 1912:

“I hold that the theatre is a public need; that its status is of vital concern to the community; and that in Australia at present it is not fulfilling its functions.”

He railed against melodrama and Music Hall productions, insisting that Ibsen and Shaw would clean the air of ignorance. He produced more than 80 plays, writing music for many of them, and then in 1911 Treharne returned to England. Some of the sources I found indicated he was on a sabbatical (from which he would never return). The company he started, the Adelaide Repertory Theatre is still in operation. It is, in fact, the longest surviving amateur theatre company in the Southern Hemisphere.

In 1912, Treharne went to Berlin to work with Gordon Craig, an English Modernist director and innovator then working in Germany. He spent time in Milan, Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. 1914 turned out to be a momentous year. He married Maud Thackeray, a soprano. Then in July, he went to Munich to see the Wagner Festspiel, intending to go on to the Salzburg Mozart Festival. He did not anticipate the outbreak of the Great War, and was detained in Lindau, with a group of English tourists, moving on to Kempten, and finally to Ruhleben, a prison camp converted from a horse racing facility west of Berlin. Maud was released and went to London to work for her husband’s release. 

The paintings of the camp here are by Nico Jungmann, another inmate.

“At first conditions were appalling,” Mr. Treharne said in an interview for Musical America. “There was not even a blanket to be had and we slept on the ground. Then, finally, we were given one blanket each; much later beds were provided, and prisoners were allowed to receive packages of food from home, but for the first six months we subsisted largely on acorn coffee- without milk and sugar- and prison bread. It was not the regulation ‘war bread,’ which is largely composed of rye and potato flour, but contained chopped straw and sand, to which the rye and potato flour was added. The sand got in one’s teeth in shocking fashion,”

His interviewer asked him why the bread contained sand. Treharne continued:

“Because, to comply with the requirements of international law, the bread served to prisoners had to be of a standard weight, and the straw was added for bulk. Once a week we got rice, for which we were very grateful, but the greater part of our meals consisted of the acorn coffee, prison bread and soup made from boiled cabbage or turnips; meat was a rarity. We were marched down to the kitchens to get our portion of acorn coffee at seven o’clock in the morning, then we were marched back to barrack before we were allowed to drink it; sometimes we were delayed a half hour in reforming in fours to march back, so the coffee was not very hot by the  time we got a chance at it. In some of the lofts in the stables at Ruhleben where we were held, there were from 250 men to 300 men; they were crowded so closely that it was impossible to lie on one’s back in sleeping, there was just room to lie on one’s side. Men with all sorts of ailments were crowded in together. There was one especially shocking case of tuberculosis, but finally we had a change of doctors and the new physician sent the man at once to a sanitarium. He was exchanged later and died shortly after reaching England.

“Our chief hardships came from the brutality of the guards who seemed to delight in ‘taking out’ their personal hatred of the English directly on us. Another hardship was in being refused all visitors, but we were allowed to receive and send letters. The English prisoners owe a very real debt of gratitude to Ambassador Gerard, for conditions became much better after he interested himself in our behalf.

“Yet, in spite of all the hardships and discomforts, I found Ruhleben a good place in which to work. One becomes very active mentally on a limited diet. It really seems to act as a spur; one’s head becomes clear and the amount of mental labor which can be performed under such conditions is quite surprising. Then the setting was ideal. Off on one side was a green, rolling forest. I never tired of gazing at it and it was no end of an inspiration to composition.

“We had plenty of music in camp at all times. A really fine orchestra was organized among the prisoners and we gave many concerts; once we presented the ‘Messiah‘ with a male choir, a very interesting innovation.”

Eventually the camp wore him down to the point where his health deteriorated, and he experienced a complete physical collapse. He was finally included among 150 men to be exchanged for German prisoners, but no papers of any kind were allowed to leave the camp. Treharne had written almost two hundred songs in the camp, one act of an opera set in Japan, and some orchestral pieces, so he begged the censor to use his influence to make an exception, and when the exception was granted, all the material was eventually sent to him in England. He returned to England by train on December 7, 1915.

Considering that Treharne would one day edit the standard vocal score of The Mikado, two details about his time at Ruhleben are startling. The Japanese opera Treharne was working on had a libretto by the Japanese Art critic Okakura Kakuzo, who spent his career exploring and contextualizing the intersection of Japanese and Western culture. According to press accounts following his release from the camp, Treharne made no attempt to imitate Japanese music. Without access to the opera itself, we can at least remark on how forward thinking Treharne’s approach seems to have been, in collaborating with a Japanese librettist, and in not attempting to mimic Japanese musical content.

The second, and more remarkable thing that happened at Ruhleben involved the many musicians interned there who organized a musical society. Treharne was a charter member, as was Canadian conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan. A group of these musicians worked to reconstruct from memory the scores of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, to be performed in an improvised theatre under the grandstands with men in the female roles and with orchestral accompaniment. The first Gilbert and Sullivan they performed was a makeshift Trial by Jury, but the year Treharne’s health collapsed they were preparing and performing their second Gilbert and Sullivan operetta: The Mikado, complete with parody lyrics about the camp:

The footballer who kicks the ball

beyond the outer track

And then yells to some pedestrian

To go and fetch it back

And the people who in concerts

Will chatter to their pals

Or the choir of youthful

Cherubim that sing the madrigals

And the man who comes to see the camp

And says, “Wie schön es ist!”

He never would be missed”

MacMillan offered this lyric in a talk to the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Toronto, explaining  that the words referred to a madrigal choir had been formed, and that the last reference was to the Herbert Bury, Anglican bishop of Northern Europe who had been allowed to visit prison camps to see the state of things and had returned to England with a glowing report. The company would later put on Yeomen, Gondoliers, and Pirates, with all male casts.

Imagine the future editor of The Mikado, seriously undernourished from eating sand in a German prison camp, working on his own Japanese Opera while his countrymen rack their brains to remember the details of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Japanese fantasy, a score they’d played a thousand times. It must have been like a fever dream.

When Treharne returned to England with nearly 200 songs in tow, he found the wartime atmosphere unenthusiastic about new music, and soon moved to America in 1916. Here he proved an appealingly romantic figure, accompanying Louis Graveure in an evening of his own songs in Aeolean Hall in New York in 1917, the year his son Frank was born.

It was also in 1917 that at singers began recording his song Mother, My Dear. The best of the 9 recordings of the song made between 1917 and 1926 was this one, made by John McCormack: (apologies for the graphic)

In 1919, his most popular work, Corals was printed. It shows Treharne strongly in the tradition of his contemporary Roger Quilter. It has appeared in a prominent anthology, and is sung beautifully here by Kayla Collingwood.

Following the teens, the enthusiasm for Treharne’s music seems to have faded. He taught from 1924-1928 at McGill University in Montreal, then in 1928 moved to Boston to become a music editor. From the late 1920s through the following decade, Treharne wrote Operettas for schools and three cantatas. One of those cantatas, The Banshee had some popularity, receiving a major performance in his native Wales. He became the Music director of The Boston Music Company, a branch of G. Schirmer. Under the pseudonym Chester Wallis, he made simplified piano versions of all the great composers for students. 

Since most of the earlier Schirmer Gilbert and Sullivan Piano Vocal scores have no copyright date, it is difficult to know when or even in what order they were released, but they were without doubt the fruition of a lifetime of Treharne’s interactions with the greatest music of the past and with his own time, his passion for the literature of the stage, prepared with the care of a music educator who loved introducing regular people to great literature and music.

He left behind his wife Maud and a son, Anthony Francis (Frank) when he died on February 4, 1948 in Long Island.

I’ve done my best to provide accurate and complete information above. If you have access to more complete information or if I’ve made errors, please contact me and I’ll make a correction. 

She Loves Me: A Rough Guide for the M.D.

Before You Start:

1. Listen to the 1963 original cast album with Barbara Cook. This is truly the definitive version. Listen to the 1993 revival with Boyd Gaines and Sally Mayes. Avoid the most recent revival, not because it’s bad, but because it’s a different orchestration, and if your production team gets those ideas in their head, you will wind up doing more work. If you want some major nerd points, listen to this crazy 1964 Original London Cast
2. Watch The Shop Around The Corner (1940) with Jimmy Stewart. Even though the show is purportedly based on the original play, the authors really based the show on the film. Masteroff even claimed he never read the play, although Harnick did. Watch You’ve Got Mail (1998) with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It has some nods to The Shop Around The Corner in it, which is fun. Watch In the Good Old Summertime (1949) with Judy Garland. And watch this little gem, a 1978 filmed version for the BBC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db_HreIe5pY  At the end there is a terrific interview with Bock, Harnick, and Barbara Cook that I quote in a few places in this blog.
3. If you have access to inter-library loan, or a few extra bucks to spend, grab To Broadway, To Life!: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick by Philip Lambert. This book is just wonderful; extremely well researched and sourced, with great insight into the score and the genesis of the work that can’t be found elsewhere. I am tempted to quote the chapter on She Loves Me extensively, but I encourage you instead to seek out the book itself and read the chapter.

Some Background:

She Loves Me is a perennial favorite among true devotees of musical theatre: It doesn’t enjoy a high name recognition among audiences, but among connoisseurs, it is widely considered one of the best constructed musicals ever written. New York Times Reviewer Frank Rich, for example says that the first time he ever walked out of a Broadway musical was when he left another play to rush over and catch part of the original production of “She Loves Me” one last time after it had posted its closing notice.

Since She Loves Me opened, reviewers have fallen all over themselves comparing the musical to food:

Richard P. Cooke wrote

“It is as nice a dish of its kind as a theatergoer is likely to get for a long time.”

Leonard Hoffman called it a

“warm, appealing story dripping of sentimentality like a chocolate drop.”

Howard Taubman wrote,

“A bonbon of a musical has been put on display, and it should delight who knows how many a sweet tooth. She Loves Me has been assembled by confectioners… they have found the right ingredients of sugar and raisins and nuts to add to their fluffy dough and have created a taste surprise.”

George Oppenheimer called it a

‘rich plum cake’,

Henry Hughes said it was

‘filled with all the rich Mittel-European pastry-stuffing of a bygone day.

John Chapman called it a

‘delicious pastry decorated with wonderful intricate dabs and curls of musical frosting’

Ben Brantley called it

“a tasty tale of love lost and found at the workplace”

Maybe the reviewers are clueing in to something Harnick himself was thinking. He said that converting the story into song was “like looking at a raisin cake and plucking out pieces of fruit.”

When people aren’t calling She Loves Me a dessert, they’re praising its jewel-box craftsmanship and elegance:

John Chapman wrote that She Loves Me is

“so charming, so deft, so light, and so right that all the other music-shows in the big Broadway shops look like clodhoppers.”

Whitney Bolton wanted to put it

“under a glass bell and look at [it] with pleasure for a long time”

Norman Nadel called it

“that rare theatrical jewel, an intimate musical that affectionately enfolds an audience instead of shouting it down.”

In 1993, John Simon wrote in a review in New York Magazine:

“The creators of She Loves Me have fashioned the perfect intimate musical. (Perfect? Yes, damn it, perfect)”

Jesse Green managed to combine both threads in two adjacent sentences in his Vulture review:

“I’ve seen She Loves Me, that nearly perfect 1963 jewel box, only four times — it’s not often done professionally — but have listened to the sublime OCR over and over for years. In some ways I know its voice better than I know my own, having learned to hear the world, in part, through its witty, melancholy, and whipped-cream accents.”

To the point we’ll explore in a moment, theatre historian Stanley Green said that She Loves Me

“…will stand as a model in its use of songs as an indispensable adjunct to the plot.”

And yet the original production closed comparatively quickly. As bookwriter Joe Masteroff put it:

“She Loves Me has probably gotten the best reviews of any show I’ve ever written. Reviews constantly would come in from all over the country from distinguished critics; ‘This is the best musical I’ve ever seen.’ It was astonishing because nobody was coming to see it.”

