21. Remember?

A Little Night Music (Columbia Masterworks, 1973);
composed by Stephen Sondheim

I have never been a musical theater guy, but I can carry a tune in an untrained way, so there were incidents in my student days. Yet we never went to bed together, even metaphorically, because notwithstanding the ubiquity of the form, I find musicals fundamentally harder to understand than opera – the discursive shift of extending or interrupting dialogue by breaking into song requires usages that simply weird me out. One of the reasons I esteem Stephen Sondheim apart from my belief in not arguing with wonders of nature is that all the difficulties and all the rewards of the form come in one full-strength package. This is my favorite of his musicals because it sounds the most distant from American vernacular without really sounding European. Set in Sweden around 1900 (and based on a Bergman period film from 1955), you think you hear bits of Grieg or Strauss, but it is a different music for a nether world in which ghosts break into song because that is the only way they can remember their lives. This is a quintet waltz in which singers recall trysts with each other that they may or may not have been physically present for.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).