about A Little Night Music: for the 2002-2003 season guide
Why is New York City Opera performing A Little Night Music?
The charms of the score speak for themselves. The musical, which bowed at the Shubert Theatre thirty years ago this season, remakes the Ingmar Bergman comedy Smiles of a Summer Night into a roundelay of yearning among that caste of gentlefolk who use “winter” as an intransitive verb. With Hermione Gingold and Len Cariou leading a deliciously sophisticated cast, the musical swept that season’s important Tony Awards, and seduced many critics and theatregoers polarized by Sondheim’s two previous collaborations with producer-director Harold Prince, Company and Follies. (“I think we’re wearing them down,” Prince joked at the time.) A Little Night Music triumphed in London and on the road in the U. S., and the exquisite barcarolle of missed opportunity that Sondheim composed for the “rumpled bed” contralto of Glynis Johns, “Send In The Clowns,” became the signature theatre song of the decade.
Still, its operetta manners don’t obscure that it is Hugh Wheeler’s book, rather than Stephen Sondheim’s songs, that drives (in fact, comprises most of the stage time of) A Little Night Music: and even the score, haunted as it is by Ravel and Rachmaninoff, certainly doesn’t proceed motivically the way most post-Tristan opera scores do. True, the overture, in which an uninhibited vocalise yields to a bewitchingly chromatic waltz, promises the musical riches you can expect at Lincoln Center, but only hope for on Broadway: the first two numbers “Now,” and “Later,” reappear, reshaped, in counterpoint to the succeeding “Soon,” creating a trio of intoxicating effect; and “Perpetual Anticipation,” a bemused commentary on romantic longing for a trio of acerbic mezzi, flirts—but only just—with fugue. Nonetheless, most of A Little Night Music’s numbers are, unabashedly, numbers—songs that in length, structure, function, and thematic independence, owe much more to the self-contained lyric units of bookwriter Oscar Hammerstein II than to the extended paragraphs of librettist Hugo von Hoffmanstahl. The music’s tone, manner, and vocal technique may reward the casting of opera singers in certain roles—Carl-Magnus (though not Fredrik); Anne (but not Petra;) and yet A Little Night Music is substantially less an opera than this same composer’s Sweeney Todd, or Passion—or even Merrily We Roll Along, the sort of crypto-Wagnerian musical comedy that might have resulted if Jule Styne, Betty Comden & Adolph Green, Marcel Proust, and Akiro Kurosawa had tossed back too many vodka stingers after a long night of Der Ring des Nibelungen.. Why, then, is New York City Opera, arguably the premiere presenter of ambitious contemporary American opera, busying itself with a piece that belongs, in essence, to Broadway, not to us? Crossover dreams? Marketing? This year’s jewel, perhaps, of our operetta program?
Only that last possibility is at all germane. City Opera has long been fascinated with how pieces written as not-quite-opera, be they Gilbert and Sullivan satires, Handel masques, Sousa rarities, or a bagatelle like Chabrier’s L’Etoile (a piece better than it tries, or has, to be) fit into the main line of operatic thinking. By that standard alone, A Little Night Music belongs on the roster. Nonetheless, I wonder if the musical doesn’t relate more closely to the new American operas this season—Jake Heggie and Terence McNally’s Dead Man Walking, and my own Little Women—than to Acis and Galatea or The Mikado. I suggest that perhaps Stephen Sondheim has done as much as any concert composer to redirect millennial American opera, without ever actually composing a piece for the opera house himself.
Here’s why. Important as they were, it was not just conspicuous commissions like The Ghosts of Versailles nor Nixon in China (or supertitles, for that matter, though they indubitably restored narrative immediacy and suspense to the experience) which brought American opera roaring back to life after decades of coma. It was also the ever-more operatic writing of certain theatre composers of the 1970s—of which Andrew Lloyd Webber (don’t hiss!) was the more popular and vocally rococo, but of which Sondheim was probably the more influential: musically, lyrically, and culturally.
Musically, Sondheim’s strophes have always retained the tautness and symmetry of the theatre song even as they experiment with their length and design and expand the range of rhythms and harmonies that drive and color them. In this, he continues the line of over-from-Broadway operatic practice that begins with Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, continues through Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, includes the iconic West Side Story and the ironic Candide (to both of which Sondheim contributed lyrics to the music of Leonard Bernstein) and reaches a pinnacle of sorts with Sondheim’s own “black operetta” (his term) Sweeney Todd and the haunted chamber opera Passion. Lyrically, his method (developed with Arthur Laurents) of identifying first the actor’s actions in any given scene and letting them determine both text and music (not always in lockstep, by the way—no other theatre composer suggests emotional ambivalence by playing music against text as elegantly as Sondheim does) is possibly the first exciting answer to that tedious question prima la parole, o prima la musica? in three hundred years. (The answer? Neither: it’s the gesture.) And culturally, Sondheim’s insistence that substantial topics, seriously addressed, could be just as valid (and entertaining) in the sung drama as in the spoken one joins him not only to his mentor Hammerstein but to repertory regulars like Mozart and Verdi, who placed the same value on astute social observation, sophistication of thought, and directness of expression that Sondheim has.
In perspective of contributions like these, the technical distinctions between Sondheim’s scores and standard operas seem less significant. True, Sondheim never orchestrates his own music: it’s largely been written for amplification for at least thirty years; and his disinterest in the human voice, particularly in its operatic aspect, is rivaled only by that of his sparring partner Ned Rorem. (Why don’t these guys write more string quartets?) None of Sondheim’s pieces were originally composed to be through-sung the way, say, Carmen or Porgy and Bess are, though it’s worth noting that at the premieres of both of those pieces the scored recitatives were spoken, not sung. And no one claims Sondheim-the-composer is much interested in modernist experiment: his musical palette is conservative by any but minimalist standards. (Next to Nixon in China, Sweeney Todd seems as richly lurid as Wozzeck.)
And yet: in the middle of a century in which American opera composers, as usual, seemed confused and intimidated how to adapt a form with so richly European a past into an authentically American present (Vanessa? Please!) Broadway’s pre-eminent songwriter, in his own medium and for his own reasons, created a richly evocative model for composers and librettists working in an art only slightly (and ever-the-less) removed from his own. I freely attest that I would never have written my opera the way I did without Sondheim’s example, and I’ll bet Jake Heggie or Terence McNally or William Bolcom would claim the same. “Having just the vision’s no solution: everything depends on execution,” Sondheim once opined in the score to 1984’s Sunday in the Park with George. Sondheim’s theatrical executions are tricky to transfer into the opera house. The vision belongs there. Wherever artists write and perform music in drama as if it matters, there, I suggest, you’ll find good American opera: New York City Opera; and (this May at least) Stephen Sondheim.