Why does this little musical, which only ran a little over 300 performances, command so much respect? I think it boils down to the extraordinary level of integration, made even more singular by Bock and Harnick’s unusual method of writing, which I’ll explain below. The way the songs function in She Loves Me illuminates character and moves plot forward in extraordinary and specific ways.

But first, some key concepts from the late Golden Age:

Experimentation, Adventurousness, and Opera

The late 1950s through the early 1960s saw the flowering of great ambition and adventurous experimentation on Broadway.  Writers had been flirting with Opera, as Rodgers and Hammerstein did writing roles for opera singers, starting in 1949 casting Ezio Pinza in South Pacific and then Helen Traubel in 1955’s Pipe Dream. Leonard Bernstein was thinking operatically for Candide in 1956 with his wacky American take on European operetta, just as Frank Loesser did that same year writing The Most Happy Fella for opera singer Robert Weede. That score is partly in Italian, and has very little dialogue.

In that spirit, She Loves Me includes one number, Vanilla Ice Cream, that has become a standard song for Opera singers looking for Musical Theatre repertoire. Further, She Loves Me attempts an operatic kind of immersive musical storytelling several times, and situations get musical treatment that would not normally be set to music, like trying to find one’s shoe. In a traditional musical, a scenario like that would not be significant enough to be told musically. But in the experimental world of this era, composers and lyricists were trying to find ways to musicalize anything and everything.

She Loves Me includes lots of examples of the innovations typical of the era, but what keeps us talking about this show is the way the musical aims all the innovation toward the specificity of the characters. We call this connection of song to story integration. The goal of integration is that every song is specific to character and story, that no song is ‘just a song’, and ideally no song could be switched from one character to another or from one show to another.

In She Loves Me, this integration extends musically into every area of each character’s expression, illuminating and informing us about their nation, their city, their occupations, and their states of mind. We hear their most mundane activities put into colorful and specific musical language that reveal character. Again, this phenomenon is not totally unique to She Loves Me. In 1954’s The Pajama Game, a character sings a duet with himself recorded on a Dictaphone in his office. In The Music Man (1957), We hear some salesmen on a train becoming the sound of a train through their chatterbox patter, we hear a young girl’s piano lesson become the accompaniment for her teacher’s yearning song, and we hear a group of gossips turn for all intents and purposes into clucking chickens. Here in She Loves Me, the store sells a music box that becomes the accompaniment for the main character’s desperate attempt to make a first sale and be hired, we hear a 4 note doorbell every time a customer leaves the shop, which becomes a recurring musical motive, and a group of Christmas carolers singing popular seasonal songs help underscore a comic sequence which shows the mania of holiday shopping while simultaneously telling the story of the growing love between Georg and Amalia. These musicalizations ground us in the world of the characters, and that’s very special. But that’s really just one instance of a major feature of the work; a concerted effort to depict the total lives of the characters.

In the New York Times Review of the recent Broadway revival, Ben Brantley perceptively wrote:

“…from the moment the show begins, with a salutation to the working day by the employees of a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest, “She Loves Me” is a sustained reminder of the pleasures of exalted ordinariness.”

Commentators often neglect this aspect of She Loves Me. These characters don’t lecture the audience about who they are in the manner of modern musicals, they simply inhabit their world, arriving at work, filling tubes of cream, selling items and taking returns, managing, hiring, and firing employees, serving wine and waiting tables. They talk about their clothes, shoes, glasses, soap, bubble baths, shampoo, perfume, weight loss, cartons, boxes, bottles, eyebrow pencils, lipstick, snoring, cracking knuckles, male pattern baldness, their schedules, and their sisters kids.  We see the weather change, the leaves and snow fall, we hear a man shoot himself, a kid on a bicycle nearly runs somebody down, trays are dropped in a restaurant, and a bunch of merchandise falls off a table. The writers establish the detail of the everyday world in beautiful and extravagant simplicity and specificity. It’s worth noting that one reason they can afford to craft all this detail is that they don’t have an enormous chorus and giant production numbers to use up all the oxygen. Conventional wisdom tells us this is one of the reasons why the original production failed; it didn’t meet the expectation of the audience for spectacle.

Showing, Not Telling

In contemporary musical theatre, characters would tell you about how they’re cultured or not, but these characters show you. Amalia mentions as asides the following cultural figures in her lyrics, casually during the course of conversation: George Bernard Shaw, Gustave Flaubert, Friedrich Chopin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jonathan Swift, Johannes Vermeer, Claude Debussy, Guy DeMaupassant, Alexandre Dumas, Paul Dukas, Raul Dufy, Guilliame Dufay, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dante’s Inferno. We in the audience discover through her everyday conversation that she is even more cultured than Marian Paroo, who is after all only interested that her beau ideal like Shakespeare and Beethoven.

George and Amalia talk about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Stendahl’s The Red and The Black, and even Ritter mentions Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh.

Making the Experience of Love Specific

One of the most difficult tasks for the lyricist is the love song. It’s been done countless times, and it’s hard to find fresh ways to express love. Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist who helped start the trend of integrating musicals, had an oblique solution. (one I’ve talked about elsewhere on this blog) He would write a kind of speculative or hypothetical lyric that doesn’t say, “I love you”, but talks all around it:

People Will Say We’re in Love (Oklahoma! 1943)

If I Loved You (Carousel, 1945)

Some Enchanted Evening (South Pacific 1949)

Or occasionally, Hammerstein would write a lyric that is a philosophical question about love:

Why Do I Love You? (Show Boat 1927)

Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful? (Cinderella 1957)

Sondheim’s answer to the question is usually to draw a detailed portrait of a very intelligent person’s neurosis about being in love, in the form of a flow chart.

But these two approaches intellectualize the experience of love, and abstract the question into the head. Harnick’s approach, especially in She Loves Me, keeps drawing love lyrics into the realm of the physicality of the character and describing the situation the character is living:

Physicality of the Characters:

In the freezing weather of December I’ll be warmly waiting for our date…

I know I’ll drop the silverware, but will I spill the water or the wine

More and more I’m breathing less and less…

My teeth ache from the urge to touch her.

I’m tingling, such delicious tingles. I’m trembling, what the hell does that mean?

My head was beginning to spin and my forehead was covered with cold perspiration

Describing the Scene:

As I sit here looking out the window…

When I am in my room alone…

The flowers, the linen, the crystal I see…

Couples go past me, I see how they look…

I sat there waiting… you were outside…

All these features serve to reinforce the world of the piece and deepen our sense of its reality.

To What End?

So the musical is spending a lot of time showing us a world. What do we see in that world? Why should we care about these people? A distinctive feature of She Loves Me, one that resonates well with a modern audience, is the way each of the characters has to face the invasion of a public persona by a private reality. George and Amalia must reconcile the disparity between their public selves and their literary romantic selves. Ilona must find a way to actualize her resolution to ‘be a different girl’ by leaving the place where she has publicly expressed her workaday identity to explore the romance of a public space of literature and then the intimacy of the private apartment of a man of literary taste. Kodaly is driven only by ego and a possessive sexuality, expressed in a flattering public persona. But when his secret betrayals become public, the flattery is suddenly converted into cutting insults, and we see a dark reality; Kodaly despises everyone. Arpad has a journey of self-revelation; the inquisitive errand boy hides the would-be adult, and his sudden opportunity to be considered for a promotion unmasks a young man who has been scrupulously attentive to all the most arcane workings of the shop. This is most delightfully revealed not in ‘Try Me’, but in the first “Thank You, Please Come Again” in his new position, where Arpad is the perfect ‘swing’, able to seamlessly assume the role of the disgraced Kodaly. Even the Head Waiter in his brief scene has to balance a public persona against a private hell. And finally, Maraczek’s heartbreaking journey in the piece takes us from a friendly and well liked boss to a bitter tyrant, through suicidal cuckold to contrite friend. His journey culminates in a man rediscovering who he actually is, having finally put aside the illusions of his wife’s fidelity and embraced his true self among his real friends as mentor and benefactor. In this way, the secondary characters are beautifully expressing and illuminating facets of the same critical themes the primary couple is exploring. This function of the secondary characters was once the mark of strong musical theatre writing, and She Loves Me is one of the finest constructions along these lines.

The basic superstructure of the story laid out in the original play provides the framework for beautiful storytelling, but it’s notable that almost every instance I’ve mentioned above is expressed musically, and with a great deal more specificity than the source material. Bock and Harnick understand the function and beauty of these interlocking narratives, and they employ sustained and specific integration to execute the storytelling that elevates it above the already excellent source material.

Behind this deeply impressive outer skin is the musical’s superstructure that plays out these same dynamics at the skeletal level.

Interruptions and Connections

As if mirroring the disjunct public and private personas of the characters, many of the numbers in She Loves Me are interrupted mid-idea. Sounds While Selling is of course a screwball assemblage of odd bits of conversations interrupting each other, but that’s only the beginning. Tonight at Eight is interrupted by a table of music boxes being knocked over, Romantic Atmosphere is continually sidelined by crashes and asides, Vanilla Ice Cream is ostensibly a letter aria, but the letter begins 3 times, interrupted fantastically by a meditation on frozen dairy dessert. Grand Knowing You is a traditional showtune that drops its classic melody like a hot potato after one iteration for a series of flamboyant burns in a Hungarian style, only to return to to the earworm melody for a final pass so blisteringly fast it can’t really be processed by the listener. A friend remarked after seeing the production, “Are any of the numbers full length?” That’s by design.

Other numbers are an assemblage of wildly disparate elements. Perspective has 4 distinct (and disjunct) musical sections, Try Me has 6 as I count them, A Trip To The Library only has 3 sections, but they are from different worlds; a Spanish Bolero, a Hungarian cadenza, and a swinging Broadway soft shoe.

These schizophrenic breaks and frenetic pacing threaten to make the piece burst into pieces, but another dynamic is at work. In keeping with the show’s themes of public breaks and private connections, there are many ingenious points of connection between musical numbers; not in the way of leitmotivs, but in much subtler ways, sometimes using musical motives in similar ways, at other times placing numbers as matched pairs in the story, and at several points even literally bridging two numbers with a single gesture.

I attempted to chart below the connections and disconnections in the score. Some of these are just the run-of the mill reprises and scene changes, but other connections are more deliberate and structural.

(I’m having a little trouble embedding images in wordpress. Right click anything that you can’t read and open the image in a new window)

How Did They Do It?

So how did Bock and Harnick achieve this level of sustained integration, and why does this score sound so distinctive?

After their 1960 musical Tenderloin went through terrible book problems, Bock and Harnick made a concerted effort to be more involved in the book end of the writing process. Joe Masteroff was enlisted to write the book, and although he had written plays, this was his first musical. (He would later write the books to Cabaret and 70, Girls, 70) The collaboration, and Masteroff’s willingness to work closely with Bock and Harnick pushed an already very collaborative process even further.

From a 1978 Interview with Craig Zadan:

ZADAN

Did the show break any new ground for you? From what you had done in the past in musical theatre?

BOCK

I think very much so. Compared to the shows we’d written, She Loves Me was a totally new adventure. We had always instinctively felt like writing the so-called integrated musical, and this was an opportunity for us to really explore that in depth, thanks a great deal to Joe Masteroff, who once finished the book, said, “take it over, do as much, musicalize it as much as you possibly can. “

He had no ego about salvaging scenes, lines, jokes, his attitude, which became our unified attitude was to absorb most of that play into music.

HARNICK

He had never done a musical, and he said, “How do I do it?” And since we didn’t know how to give him specific directions, we said, “Why don’t you just write a play?” Make it shorter than you would ordinarily, because we’re going to have to fill in the time with songs and with dances.

So he did, he just wrote it, and said, “I don’t know where the songs are, but use whatever you want, and partly because of the nature of Joe’s writing and partly because of the nature of the story itself, the show just called for music all over the place, and in fact, we wrote too much, and  on the road, if you remember, we had to cut, Am I right in remembering about 45 minutes of music?

It’s the process of arriving at that music that I find fascinating. Later in the same interview:

HARNICK:

He gave me a tape with a lot of music on it. And by the time I got the tape, I had been studying both the original play by Miklos Laszlo, and I knew the film, which I loved. Joe Masteroff had given us certain scenes, and by going through that, I knew there were certain moments which appealed to me so much, I wanted to start with them, I thought they’d be great fun to work on, I don’t remember what they were. But when Jerry gave me a tape with music on it, I listened to the tape and as almost invariably happened there were moments on the tape that coincided with the moments that I wanted to try and work on…

ZADAN:

Is that unusual for your collaboration, up to that point?

HARNICK:

No, invariably

BOCK:

No, That’s how we worked together.

HARNICK:

At a certain point, when there was no existent music yet for something I wanted to say, Then I would write lyrics first, and Jerry…

BOCK:

To the question, What comes first, the music of the lyrics. In our case for the first half of the adventure, the music comes first. For the probably most important part, the lyrics begin to come first because the requirements become more specific: The needs are words to shape the rest of the characters to express the characters, We manage, fortunately, to be able to work both ways.

Many years later, in a Fresh Air interview, Bock explained how he found the sound world for Fiddler on the Roof:

TERRY GROSS:

Jerry Bock, when you were writing the music for “Fiddler On The Roof,” how – how Jewish did you want the music to sound? How much did you want it to sound like Klezmer music and how much did you want it to sound like Broadway music?

BOCK:

It never entered my mind in either case. I knew the ambiance was going to be Russian and that it took place in a shtetl. But I had no compulsion to research either early Klezmer or, particularly, Russian music at the turn of that century or just before the turn of the century. The music that I hadn’t been able to write with all our shows was something that I had silently deposited in my creative mind. And the opportunity to now express myself with that kind of music just opened up a flood of possibilities for me.

GROSS:

What did you listen to when you were writing the show? Did you listen to much music?

BOCK:

Not really. Somehow, as I said, I had unknowingly, unwittingly stored a lot of the sound of it without having been able to express myself with it. I love Russian music. I love Romanian music. Minor is my major key.

Harnick said in another interview about Fiddler:

“Jerry Bock, on the other hand, was afraid to do research. He was afraid some of the music might work its way into what he was doing, so he just called on his own emotions and his own memories of when he was growing up.”

I was unable to find any source where Bock says unequivocally that he did no musical research on She Loves Me specifically, but Bock and Harnick were sketching She Loves Me and Fiddler on the Roof simultaneously, and we know from several sources that Bock was not researching Jewish music for Fiddler, relying instead on memories from his childhood. I think it’s safe to assume that he was also drawing on memories for the Hungarian aspects in She Loves Me, not on research.

One source I found claims Bock’s father was a Hungarian salesman, and he called himself.  “Russian-Hungarian-German Jew, mostly Russian.”.

So Jerry Bock was drawing on his memories of Hungarian music for the flavor of the material he was writing, recording, and sending to Harnick. From that 1978 interview about She Loves Me:

ZADAN:

Jerry, how did you decide what kind of music you wanted to write for this score?

BOCK:

Well, the key was Hungarian. The word Hungarian. And, that is, you know, very general, mind you, but it gave me a sound, a shape, the period, the feeling that I began to string melodic notions and guesses around that kind of instinct.

Europeans, particularly Hungarian. Not that all the songs are Hungarian, but that gave me a platform from which to take off.

HARNICK:

I would also imagine that, whether this was a conscious decision or not, The word romantic must have entered, because it’s a highly lyrical, highly romantic score…

BOCK:

Well, I equate Romantic with Hungarian.

As to what came first, Bock said in that same interview,

“Our answer has become ‘the book.’ That is the fountainhead. We could work both ways, but the book predominated our thinking.”

In a 2004 interview, BOCK said:

“I, along with Sheldon, I just bury myself in the book, and start to gravitate toward the period, particularly. That gives me a head start in each show. And then imagining the characters in terms of what they might sing, who they are, where they are and what they might sing under certain circumstances. I have no idea in writing of a style because I’m too immersed in the content of what we’re doing, really, and that’s why when I said She Loves Me was our first Romantic show considering The Body Beautiful, considering Fiorello, and Tenderloin, particularly Fiorello and Tenderloin, period pieces, She Loves Me gave me an opportunity to write a Romantic Score, but equally important, a Hungarian Romantic Show.”

I know that’s a lot of source material to quote, but I hope the point comes across: Bock and Harnick saw that the story was set in Budapest, and so began with the idea of Hungarian music, Jerry Bock drawing from his own memories of Hungarian music.

How Hungarian is the Score?

Having established that Bock was relying on his memories and existing conceptions of Hungarian music for the flavor he was seeking out; it’s worth asking the question, what was that conception? What ideas were part of Bock’s experience of Hungarian music? How are those ideas expressed in the musical?

My answers here will be speculative, of course. Bock is no longer around to ask, and in interviews he seems never to have been any more specific than in the passages I quoted above. He was above all, an intuitive composer in both method and execution. (it was his great strength)

In Philip Lambert’s book, he makes a great deal of the famous Russian (not Hungarian) folk song Otchi Chorniya, which was used by Werner R. Heyman in The Shop Around the Corner as the tune played by the music boxes, and by the orchestra in the cafe. He makes the case that a typical ‘chromatic double neighbor tone’ melody as found in Otchi Chorniya appears frequently in the score. I encourage you to check out that chapter. For anyone who hears a similarity between the Russian music in Fiddler and the Restaurant scene in She Loves Me, you’re really hearing the overlap between Romani music and Russian music. (Klezmer ideas overlap here as well)

For our purposes here, I want to look at other ‘Hungarian’ musical ideas that crop up in the score, ideas that would have been commonly known by Americans in the early 60s.

The Style Hongrois

The style hongrois is a vocabulary used by composers in the European classical tradition to evoke the culture of the Romani. (formerly known as Gypsies) Before Bartok and Kodaly reclaimed a different kind of Hungarian music in the first half of the 20th century, this set of musical ideas would have been synonymous with Hungary to the rest of the European world. Composers as far back as Schubert and even Haydn used this musical vocabulary, but it reached a kind of flowering with the music of Franz Liszt, who was Hungarian himself. (although not Romani) Any casual classical music fans in the mid 20th century would also have been very familiar with Brahms’s take on this music, which included his Zigeunerlieder and Hungarian Dances, Sarasate’s Zigeunerweise, and the innumerable Hungarian characters in Viennese Operetta, especially the Cszardas from the second act of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, which is sung by a character pretending to be Hungarian. Die Fledermaus is the only the most enduring operetta of many that would have been commonly known by the theatre going public, including Operettas by Herbert, Friml, and Romberg, but the trope of the exotic Hungarian was even current enough that it appeared in 1956 in My Fair Lady in the character of Zoltan Karpathy. More on his musical depiction shortly.  

I’m just going to identify 3 basic style hongrois ideas and show you examples from various places in classical music, especially as they appear in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which is probably the most popular ‘Hungarian’ piece in classical music. Then I’ll  show how these ideas appear in the musical:

The first idea is a repeated short-long pattern, often followed by a melodic idea. This rhythm is related to the natural rhythm of the Hungarian language.

As it appears in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2:

As it appears in Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, sung by a character pretending to be Hungarian:

 

As it appears in My Fair Lady, after Higgins has just told the Zoltan Karpathy story:

As it appears in Perspective:

The second idea is a slow polka that speeds up gradually.

As it appears in Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2:

As it appears in Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (it’s not marked in this score, but this passage is always performed getting gradually faster)

As it appears in Perspective

As it appears in Romantic Atmosphere:

As it appears in Vanilla Ice Cream (with apologies for the hole punch in my score, which eliminated the treble clef)

And a third idea, a very fast scale passage. Liszt loved alternating octaves between the hands, perhaps in imitation of the Cimbalom, common in Hungarian music. Observe this most famous passage of the Second Hungarian Rhapsody; appearing in innumerable cartoons.

At the end of Vanilla Ice Cream, Bock uses that idea pretty clearly, even though he isn’t alternating octaves.

Non-Hungarian Threads

At some point, Harnick used up all the music Bock had written on spec, or would need to move in another direction not compatible with the music he had provided ‘on spec’ at which point, Harnick would write a lyric first, for which Bock would provide music. I think this is where most of the more conventional Musical Theatre tunes in the show originated.

One way of spotting these pieces is looking for a ‘thumb-line’, longer, slower moving notes held by the thumb of the accompanist within a more active oom-pah accompaniment. This style of accompaniment had become very common in musical theatre in the early 60s.

Here it is in Tonight at Eight:

Here it is in A Trip To The Library

Here it is in Try Me

In Grand Knowing You

It’s used in a very unorthodox way, but here it is in Where’s My Shoe?

There is a very small bit of more ‘mod’ musical theatre in the show as well: a one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two rhythm that would have felt more up-to-date, even perhaps self-consciously pointing toward youth culture.

Here it is in 1961’s How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (watch the accents):

And here in 1963’s Funny Girl:

In both of those cases, they would have read to the audience as being in a modern style. So it shouldn’t surprise us to find it in She Loves Me in the rhythm of the younger characters in moments of drive and energy:

Here in Try Me, sung by the youngest character:

Here in the title number:

And here in the music of the newly liberated Ilona:

If you’ve followed my argument this far, you won’t mind a closing idea linking these threads:

When writing teams started working hard in the ‘40s and ‘50s to integrate the songs with the story, the position of the lyricist was elevated. After all, songs are integrated in content, which is mostly found in lyric. When the writing process begins with lyric, many structural decisions are made before music enters the equation, unless the lyricist and composer are one and the same person. In this dynamic, composers are left to establish the musical world of the piece as a secondary concern while they try to do justice to the parameters laid out by the lyricist. I think this is one of the reasons the ‘showtune’ has such a strong identity in music of this era. Oddly the drive to make songs specific to character in the lyrics makes them more generic in the music.

But Bock and Harnick’s unusual method of working flips that dynamic on its head. The very first element in their creative process is the development of a musical and tonal world, pulled from Bock’s memories of sounds that evoke time, place, and energy. Harnick, being himself an exceptional musician, molded and shaped that raw material, always aiming it at the specifics of character. Only when these building blocks had been exhausted did they set their sights on more traditional musical theatre fare. This is why each of their shows sounds so distinctive, and why their most popular songs could never have been written by anyone else.

What about the disconnect between the connoisseur and the layperson? I’ll let Jerry Bock have the last word. An interviewer once asked him what the problem was with She Loves Me, why it hadn’t been a success with its original audience. He said,

“There was no problem with the show. I mean it was everybody else’s problem. Sometimes you do the best you can, and you think you’ve done well- you know you’ve done well- and other people don’t agree with you. So be it.”

As You’re Casting:

ARPAD

One of the greatest roles ever written for a young tenor. A very physical role for a good actor with a wonderful song and some great scene work. Requires good musicality and the ability to play comedy well. Should be sung without a lot of pop-musical-theatre mannerisms, something that is unfortunately rarer and rarer these days. This is as good a place as any to note that Sheldon Harnick is a master at writing the young person on the brink of their future. (see Motel’s Wonder of Wonders or Matchmaker for further proof) Bock and Harnick have created a deeply funny and human portrayal, far more sympathetic than the character appears in The Shop Around The Corner. You should hear some of the middle of Try Me at callbacks. 

Range:

SIPOS

A wonderful character role for a comic baritone. Needs excellent diction and good comic timing. Could be played by many kinds of acting singers. You should hear the patter section of Perspective at callbacks. 

Range:

ILONA RITTER

She’s referred to both as Ilona and as Ritter throughout, so get used to both names. This role is often played as a floozy, which is a big mistake. Ritter is no dummy, she has a wonderful character arc that’s fun to play, and the music is more difficult than it sounds. We’ve come a long way from Ado Annie and Miss Adelaide. Cast an actress with a sensual side, but be sure you cast someone who can deliver a complex character.

You should hear your Ilona candidates sing the following passages:

1. The opening of A Trip To The Library
2. The very end of I Resolve
3. The “If he isn’t too handsome” section of I Don’t Know His Name

If your Ilona can’t get through those, you’ll have a tough time getting this show up.

Range:

KODALY

Harnick said in an interview that Kodaly was kind of fun to write because he was ‘totally immoral’. In The Shop Around The Corner, Kodaly has few redeeming qualities, but in the musical he is terribly charming and has a quick wit. Your Kodaly should be a charming flirt, but one with a bit of an edge.  At auditions, be sure to give him a chance to sing the middle of Grand Knowing You (for comic timing, diction and ability to stay with you as a pianist) and the end (for the high note!)

Range:

GEORG

Needs to be cast with a likeable baritenor. Likeable because we need to still root for him when he acts like a cad midway through the show. Even though he’s the man in the primary couple, this show is really about Amalia. Georg delivers a great story arc, but the main point is that he can play exasperated without seeming unredeemable, to give Amalia something to play against.

Range:

CUSTOMERS/CAROLERS

The three part chorus of women in Sounds While Selling is potentially a little tricky, but the remainder of the number is not terribly difficult. Only 3 customers are necessary for that number, although if you’re looking to expand your cast, you can double or triple up those parts without damaging the number.You’ll want dancers for the Romantic Atmosphere scene, (but nowhere else) and you’ll want people with some choral chops for the Christmas Sequence. (but nowhere else) These features are part of what makes She Loves Me ideal for a university or small theatre company, but less of a draw for large community groups that rely on the chorus participating fully in the production.

MARACZEK

Maraczek should be played by an older actor whenever possible. The number he sings is not difficult, and could even be spoken. But the monologue delivered on the phone, along with the scene at the top of Act II require a really fine actor. And as a corollary to my earlier remarks about Arpad, Bock and Harnick have also given us the greatest portrayals in the literature of middle aged people. Sondheim gave us many examples of bitter, cynical adults. Bock and Harnick give us adults trying hard to make sense of a changing world, but finding a way toward acceptance and grace. Tevye and Maraczek are worlds apart, but are both men who are finding their places in the world of the young.

Range:

AMALIA

This is one of the finest legit roles in Musical Theatre. Complex, funny, and tragic, she needs to have a terrific instrument capable of singing Vanilla Ice Cream, and the comic timing to sing Where’s My Shoe. (probably while hefted over the shoulder of Georg) Don’t program this show unless you know you have a very fine Amalia prospect.

Range:

WAITER

A tenor, but could be mostly spoken, and the high note could be falsetto or changed. Should certainly be able to play an imperious taskmaster, but also has a rather subtle exchange with Amalia that is tricky to play.

Range:

A Few Things to Note About the Music Director’s Materials:

I belong to a Music Director’s forum online, and every so often someone posts about She Loves Me’s materials. Then follows a litany of complaints in the comments about the shape of the score. A lot of Golden Age scores have been restored and re-engraved at this point, but for this show, the score you get in the mail is the same one MTI sent out 15 years ago, which I believe emerged from the 1993 revival. Having spent the last couple of months with these materials, I’ll summarize what I found here.

Most of the score comes from the original production, in a copyists handwriting, with markings that reflect the original orchestration. That orchestration had (as far as I can tell) 5 reeds, 5 brass, full strings, harp, accordion, and percussion. The handwritten score is sometimes cramped or poorly aligned, but everything is there, and it’s pretty easy to read. The orchestration that comes with the rental material is extremely well reduced for a smaller ensemble, but the piano vocal is sometimes miscued now for the larger instrumentation. If the whole score were like this first bit, it would be fine.

Another chunk of the score is professionally engraved, and fairly well! Short passages of Three Letters, Tonight at Eight, I Resolve, Romantic Atmosphere, the Entr’acte, Twelve Days, Thank You Bells, a few scene changes, and the entire Vanilla Ice Cream are executed on Finale or Sibelius. These sections look pretty, but are sometimes frustratingly misspelled, and worse yet, they are not cued at all, so conducting from them requires a lot of comparing parts and score. And if you’re conducting from the keyboard, you have no idea what you’re supposed to play and what is being covered by others.

A third part of the score is simply not at a professional level of copying. It looks very much like it was made on Encore or a lower level copying software in the 90s, and printed on (I’m not exaggerating) a dot matrix printer. What we’re seeing here is a copy of a copy of a copy of something that wasn’t great to begin with. Most of the places where the score does not correlate with the parts come in these passages. In some spots it’s tough to even piece together what is supposed to be happening, the parts will have a whole note and the score a quarter or vice versa; score and parts have scales or arpeggios that go in opposite directions, or parts and score have different ways of numbering the pickup measure, causing the whole song to be mis-numbered. These passages simply have to come from the ’93 revival, because these are also the pages where scene change or underscore sounds like good ‘90s musical theatre, and not like classic 1963.

The orchestra parts are very well done, with the exception of the reed parts in No. 19, which are criminally bad. There are a handful of other mistakes, which I’ll point out where I can. The rest you shouldn’t have trouble catching. On the plus side, these parts are clean and easy to read. As I said before, the reduction is also excellent; everything is covered tastefully. The reed books contain options for every kind of doubling; if you don’t have the alto flute or the oboe or whatever, there’s a transposition right there for an alternate. This is ideal! One word of warning though, from experience; there’s a 2 reed version and a 3 reed version. They send you all those books with your pack. But MTI sent me 2 books for Reed 1 (2 reed version) and forgot to send me Reed 2. We sent that book back, requested the replacement, and a week later, we got a second copy in the mail of Reed 2 (3 reed version). The third time they sent us what we actually needed. Make sure when those books arrive you carefully check which books you received to allow plenty of time to correct it if they’ve sent you the wrong thing.

As I go through the score, I’m going to explain what I found where I can. At one point what they sent is so bad that I’ve posted my mocked up accurate version to help people out. One wishes that the show had been enough of a success in its original incarnation to warrant a mass market vocal score. For now we have to wait for MTI to find it in their hearts to hire a few NYU grad students to fix it.

Going Through the Score Number by Number:

1A. Overture

This Hungarian overture-into-opening scene seems to have been conceived by Bock. Harnick describes the tape in an interview:

“[Jerry Bock] had done the music for the opening, which was an Overture which segued, which just flowed right into the first scene. And it was so charming I had an idea for it that I started, I think that  was the first thing I started working on. But that was a wonderful way for me to get started because I didn’t have to shape the lyrics, the music was there to determine the shape.” 

The first section is really an set of cadenzas followed by a passage of Perspective. First for the trumpet, then the accordion, then the violin.

1B. Opening: Act I

The bass book has an error in measure 45. The last beat should read F, not Bb.

1C. Good Morning, Good Day

If you watched “The Shop Around The Corner”, (and I hope you did!) you’ll note that this song is a musicalization of the opening sequence of the film. To my mind, though, the authors have clarified the action and accomplished much more effortless exposition and character work right off the bat. Arpad conveys a wide eyed innocence and desire to please, although it’s clear he’s very green and naive, Sipos is doing the bare minimum to stay employed, we find out he’s married and happy to have a job, Ilona’s relationship with Kodaly is crystal clear, her insecurity about her age and Kodaly’s expensive tastes and George’s charm is clear. We’re aware of the weather and the work, we immediately know these people. This is the way Golden Age musicals used to show you character. Ironically, it would be She Loves Me’s original director Hal Prince who would revolutionize the opening number with Bock and Harnick’s next show, Fiddler On The Roof, by having all the characters simply introduce themselves and tell the audience who they were and what they did. From Sweeney Todd to Ragtime to Hamilton, that method of ‘tell-don’t-show’ has become very common. But here we’re seeing the new masters at work in the old style.

To Broadway, To Life!: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick has a brief but interesting little analysis of the melodic material in this number centering on the use of the 6th scale degree; which will become a central feature of the musical material. I don’t want to steal that chapter’s thunder; you should go look it up. 

Reed 2 (2 reed version) has an error in measure 78. That figure should come on the downbeat of the measure, not halfway through. The Bass book has an error on the downbeat of measure 85, which should read an F again, not a G. The fermata in measure 92 you can see in the piano score is not in the parts. In measure 97, the last eighth in Violin I should read E natural. The rit. In measure 139 does not appear in the parts. Give your players some word cues to get out of measures 55, 66, 82, 98, and 108 in case an actor fumbles.

2. Opening the Shop

The piano reduction for this number is so inaccurate in 2 or 3 places that I redid it. If MTI sends me an e-mail telling me I have to take it down, I’ll do so, but I can’t imagine anyone using it for any purpose other than as a scene change in a production of the show, so I don’t feel any qualms about violating intellectual property. MTI is also welcome to use this reduction in the score themselves if they like.

3. Sounds While Selling

I’ll come out and say that I think this number doesn’t really work in the way it was intended, at least not with modern ears. It seems to want film treatment, where we can see flashes of each part of the conversation. But the music itself can’t draw the eye around the stage, so the joke wears thin. Your mileage may vary.

The ending introduces the doorbell- thank you idea, which Philip Lambert points out as another example of the prominence of the  6th scale degree, this time functioning as a part of a planing 6/9 chord.

I would teach the entire melody of Sounds While Selling to everyone and then split the tune up among the singers after everyone knows it. It may help as you teach measures 35-43 to play some chords for context. (not during performance, of course) Db works from 35-39, then play Bbm on the downbeat of 40, and Db again on beat 3. Play Gb on the downbeat of 41, F#m on the downbeat of 42, F#sus on beat 3, A on the downbeat of 43, and B7 on the downbeat of 43. I don’t need to tell you that the doorbell motive gives you each of the pitches the actors need, and that they then plane up and down stepwise from their first note. It may be wise to make that clear from the beginning. I also made every fermata on ‘Madam’ a dotted half note, (basically a 4/4 measure) just to eliminate confusion and coordinate cutoffs.

If you’re trying to expand the ranks of your female chorus, you can double or triple up the parts in the canon and distribute the solo lines among more singers.

The Doorbell idea grew out of a line in Masteroff’s script, where Good day-Thank You-Please Call again appears 4 times. In the original play, “Goodnight, Madam, Thank You Very Much, Call Again” appears 9 times. (This information again comes from Philip Lambert’s terrific book)

4. Reading The Letter

This beautiful underscore is best with just the strings. Our violin/cello combo along with keys 2 playing a string patch sounded terrific.

5. Days Gone By

Amid all the experimental and even operatic storytelling in this musical, it’s easy to forget that Bock and Harnick were also very good at writing traditional musical theatre songs; here given to the oldest member of the cast. We will see shortly that more contemporary musical ideas are deliberately assigned to younger members of the cast.

At the lyric ‘around, around, around’ we hear another example of the prominent 6th scale degree.

Measures 83-102, where the engraving suddenly gets computerized and rather poor, we also get some conflicting signals in parts and score. The piano vocal score has a jazz waltz accompaniment pattern from 87-97, and from 99-102, but the strings (and the drumset I think) are playing old fashioned quarters. Better change them while you’re in rehearsal because it alters the groove the choreographer is working from.

6. Music Box #1

The music box figure should be recorded and played as a sound cue. Our sound designer built a bluetooth speaker into one of the boxes so the sound could be localized. During rehearsals you’ll need to play. I found it oddly difficult to memorize, considering its relative simplicity. If you can memorize it, though, I would, so you can watch the actors open and close the box.

7. You Will Pay Through The Nose

It really doesn’t matter if Maraczek is in key here. Let him pick whatever starting pitch he likes.

8. Music Box #2

See notes above

9. Doorbell #1

Our pit was situated directly above the action in a loft, which made it very easy for me to time my doorbells to the door openings. A sight line is great.

10. Music Box #3

See notes above

11. Amalia’s Entrance

See notes above

12. Thank You Madam, #1

See notes above

13. Music Box Surprise

Note that the key has changed here. If you pre-recorded this one too, be sure you’re in D flat now. The enharmonic spelling is nasty, but it’s not particularly hard to play. Because No More Candy should really be slower than the other iterations, it may be a good idea to start this version a little slower than before to ease the transition.

14. No More Candy

How wonderful that this odd little music-box theme accompanies the simplest of melodies in AABA form, the A sections completely constructed from descending and ascending three note phrases.

Don’t forget that the celesta sounds an octave higher than written, so if you’re playing this on the piano, you may want to play up the octave.

In comparing the piano scores from the two times I music directed this show, I noticed both times I needed to give a note to myself to play slower, and that in measures 11-13 I wrote in chord symbols: C#m/E and Ab/Eb for measure 11, E7/D and A/C# over measure 12 and Ebm/Gb for measure 13.

I think it’s a nice touch to treat the last measure like the music box is winding down somewhat.

15. Thank You, Madam #2

See notes above.

16. Three Letters

This brilliant number was originally a more complicated number called Seasonal Changes. It was extended in the London Cast to include the ensemble more. You can hear that version here at 8:24:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImTLernORzs

Boy it’s interesting! But not, I think, an improvement.

Jerry Bock uses a delightfully jaunty left hand figure reminiscent of what he would do later in Oh, To Be A Movie Star from The Apple Tree.

A true understanding of the charm of Bock’s writing involves appreciating this flavor; a composer like Jerry Herman has a strong harmonic sense, and his melodies are nearly always built around arpeggiating the chords and emphasizing the tendency tones of the very sensible harmony. (hum Hello Dolly and you’ll see what I mean) Accompaniment patterns are just strumming in most of Herman’s songs, though. Richard Rodgers had a stronger sense of what the accompaniment could do to set off the melody, as chromatic interior lines undergird simple and self referential melodic patterns. And Sondheim creates elaborate webs of interlocking ideas in his accompaniments in a dizzying display. But compare Bock’s effortless chromaticism in the accompaniment here. It’s wildly active, but somehow doesn’t distract from the melody, which is only a sing song; something you’d hum to yourself. In fact, the harmony is almost completely static. When you learn to hear this quality in Bock’s music, you’ll marvel at the effortless fecundity that never draws attention to itself.

Reed 2 (two reed version) has an error in measure 41, which should read F# half note, F natural quarter note, and E natural eighth note. (compare piano vocal) Your score also doesn’t have a vamp in measure 50, but the parts do! It makes sense there. Near the end, the drum book has a 3 measure rest that should be a 4 measure rest.

By now everyone knows when they get to their seats that the two co-workers are penpals and aren’t aware of it. But in the original production, this reveal must have been wonderful. The conclusion of 3 letters is such a clever device to make that plot point!

17. Tonight at Eight

According to Harnick, this number nearly killed him.

“I was working on a number for She Loves Me. It was called Tonight at 8. I was walking around New York singing the melody to myself, trying to write the lyrics, and I stepped in front of a truck. The driver slammed on the brakes, honked his horn. I looked up, startled, and then kept right on walking, working on the song. Jerry told me to be more careful.”

There is one pronunciation problem in this lyric, because tete-a-tete doesn’t rhyme with eight if you pronounce it in correct French. So you have a choice: you can say “tate ah tate” at “ate” or “tet a tet” at “et” Otherwise it sounds like Harnick doesn’t care if it almost rhymes.

For (and on) the record:

1963 Original cast: tate a tate, eight

1964 London Cast: tate a tate, eight

1993 Revival: tet a tet, et

1994 London Revival: tet a tet, et

2015 Prince of Broadway: tet a tet, ate

2016 Revival: tet a tet, ate

So as you can see, people have cared more about the correct French pronunciation over time and less whether the thing rhymes or not. I sort of think it should.

I thought I had found a rare Harnick near-rhyme in this lyric until I realized I had mis-identified the structure of the rhyme scheme. Ape does not rhyme with Eight, obviously, but they’re not supposed to. Because the lyric is actually:

In my imagination

I can hear our conversation

Taking SHAPE

Tonight at eight

 

I’ll sit there saying ab-

Solutely nothing or I’ll jab-

Ber like an APE

Tonight at eight

And it goes by so effortlessly, maybe you missed the impressive triple double rhyme at the end:

If it goes

Alright

Who knows

I might

Propose

Tonight

 

At eight.

You might also notice there’s a cute little closing figure under the last word 3 measures from the end. It’s a prefiguring of the opening of I Don’t Know His Name.

 

Since the lovers’ aspirational numbers are back to back, this tiny connecting fiber is a nice touch.

In the Piano Vocal Score, measure 71 is blank. In the parts, there’s accompaniment. I suggest you make that measure tacet in the band for the sake of bringing the ensemble in cleanly.

18. Tonight Tag

In the parts, this is called Shop To The Back Room. Might want to change that title in the Piano Vocal so if you call the number, they know what you’re talking about. One of the reeds has an instrument switch, so you may want to wait a sec before starting…

19. I Don’t Know His Name

There’s a lot to unpack here. Firstly, it’s a canon followed by a quodlibet. Secondly, the melody is very Lydian, with a prominent #4 scale degree that conveys Amalia’s aspirations well. In fact, the Fi-Sol idea so prominent here will turn out to be the main idea in Will He Like Me! Lydian melodies tend to inflect the piece toward the subdominant. But this progression modulates DOWN instead, starting in G, then tonicizing F#. When the B section begins, the progression is even more unusual, using a descending sequence to work from IV through iii through ii through I in F# major, but then overshooting the I chord to cadence in Bb major, of all keys! A very deft modulation allows us to return to F# major and repeat the process, this time cycling back into F. After the underscore of Amalia’s Monologue, the B section repeats a half step lower than before with Ilona singing the bass line up the octave! The number concludes with a return to the original canon, now a whole step lower than originally. As in the other numbers, Bock has also written an extremely active accompaniment that manages not to feel busy. Oddly, none of this unusual modulation or figuration feels forced or unusual; we accept it as listeners that it’s a perfectly ordinary tune.

Finally, it’s worth noting the similarities and differences with Marry The Man Today from Guys and Dolls. Both are canons, both are about two women dealing with men. In each case, one of the women is a soprano with high ideals and the other an earthier belter who’s seen some things. Marry the Man Today has some nice character touches, as when Sarah corrects Adelaide’s grammar. But I Don’t Know His Name is a far higher level of storytelling. Ilona doesn’t sing any of Amalia’s music until she’s taken Amalia’s side. The canon is a musical depiction of Ilona’s agreement, a dramatic shift which happens during the song. Good musical theatre song placement lands on the point of decision, in this case Ilona’s decision that she should get a library card and expand her horizons. Marry the Man Today takes place after the two already agree. Amalia and Ilona also have deeply distinctive lyrics. Amalia shows herself extremely literate and articulates one of the most important ideas of the musical: You don’t need to physically meet someone to fall in love with them. Ilona’s lyric is far more grounded, but not in the cliches of ditzy chorus girls. Ilona’s concerns are practical. What if he’s horrible to be around? What if he’s terrible in bed? When Ilona finally agrees, she doesn’t parrot Amalia’s lyric wholesale. Her echoing phrases are a realization that she’d fallen into a misconception.

There are some awfully strange errors in the reed books here. I’m referring to the 2 Reed version here. I don’t know if these problems are in the 3 reed version. The first issue is kind of hard to describe: Reed I is supposed to play Alto Flute. If they don’t, a regular flute part is provided. Reed II is supposed to play regular flute. If they don’t, a clarinet part is provided. If there isn’t a Reed II, there’s a bit that the orchestrator has moved into an optional Reed I flute part. So far so good. But it sort of looks from the Reed I book that the optional flute part might be for when Reed II just can’t play flute. (which isn’t the case; it’s covered in the clarinet) Having said all that, I can’t figure out what the orchestrator was going for with the division of measure 12. Also in the last beat of measure 12, 3rd sixteenth of beat 4, Reed I needs a concert E sharp, which you can see in beat 3 of the optional flute part, but which didn’t make it into beat 4. Reed 2 clarinet part is just wrong from 14-16. Wrong key signature to begin with, (should be A major) and then the clarinet part should be a whole step higher than the Flute part is, from 14-16. In measure 19, the last note in the Bass book should be G, not a D. In Reed I, measure 22, the third sixteenth of beat 2 should be a concert B, not a concert C in both Regular and Alto Flute parts. I think beat 3 in Reed II should be a concert C#, not a concert E flat, which wouldn’t make harmonic sense. In measure 31, in Reed II, the first 2 notes should be D flats (concert C flats), and the 3rd and 4th notes should be B flats (concert A flats) These reed parts need a redo.

One last thing:

When I undertook this correspondence

Little did I know I’d grow so fond

Little did I know our views would so correspond.

That’s magical.

20. Back Room To Shop

This is one of the pages that looks newer, but has a dreadful spelling! The last measure is a G6 chord, but the C flat makes it look like some kind of C/G thing. Write a G6 symbol or rewrite the chord.

21. Thank You, Madam

See notes above

22. Perspective

The piano accompaniment doesn’t play easily, but it’s perfection. Sipos has what is surely the most Hungarian music in the show, and he expresses a philosophy you’d find in no other character in any other musical. Obviously, the most difficult passage is the middle section, but I’ve coached it many times and found most people can find their way through it. The trick is to ignore the note values and focus on lining up the stressed syllables with the big beats:

I am only ONE

OF

SEVERal in a rather small per-

FU-merie.

And so forth.

23. Doorbell #2

One of these doorbells has been cut each time I did this show. Not sure if that’s a score/script discrepancy or what.

24. Thank You Madam #4

See notes above

25. Doorbell #3

See notes above

26. Doorbell #4

See notes above

27. Goodbye, Georg

Note how we are 27 numbers into the score at this point, and there have only been 4 normal songs where characters simply express their thoughts. All the other numbers have been people shopping or reading letters or doorbells or music boxes. Here the authors have dipped backward into the score to add a layer to an existing number, as the staff mournfully wish Georg good luck.

I think this long stretch of musical shop interactions is the last vestige of a bigger scheme which was ultimately dropped. Sheldon Harnick said in an interview:

“This is a piece that’s not going to be hard to find music for. In fact, we found too much. Everything wanted to be sung. Our initial mistake, which I think we rectified was that we decided we were going to have musical bits. We were going to have songs and developed pieces, but we were also going to have a lot of musical fragments. What we discovered was that it’s hard enough on first hearing to absorb all that music. Then if you deluge audiences with additional bits, eventually the mind will stop hearing. The audience just gives up.”

The trick with Goodbye George is finding the right tempo. I found about 114 to the quarter note worked pretty well. Even though the content is sad, it shouldn’t descend into a dirge. The customer melody is essentially the same as Songs While Selling, down a half step, with a new countermelody for the staff. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you want to try and line up the dialogue with the music as it appears in the score. We found that if you begin in measure 12, it timed out okay without trying to line up measure 33. I didn’t want to have to hassle with conducting the caesuras in 75 and 76, so I counted 2-3 after the first So Long, 2-3-4 after the second So Long, and then on to the end as in all the other times.

28. George’s Exit- Will He Like Me

I found measures 9-12 easier to get through in 4 than in 2, but you may feel it differently.

29. Will He Like Me

Thanks to the internet, we can look at some of the writing and editing process for this show. Will He Like Me is an expansive ballad in the classic Late Golden Age style, a cousin to My White Knight, also sung originally by Barbara Cook. But this wasn’t the first number Bock and Harnick wrote for this moment. Originally there was a number entitled Tell Me I Look Nice, which is much more in the vein of I Could Have Danced all Night or I Look Pretty, although it begins in 5/4!

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5K9bv1iRf5Il5RskFWbr8M

It’s a lovely number, and it must have been difficult to cut! In fact, Sondheim lists it as one of the “Songs I wish I’d written”. But as delightful as the song is, its replacement is much better. Will He Like Me is vulnerable and specific, and it helps earn the difficult sentiment of the end of the first act. Harnick said in a 1983 interview,

“I never mastered the knack of getting the right idea the first time around. In fact, what I found out about myself was that each draft acquainted me with another level of a character’s personality, so successive drafts made the character more real to me, more three-dimensional, which in turn affected the show as a whole. I always took to heart the truism, “Shows are not written, they are rewritten.”

Philip Lambert goes into some great detail in his chapter about She Loves Me regarding Jerry Bock’s use of the 5th and 6th scale degrees for expressive purposes. I’d like to make some similar points here, with an acknowledgment of Lambert having arrived here first in analysis. I think this is, in fact, where the 6th scale degree idea functions most beautifully. The melodic content of the song is as sophisticated as what Sondheim would be doing decades later. The melody is, in fact, a master class on how to shape melodic contour rhetorically to reinforce the dramatic moment. 

Consider what’s happening in this melody: for the first 4.5 measures of the tune there are only 2 notes; Sol and La. We are hearing a rumination; Amalia is thinking through the most important idea in the show so far: Will she live up to his expectation? When she breaks out of this stasis, she finally ascends the scale up to Mi, (…the girl that he’s imagined me to be?) then on the title of the song, a yearning Fi (#4 scale degree) leading to Sol. (scale degree 5) She’s in the same Lydian mode she was in for I Don’t Know His Name. The second A section is a direct repeat, again breaking free of the Sol and La at the critical line, “…there’s more to me than I may always show”

The B section begins a full octave above the A section. Sol La is again the key idea, but now it’s urgent, and an octave higher, with an expressive dip down to Re. The idea is then sequenced at Fa Sol, dipping down to La, then closing with a descending scale that again sets up Sol and La.

The return of the A section is identical to the first two, except that it has an extension Do Do Do Re (…He’s just got to) which is just heartbreaking. This is the kind of thing Andrew Lloyd Webber keeps trying to make happen in his tunes but far less effectively. Think of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, when the tune goes “I kept my promise… Don’t keep your distance.” or “Where am I going to… where am I going to…” in Another Suitcase in Another Hall or the weird “We taught the world new ways to dream” that comes out of left field at the end of As if We Never Said Goodbye

But this little echo phrase does its job wonderfully, perfectly closing the old idea while inaugurating the new one, a bridge that is just as active as the main body of the song was ruminative. “When I am in my room alone” sounds inevitable, because it’s appeared in the accompaniment already in measures 20, 28 and 44. Again the sharp 4th scale degree gives the melody a yearning quality, and when the melody gets sequenced, it moves from G flat major to E flat minor, and takes on a melancholy quality, which quickly passes as we head to a thrilling approach to D flat, a dominant that will bring us to the original B section.

The last A section, beginning at measure 76 takes us through familiar territory, and our two note idea is still the main course, but the melody ends on a very daring La Ti, a beautiful, but dissonant major 7th against the root.

Amalia has unfinished business at the end of this song. (and just to pique your interest, the unfinished business will be payed off in Georg’s big song in act II) This kind of melodic sophistication is worthy of Jerome Kern and prefigures what Sondheim would be doing in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Next time I music direct this, I’m going to build a new Music Director part for this song from the parts, because this one is a real mess. There are many places where the note lengths on long notes don’t match the conductor score or one another, so it’s tricky to know when the players will cut off. I didn’t anticipate this being an issue, but I should have gone through and at least checked each part against my score so I had some sense of it. (particularly in measure 85) The piano vocal is also pretty poorly spelled, as in the end of measure 55, where D minor is spelled with Ebb and Bbbs, (surely the left hand should have them too?), and the second half of 64, which really should be spelled A7, not Bbb7, however harmonically correct that may be. You need a courtesy F natural in measure 70 in the first violin, by the way. The reed entrance halfway through 76 comes in on the and of 2, which I think is an error. It doesn’t do that anywhere else in the score.

29. Will He Like Me Scene Change

I wonder whether this is from the 90s. The top of the scene change feels very right, but the ending sounds like the bumper from a cop show, and the quote in the bass clarinet from I Don’t Know His Name feels harmonically odd. Come to think of it, there may be some typo in the parts I never identified. Have a look.

30. Ilona

This number is also a second draft! You can hear the original number, Merry Christmas Bells here:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/4RpAtE0WrrTGGIHKtGVx7R

It’s easy to see why Ilona is a better thought for this moment, but more intriguing is how Bock and Harnick kept the basic idea in the old number as an interlude in the new version. The old version was about the sentiments of the whole room simultaneously, as in Sounds While Selling. But the new version solves a key problem; we need to understand why Kodaly is attractive to Ilona. The old version is also musically static, relying on mode mixture for variety. The final version is very harmonically active.

I have to point out that Kodaly’s melody obsessively (and rather mindlessly) traces an Ebsus chord for quite a long time. This pattern is related to the shop idea, only in 4ths instead of 5ths.

 

Some of this interlocking 4ths idea is also present in the title song of the show, but Georg abandons the idea immediately to explore other avenues. To Kodaly, this is another in an endless stream of sales pitches. We only see him start to think outside the box when he’s mercilessly ripping everyone apart in Act II.

I found the number works best when you take it at a very fast clip. A moderate tempo requires a surprising amount of breath support from the singer.

31. I Resolve

Bock and Harnick replaced I Resolve with a new number for Rita Moreno in the Original London Cast called Heads I Win. You can hear that song at 22:13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImTLernORzs

The number isn’t available to use in production, but it paints a much more complicated mental state for Ilona! It’s a terrific lyric with some very subtle double entendre.

There’s something very odd in the score; Lines for Kodaly in measures 6 and 8 that there actually isn’t any time for. The revival solves this problem by eliminating the accompaniment and adding caesuras. If you want to do that, play a Bb minor chord on the downbeat of measure 3, then tacet unil the downbeat of measure 5, where you play another Bbminor chord. No accompaniment after, Caesura following measure 6. Bbmajor on the downbeat of measure 7, then nothing through measure 8. Caesura after 8, Bb major on downbeat of 9. No accompaniment through the downbeat of 10, then play from beat 2 of measure 10 through the rest of the number as written. I do wonder how the original cast did the thing; the lines don’t appear on any of the early recordings.

The off-beat accompaniment is tricky for some singers, and the last 4 measures of accompaniment are very counterintuitive. You’re playing in F minor (?) until you suddenly cadence in G minor. It takes some work.

Again, note how just like Amalia did, Ilona often vacillates between 2 notes as she works through her issues. Note also how Bock has provided the most delightful and unusual accompaniment imaginable. And note how empowered and active Harnick’s women are. As woke as our current musical theatre is, so many of the female characters written in today’s musicals simply wallow in self pity. Ilona’s sexuality gets her in trouble, but she’s nobody’s fool.

32. Ilona’s Exit

Write some courtesy c naturals in for yourself in measures 10, 13, and 14.

33. Street To The Shop

Both times I played this I needed to write naturals next to some Cs here as well.

34. Goodbye Love

I read that there was originally a number called Hello Love that was cut which was in this spot. (I think) I would very much like to hear that number, although it must have been cut for length. The underscore that is currently here strikes me as a 1993 confection. The music is really beautiful, but this way of using Lydian repeated ideas everywhere and the elevated repeating phrases somehow don’t feel like 1963 to me at all. They feel like they came from a Maltby-Shire show….

That’s not an insult, I’m just saying it doesn’t really fit here.

35. A Romantic Atmosphere

There’s a problem here for a modern production, particularly if a) you don’t have a proscenium stage or b) you staged Goodbye Love on the set instead of in front of the curtain. I believe what’s supposed to have happened here is a gunshot/crash, after which the curtain immediately opens and we see a waiter looking down on a fallen platter. ‘Did we hear a gunshot?’ we think, but we won’t find out until act 2. Unfortunately, this complicated set change is probably going to take a while, which means you have some choices to make. If you add music between 34 and 35, it can be either more of the Goodbye Love music, which seems like a pretty depressing choice, or Romantic Atmosphere music, which will just make us tire of this new number before it even starts. We opted to use 37.Tango Tragique as a scene change.

Looking at the PV, it sure seems like there was a full measure of rest after 5 and after 8 at some point; and that tends to work out most of the time, if you want to just time out the fermatas instead of cueing out of them. I think the ‘Victor Hugo’ line comes from the 1993 revival, where I want to say it reads as though two men are lovers. (although I can’t be sure) The original Broadway and London casts have someone giggling in the second rest.  

The dance break is rather difficult to play, particularly from 71-78, which is wild. Don’t ask me what Hotsy Hungarian Jazz Style means. Tell your players to feel free to klezmer it up a little, particularly around 89.

36. The Cafe Imperiale

This number is so fun to play.

37. Tango Tragique

This delightful and brief vocal version of this number doesn’t appear in the 1964 London production or the 1993 or 2016 revivals, being replaced by a monologue with essentially the same material over an underscore of the original tune. The first act is long, but by my calculation, putting the number back into the show adds only one minute to the act.

If you want to include it, everything is actually already there, you just have to reassemble it correctly. You can find the singer’s version of the number in the Singer’s Musical Theatre Anthology Tenor Volume 2. https://www.amazon.com/Singers-Musical-Theatre-Anthology-Piano-Vocal/dp/0793523311

Measure 1 should be played by the Piano or Accordion. The orchestration of measures 2-37 are measures 2-37 of 36 The Cafe Imperiale as it currently exists in underscore form. Measures 38-46 are measures 55-63 of 37 Tango Tragique. Measures 47-49 are measures 39-41 of 36 The Cafe Imperiale.

I suggest you play 37 as written in underscore form, timing it so that the end of the dialogue lines up with one of the open G chord cadences, such as measure 26, or best of all 49, which has a nice dead stop. If you have trouble lining that up, start the number later, or cut passages until it lines up properly.

37 as written as a scene change has one error in the Piano Vocal (that I noticed) The right hand downbeat of measure 10 should be a C, not a D.

38. Mr. Nowack, Will You Please

This is a shorter version of a much longer original. (or so I’m led to believe) It’s a rather operatic moment, in a mock Viennese style. I adored playing it.

39. Dear Friend

Of course this number is perfection. On the other hand, it’s troublesome to stage today, since the comedy of watching a woman at the lowest point of her life trying to muster some hope while being insulted by the waitstaff reads differently now than it did in 1963. We found leaning into the uncomfortability was helpful, so the crash right at the top of the number was useful in establishing that this is a tragi-comic moment.

I could make a tenuous case that the first gesture in Amalia’s melody (…flowers, the) here uses the exact three pitches as her first melody in the show, (we become) drawing a connection between the insecurity of the woman afraid of overeating in her sales pitch and the insecurity of a woman waiting for a man who might not show. That seems like a bit of a stretch, though. This melody is built of thirds and sequences just as No More Candy, and it has a prominent Lydian moment as the chorus begins, which in the vocabulary of this piece is aspirational.

Note the subtlety of the rhyme scheme here, and note how Amalia drops her Dufy-Dufay-Defoe wit and trick rhymes as she goes, opting for a simpler and more heartfelt expression. In fact at the end, the trick rhymes almost disappear:

The flowers, the linen, the crystal I see

Were carefully chosen for people like me

The silver agleam and the candles aglow

Your favorite songs on request.

 

Each colorful touch in the finest of taste

And notice how subtly the tables are spaced

The music is muted, the lighting is low

No wonder I feel so depressed

 

(AABC, DDBC, and reader please note agleam-aglow, music muted, lighting low wordplay)

 

Charming, Romantic, the perfect cafe

Then as if it isn’t bad enough a violin starts to play

Candles and wine, tables for two

But where are you,

Dear friend

 

Couples go past me, I see how they look

So discreetly sympathetic when they see the rose and the book

I make believe nothing is wrong

How long

Can I pretend?

 

Please make it right, don’t break my heart, don’t let it end

Dear friend

(AABBC, DDEECC)

 

You sort of need a violinist on stage. Obviously a real violinist actually playing is ideal. Fake violin playing is atrocious. Also, for any potential Amalias out there, you must play against the tragedy in the number. It’s far more meaningful to watch Amalia try to get enough courage to believe she still has a chance than it is to watch her wallow for 5 minutes.

All measure numbers are wrong, because the parts list the pickup measure as measure 1. Both times I music directed this, the section beginning at 76 wasn’t anywhere near enough underscore for the entire dialogue. For one production I played painfully slowly through the underscore. If you need to get people offstage before intermission (as we did in our thrust space) you can play the last page again, giving the melody to a violin or a trumpet.

40. Entr’acte

Considering the length of the show, I can’t imagine playing this Entr’acte, but it’s a good one. I suggest starting Act II with 41 Opening Act II.

ACT II

Both productions I’ve music directed were directed by the wonderful Matt Decker, who commented in rehearsal about the incredible string of numbers that opens Act II. If you’ve ever written a 2 act musical, you know that the beginning of Act II is the toughest nut to crack. If you’ve ended Act I in such a way that the audience wants to come back, Act II must drop the audience back into the action, delaying the resolution of the story without making the audience feel like they’ll be there forever, and getting across new information without getting bogged down in book scenes. At this critical juncture, Bock and Harnick deploy 5 of the best numbers in American Musical Theatre, one after the other. It is a tour de force.

41. Opening, Act II

This quirky little opener is similar to 2. Opening the Shop, except the Piano Vocal seems to be error free!

42. Try Me

Arpad and Motel the Tailor from Fiddler are clearly cut from the same cloth. With the possible exception of Tulsa in Gypsy, I think they’re the two finest roles for young men ever written, and again, the attention to detail of character here is astonishing.

After the opening lick, which reminds one of I Could Have Danced All Night from My Fair Lady, Arpad launches us into a wonderfully declamatory verse that keeps ratcheting up, from C to D to E to F to G to A, always major, finally dropping into a very ‘mod’ sounding groove which contains the hook. As is typical of this show, the catchy tune appears only briefly before an extended retail fantasy, which hits so many marks and wanders so far afield, it’s a wonder the number still holds together before returning for a final pass of the chorus.

A few performance tips: It is possible to play the glissando with two fingers of the right hand in measure 13. It’s kind of fun; it just takes a little practice. Some tenors have trouble hearing the D in measures 60 and 81, especially as the piano so clearly plays a C. The G in the right hand in measures 135 and 136 may be an error; it certainly fights that F in the woodwind line above it. I think you want to play D minor 7 for those 2 measures. 

43. Maraczek’s Memories

You may need a little more music here, in which case I suggest you repeat the first 16 bars.

44. Where’s My Shoe?

I live in one of those odd houses where 6 different people actually sing this song whenever looking for shoes. What else would one sing? Only in a Bock and Harnick musical could such an oddball story moment result in such an outside-the-box number, and one of the highlights of the show at that!

Musically it’s a wonder! The accompaniment is a romp, with a chromatic interior line and an oom-pah passage that can’t seem to decide if it’s in 3 or in 6. Melodically, Amalia is utterly unhinged, arpeggiating the tonic chord, but veering off into sharp 5, twice, then snaking up from Fi to Ti chromatically. 3 seven note scales sequence over a circle-of-fifths progression twice, then the arpeggiated A section begins all over again. George is much more grounded; his melody is a single note when it isn’t a perfectly rounded phrase or a simple scale.  

This number is not so terribly difficult to prepare, the trick is to make it feel like it’s going off the rails without it actually going off the rails. Traditionally it’s staged with a lot of acrobatic chasing and throwing Amalia over Georg’s shoulder, which is not conducive to beautiful singing. Either you have to get used to the idea that it will be funnier than beautiful, or you’ll need to get involved with the staging so that Amalia isn’t supporting the weight of her head with her neck muscles while singing the G, for example. Keep in mind that she needs to play a scene, then sing Vanilla Ice Cream in about 4 minutes.

The lick in the last 5 measures is a bear to play. I recommend leaving the left hand out.

45. Vanilla Ice Cream

This is justifiably one of the most talked about numbers in the history of American Musical Theatre:

Will Friedwald wrote: “Ice Cream is one of the theater’s best songs of self-exploration and discovery, the kind usually given to leading men in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, such as the King of Siam puzzling out A Puzzlement and Billy Bigelow contemplating parenthood in Soliloquy. Ice Cream repeatedly changes keys, tones, melodies- the works- mirroring the thought process even more ambitiously than Adelaide’s Lament in Guys and Dolls in a way that seems completely random but is obviously carefully concocted.”

The number replaced an earlier song, The Touch of Magic, which was converted back into a monologue.

In Jennifer Packard’s interesting book A Taste of Broadway: Food in Musical Theater, she points out that Joe Masteroff’s insertion of Ice Cream into the scenario is more related to his childhood in Philadelphia than any Hungarian roots. She also observes that it was Masteroff who introduced the Pineapple into the romantic story between Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz in Cabaret 3 years later.  

The ‘Ice Cream’ part of the melody once again embraces the 6th scale degree, and again I’ll refer you to Philip Lambert’s excellent  book for an analysis along those lines. I’ll work my analysis here along broader lines.

The famous opening letter passage combines the two most compelling Amalia ideas from Act I. A celesta plays a music box idea; different from the cigarette boxes near the beginning of Act I, but tonally reminiscent, while below, a we hear the melody of Dear Friend from the end of Act I.  

Amalia’s letter is interrupted by a Hungarian idea once again looping around neighbor tones, with another Lydian inflected Fi. Just as this Csardas seems to be going off the rails, Amalia regains her composure and starts the letter again, this time with no countermelody from the restaurant! She has already started to move on, and spectacularly so, culminating in a tiny bit of coloratura in thirds with a flute, which I’ve always heard as a callback to the Mad Scene in Lucia di Lammermoor..

America’s conceptions about Opera have changed quite a bit over the years. Today Vanilla Ice Cream’s operatic flavor at the end reads to general audiences as a fanciful touch, even a little loopy. But for Barbara Cook, who played this part originally, Opera was meaningful on its own terms. She said once to an interviewer:

“Opera was such a huge part of my growing up. I don’t quite know how it happened because nobody cared about opera in particular. When I was a little girl, I would always ask my mother or my grandmother to call me when the Saturday afternoon broadcast was beginning. It was a beautiful, beautiful part of my life.”

In the 1960s American audiences had a much higher level of Opera literacy than they do today, and for audiences familiar with operatic tropes, the end of Vanilla Ice Cream signified more than just whimsy. Mary Ann Smart wrote in an oft quoted passage from a 1992 article in the Cambridge Opera Journal:

“Trills, melismas, and high notes suggest hysteria, an unbearable pitch of emotion; they liberate music from text, allow it to escape from the rational, connect it with pre-symbolic modes of communication. In a sense coloratura is free from the confinement of music an of language; a syllable stretched beyond recognition is an escape from signification, the emergence of irrationality and madness.”

Smart was writing generally about coloratura in an article specifically about Donizetti’s opera Lucia Di Lammermoor, and it’s the mad scene that most opera fans would have thought of upon hearing the very brief moment of coloratura at the end of Vanilla Ice Cream. Both are accompanied by a flute after the orchestra has dropped out, although Amalia’s ascent into the stratosphere isn’t anywhere near as long or complicated:

The mad scene from Lucia is only the best known of a long list of soprano arias accompanied by flute, including examples from almost every important French Opera composer of the mid-19th century. Lucia is by far the most famous example. As of this season, it is the 15th most performed opera at the Met, with 611 performances, more than any opera by Mozart or Strauss.

So is Amalia going mad? Of course not. But as the number veers toward opera, she is in a very real way liberated from language, which had up until this point been not only her character’s interest as a reader of books, but her mode of expression; wordy, articulate, reasoned. We are seeing an ecstatic moment that sets her character on another course.

I don’t have much in the way of words of wisdom as you coach this number, except to encourage your soprano not to overdo the difference between the vocal quality of the two sections; the lower part should not really be belted. And then the portamento between the High B and the E is important. To do it in a quasi-operatic style, use vibrato as you descend; it’s a great effect.

Most of the parts have only 1 fermata in 96, not 4, so your players may need clarification. If you are conducting from the piano, your trumpet players and others who have a similar rhythm may have trouble figuring out your tempo, since what you’re playing sounds like triplets. Show them your part and all will be well.

Should you need a playoff, you can go back to 74, 82, or 98.

46. She Loves Me

 

When David Gordon asked Joe Masteroff and Sheldon Harnick if they would change anything about the show, Masteroff said:

“I must say the one thing I didn’t like… I like the song She Loves Me, I hate it as the title for the show. It seems so cliche. It seems like every other title you’ve ever heard.”

Harnick then suggested it was probably Hal Prince’s idea, and Masteroff continued:

“I’m sure it was Hal. He never asked me about anything. There ought to be something like ‘She Loves Me?’ with a question mark, which is more effective as a title, I think. It gives the audience something to wonder about.”

In an interview for the 1993 book Creativity: Conversations With 28 Who Excel, Harnick said:

“ I was very pleased when I wrote a song like ‘She Loves Me’. I thought, ‘Oh, good, the analysis is working.’ I’m able to say things that really come right out of me, unselfconsciously. For instance, there’s a line, ‘My teeth ache from the urge to touch you.’ [sic] And that was because there have been moments when I’ve been with a girl and the back or my teeth hurt.”

There’s an odd notation at the top of the piano vocal score that Amalia says, ‘well, well…’ and then Georg saying, ‘well!’ before launching into the song. Those lines don’t appear in the script at all, and I have no idea how they would! But this makes me think that at one point, the authors had attempted a seam between the previous scene and this song similar to the seam between Maraczek’s suicide attempt and A Romantic Atmosphere! But even without this glue, there’s plenty of connecting material between this number and other material in the show, beginning with “Will wonders never cease?”, a clear callback to the previous number. Amalia just sang that 4 times.

The ‘well well’ passage slips chromatically and hilariously from Le down to Do, as Georg nearly abandons language himself, but the “I didn’t like her” section jumps spastically up from E flat to Bb, Db, C, Eb, Fb, Georg is wildly attempting to ground a tonality before finally settling on the same 2 pitches (Db and Eb) Amalia was vacillating between at the top of Will He Like Me!

Let me put too fine a point on that: Georg is answering her question. “Will he like me?”, she asks. “I didn’t like her”, he answers, but then using the two notes that represented her confusion, he adds: “Now I do!”

It took me far too long to notice that Georg’s lyric refers back to itself:

I didn’t like her But now I do

Didn’t like her? I couldn’t stand her! And I could

Couldn’t stand her? I Wouldn’t have her! And I would

I wouldn’t have her I never knew her! And I know…

Melodically, we are also once again hearing the prominence of the 6th scale degree (the song ends on the 6th!) Georg’s main melody begins similarly to Kodaly’s in Ilona, except that Georg’s accompaniment is actually going somewhere. In fact, the melody pays off the exploratory jumps and descents of the introduction, this time climbing the scale in a very satisfying way!

Note also that Georg has taken the ‘mod’ rhythm from Try Me as his new motif. He is a younger man as a result of this revelation.

When accompanying with piano, it is possible to follow the singer through all the ‘well’s. But when conducting, it’s far more difficult. I suggest the singer follow you, or work out a very consistent pattern of speeding up.

In measure 14, reed I needs an F flat.

47. She Loves Me Playoff

There is a pickup to measure 1 in the parts (A in the trumpet). Yet another example of the shoddy copywork in this strata of the vocal score.

48. A Trip To The Library

Philip Lambert shrewdly notes that just as Ilona forms a matched pair with I Resolve, A Trip to the Library matches with Grand Knowing You. In the first matched pair, Ilona is seduced, then finds a new determination in rejection. In the second matched pair, Ilona is again seduced, but this time by a better man, and she makes good her resolve, which reveals Kodaly’s true, embittered self.

It has always been a go-to for audition material and for the discerning actor-singer, because the material is so character driven, and the actress gets to sing 3 characters: the one telling the story, herself, and Paul! It’s a number for a belter that doesn’t go terribly high, relying on characterization and comic timing rather than vocal fireworks.

The first section is a bolero with the rhythm played on the flute, a clear nod to Maurice Ravel. Ravel’s 1928 Bolero is a sinuous, sexy kind of piece with a dramatic finish, and any theatregoer in the 60s who was mildly literate in classical music will have had some contact with it. Older people today would associate it with a particular scene in the movie 10 that made Ravel’s Bolero the bestselling classical piece in the world.

Bock’s melody is amazingly even more repetitive than Ravel’s, which perfectly illustrates Ilona’s nervous energy.

Four measures of very dramatic Hungarian music follow, as Ritter’s low-key nervousness explodes into melodrama. But then we find ourselves in a classic early 60s show tune. As far as I can make out, this is the longest time in the whole show we hear a classic showtune. Embedded in this part of the tune is some of the most exquisite timing in any musical. We hear this kind of thing between Golde and Tevye in Fiddler, but it’s extremely rare, particularly in a straight ahead tune. I’m talking about pauses and placement in the bar that emphasize intention and depict the speed of thought in the character’s mind.

…quietly said to me…. “Ma’am”

I said “No”….. (off the beat, as if suddenly changing her mind)”Yes I am!”

 

What happens if things go wrong?

It’s obvious he’s quite strong….. (the longer the pause, the funnier the payoff)

He read to me all night long.

Under this perfectly constructed musical storyline is the wittiest imaginable orchestral accompaniment, alternating a seductive thumbline against jaunty chromatic punctuating phrases, culminating in that ‘mod’ rhythm we see whenever the story is aiming at the storylines of younger people.

After another bolero and Hungarian passage, the second chorus of the ‘tune-proper’ has a saucy woodwind counter-melody that is worthy of Nelson Riddle.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed, having coached this song for dozens of singers over the years:

1. Some singers struggle with the timing of the first entrance, since that bolero rhythm is repetitive and easy to get lost in. I tell singers to listen to the bass, which is far easier to latch on to. Tell your drummer to play in the bolero as quietly as possible and emphasize the double bass part.  
2. I rarely hear the correct notes in measure 18. Measure 19 is easy to hear, but the starting note for “and there was this…” is surprisingly hard. Drill that a bit at the beginning of your process. That passage happens a couple further times, including after a fairly subtly voiced key change. Make sure we get that first starting note correctly each time, and aim for a bright tone so the voice cuts down there so low.
3. Most people can sing the passage “A trip to the library has made a new girl of me”, but singers have more trouble with the chromatic “I can see.” Keep those half steps small, or the following passage will also be wrong. This applies all four times that passage is heard.
4. For some reason the text in the second bolero trips up singers more than the first. Learn it slow at first.

49. Sipos’s Exit

There is no repeat in the parts. (that’s written on the bottom of the PV page, but it’s easy to miss) I only mention this because if you need more time, you may accidentally ask your players to make the repeat into a vamp and they don’t have the repeat.

50. Dorbell #5

See above

51. Doorbell #6

See above

52. Thank You, Madam #5

Arpad’s part in measure 8 is wrong, and I’m pretty sure the parts are mislabeled in the vocal books. 

53. Grand Knowing You

There was a different, and very successful song in this spot originally, called My North American Drug Store, written to get Kodaly offstage after being fired. (imagine the moment without a number for a quick laugh, Kodaly simply slinking off! Impossible)

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/5wudJFlHscAczmaO1Ae5Kb

It was hard to make this cut, since the number was doing well with audience and performer. According to Harnick:

“I was never happy with it. I got to know Jack [Cassidy] and realized he needed to be bitchy and terribly funny- but there was an innocence to the bitchiness. It was witty rather than mean, and I thought, ‘this is the kind of song to try.’ We came up with Grand Knowing You. Jack was very reluctant at that point to do a new song, because North American Drug Store was stopping the show. You couldn’t argue with that, but we showed it to him and said, ‘Jack, this is a better song. It’s a character song… it was a combination of his character, his personality, and the character of the show.’  

The rewritten version is not only a better tune, but much better written to character, with a bitterly cruel and very funny middle section that paints Kodaly beautifully. It’s another example of Harnick’s rewrites getting closer to the truth of the characters.

Of the 6 numbers in She Loves Me that speed up from slow to fast, this is the first that doesn’t sound ‘Hungarian’. I might have said the ‘only’ number, but the number that follows is actually built as one enormous gradual accelerando, and it doesn’t sound Hungarian at all. The main melody is deceptively difficult to sing well; it requires a good deal of breath support. Choose your tempo for the first section based on what your singer can sustain, leaving room, of course, for it to get much faster at the end.

The middle section is very fun, and something of a bear to play and coordinate. If you listen to a few recordings, you’ll hear that the tempo is extremely fluid, but oddly consistent. That is to say that it speeds up and slows down, but in the same way every time. Because there is so much crazy style hongrois passage work in the orchestra, you will have to work out with the singer when to wait for the band and when to go on. And ideally it should always feel like the singer is driving those choices, not just waiting for the band. That’s hard! Finally, you’ll have to let the orchestra know how to get through those passages, which is really very difficult if you’re conducting from the piano.

You may also find that the passage beginning at measure 64 will come out wrong at the sitzprobe 2 or 3 times before your rhythm section understands what’s happening. In fact that’s a spot you may want to address before you even begin running it with the band.

54A. Christmas Sequence

After a true ‘string of pearls’ of fantastic character songs, Act II give us its last major number with a chorus feature, exactly the opposite of what most musicals would do in Act II.

This is marked Fast Chase, but I chose to do it slower, which made the rit at 8 much easier to handle from the keyboard. I don’t know how you could possibly slow down from the previous number’s speed to that fermata gracefully using only your head nodding to indicate tempo.

54B. A Christmas Carol

Measure 23 has a poco rit. in the parts. (but not in the Piano Vocal Score) It’d be nice to know that when rehearsing the number, no?

If you were very short on chorus guys, you could make the chorus all female, either by treating the parts as a true canon, all in the same range (which does mostly work) or by putting every F# from measures 10-23 up the octave and eliminating the lowest notes in measures 24-33. But truthfully, you only need 1 tenor and 1 bass.

54C. Twelve Days To Christmas

I like a little crescendo in measures 32-33.

Be sure you choose your tempo at the top of 54C with some room to speed up. After all, that’s the name of the game here. If you start slower, the speedup will be more dramatic.

The last note in the vocals in measure 45 should be an A.

Measures 119 and 120 have the left hand a whole step high. If you can’t figure out what the measure is actually supposed to be by this time in the show, I don’t know what to tell you. The left hand in measure 121 is missing a quarter note rest, and all the parts have a half note on beat 2 with a fermata on it. Again, super important information missing from the conductor score.

Keep an ear out for the rhythm change in measures 166-168. I suggest converting measure 171 into a 4/4 measure, especially if you’re conducting with your head and playing. The original cast recording has something else here, and in the 1993 recordings and following, it’s sloppy and unclear. It’s hard to establish that new tempo for just one bar or to relate the 2/4 tempo to the 6/8 tempo. For my money, we lose nothing by changing it to 4/4 and treating the new 6/8 dotted quarters with the same pulse of the old quarter. Trust me, it can still feel ‘off the rails’, it just won’t actually be off the rails. And that, incidentally, is the principle that should guide you: As fast as you can go without being sloppy.

Your players may find themselves wanting to slow down in the last 6 measures, but I think you want to just plow through.

55. The Invitation

The underscore that sits here now is simple and perfect. Should you need more music to cover the scene, I suggest repeating 25-32 and 41-44.

56. Closing the Shop

There was a lovely Christmas number that was cut from the show in previews called Christmas Eve that you can hear here. (I’m guessing at the placement in the show, although someone will surely correct me)

https://open.spotify.com/embed/track/2X1LzP0j3m96BF4tc4aa9L

The cue for this number is, “You’re right, my boy. You won’t get it.”

57. Finale, Act II

Many writers have commented on the brilliance of repurposing the Vanilla Ice Cream thematic material with a new lyric here. This stroke of genius apparently occurred in the Philadelphia tryout. Originally it had been a reprise of No More Candy..

This is also a kind of a bookend to Three Letters at the top of the show. Three Letters revealed to the audience that the main characters were writing one another when Amalia reads Georg’s letter. The Finale reveals to Amalia that Georg is her pen-pal when Georg quotes Amalia’s letter. And how wonderful that when they sing together, nothing rhymes and there is no attempt to allow the audience to process their separate thoughts. The lovers are so excited that they drop their carefully curated facades of language in favor of a stream of consciousness. As Amalia said: “There’s no hiding behind my paper and pen.”

We opted to have the accompaniment begin in measure 3 in our production, so that Georg could take more ownership of the moment. I suppose if you like that thought, you could even begin even later.

58. She Loves Me Bows

The first measure is in 2 in all the parts, but in 3 in the score. All the measure numbers in the piano vocal are wrong following measure 41, (renumber your book continuing from 41) and from 54 to the end, the clarinet part in Reed I is mis-transposed.

Other than that, this is a nice Bows.

59. Thank You Bows

26-45 makes a decent repeat if you need one.

60. Exit Music

Measure 95 is marked Allegro Con Brio in the parts, but not in the Vocal Score, and the metric modulation is wrong, I think. If you take a reasonable tempo for She Loves Me at 53, and you treat the new half like the old quarter, it’s so fast, the orchestration doesn’t make sense. If you take the old meaning of the metric modulation, where the new quarter is the old half, it’s painfully slow. I think you gotta treat the new quarter like the old quarter and just switch up the groove. OR pick a new tempo for the Allegro con Brio that has nothing to do with the old one.

Pit Orchestra Considerations:

A few instruments are essential: The trumpet and violin have important cadenzas right away. It helps to have a violinist who doesn’t mind being onstage during Romantic Atmosphere and Dear Friend. You need to pick between the 2 reed version and the 3 reed version. The 2 reed version is very good, so I can’t imagine a situation where somebody has enough money to hire the extra reed instead of another player elsewhere, but perhaps you have a bigger budget than me.

I used violin 1, cello, reeds 1 and 2, Trumpet, bass, drumset, and keys 2. Keys 2 really helps fake a string section, especially if you have real strings on the outside of the texture. I cued up my vocal score using the keys 1 book, and played mostly a somewhat french sounding accordion patch, harp, and piano sounds.

Enjoy your production of She Loves Me! I sure did!