LP ABL1-4159 (S)
Cassette ABK1-4159
Includes: “Your Eyes Are Blue”—Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry
A Stephen Sondheim Collection/Jackie Cain and Roy Kral (1982)
Finesse Records
LP FW 38324 (S)
Cassette FWT 38324
DRG Records (1990, reissue)
Cassette DSC 25102
Includes: “Comedy Tonight”—Jackie Cain, Roy Kral; “Love Is in the Air”—Jackie Cain, Roy Kral; “I Do Like You” —Jackie Cain, Roy Kral
A Stephen Sondheim Evening (1983)
RCA Records
LP CBL2-4745 (S); 2 record set
Cassette CBK2-4745; 2 tape set
Includes: “Pretty Little Picture”—Bob Gunton, Liz Callaway, Steven Jacob; “The House of Marcus Lycus”—George Hearn, Bob Gunton, Women; “Echo Song”—Liz Callaway, Steven Jacob; “There’s Something About a War”—Cris Groenendaal, Men
A Collector’s Sondheim (1985)
RCA Records
LP CRL4-5359 (S); 4 record set
Cassette CRK4-5359; 4 tape set
Includes: “Comedy Tonight” / “Love Is in the Air”—Millicent Martin, Julia McKenzie, David Kernan; “Pretty Little Picture”—Bob Gunton, Liz Callaway, Steven Jacob; “The House of Marcus Lycus”—George Hearn, Bob Gunton, Women; “There’s Something About a War”—Cris Groenendaal, Men ; “Your Eyes Are Blue”—Craig Lucas, Suzanne Henry
Sondheim (1985)
Book-of-the-Month Records
LP 81-7515 (S) ; 5 record set
Cassette 91-7516; 2 tape set
Includes: “I Do Like You”—Bob Gunton, Timothy Nolen; “Comedy Tonight”—Bob Gunton, Company
Cleo Sings Sondheim/Cleo Laine (1988)
RCA Records
LP 7702-1-RC
Cassette 7702-4-RC
Includes: “I’m Calm”
Julie Wilson Sings the Stephen Sondheim Songbook (1988)
DRG Records
LP SL 5206
Cassette SLC 5206
Includes: “I Do Like You,” “Love, I Hear”
Symphonic Sondheim/Don Sebesky Conducts The London Symphony Orchestra (1990)
WEA Records (London)
LP 9051-72 119-1
Cassette 9051-72 119-4
Includes: “Comedy Tonight”
Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall (1992)
RCA Victor
Includes: “Love, I Hear,” “Comedy Tonight”
Broadway Revival Cast Recording (1996)
Broadway Angel
a Litlle night music
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Hugh Wheeler
Suggested by a Film by Ingmar Bergman
Originally Produced and Directed on Broadway by Harold Prince
Introduction by Jonathan Tunick
Victoria Mallory (Anne Egerman), Garn Stephens (Petra, but replaced prior to the Broadway opening by D. Jamin-Bartlett), George Lee Andrews (Frid), Laurence Guittard (Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm), Patricia Elliott (Countess Charlotte Malcolm), Len Cariou (Fredrik Egerman), Glynis Johns (Desirée Armfeldt) and Hermione Gingold (Madame Armfeldt)
INTRODUCTION
During the course of our preliminary discussions of A Little Night Music, Stephen Sondheim remarked that he imagined “the atmosphere to be perfumed—of musk in the air.” My immediate reply was, “Plenty of strings.” This exchange offers a paradigm of the composer-orchestrator relationship as practiced in the Broadway musical. Although the various textbook definitions of the orchestrator’s craft confine themselves strictly to the adaptation for orchestra of music already complete in melody, harmony, and form, but composed for another medium, such as the piano, the theater orchestrator’s responsibilities are more far-reaching. It is his function, as indicated by the foregoing anecdote, to translate into practical terms the musical and dramatic conception of the composer, who, unlike Sondheim, may not be a literate, trained musician, or, like him, may conceive his music exclusively on the piano and need to rely upon a specialist in the technique of the orchestra and its various instruments. Sondheim is rare among Broadway composers in that he calls for highly colored and dramatic effects in his accompaniments, but typical in that he is not trained in translating these effects from the medium of the piano to that of the orchestra.
Therefore, the existence of what I have come to regard as an honorable craft and the opportunity for me to have participated in the creation of this most elegant work.
If one imagines the Sondheim-Prince musicals of the 1970s to be the movements of a symphony (Company: Allegro; Follies: Adagio; Pacific Overtures—well I admit that the analogy falters here—how about Intermezzo á l’Orientale; and Sweeney Todd: Finale), A Little Night Music takes its place as the third, or Scherzo, movement. The Scherzo, introduced by Beethoven as a replacement for the Classical symphony’s Minuet, became an integral element of the Romantic symphonies of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.
A Little Night Music, like the Scherzo, is light, fast, playful, mysterious, and in triple meter. It swims in the heady, magical atmosphere imagined by its creators and displays all the literacy and wit that we have come to expect from them. The music is rich in melodic invention, contrapuntal development, and harmonic texture. The show’s quirky, appealing characters demonstrate satisfying growth during the course of the developing plot, which comes to a rational and gratifying conclusion. It is Prince’s most romantic work as well: erotic, charming, and imaginative.
Although easier on the audience than most of Sondheim’s musicals, A Little Night Music is by no means simplistic. Like all great romantic works, it is classically precise in structure. Hugh Wheeler brought to the material the exactitude of the mystery writer (Sondheim commented that the show is plotted like an Iris Murdoch novel), creating between the various characters an effectively geometrical pattern of interrelationships, based, like the score, upon the number three:
A chain of triangles: in each of these connected relationships, the unstable number three is drawn to the stable two, as the various mismatched couples disengage and find their proper partners.
It was Sondheim’s intention that the score be entirely in triple time—a Waltz musical in the style of the turn-of-the-century Viennese operettas. (Strauss, Lehar, and Kálmán, the masters of this genre, never did this—the many waltzes in their scores are balanced by plenty of music in 2/4 and 4/4—polkas, marches, galops, etc.) Though one might quibble about Sondheim’s use of a 12/8 Nocturne pattern accompanying “Send in the Clowns,” and that there are twelve 2/4 bars in “The Glamorous Life,” eighteen more in “The Miller’s Son,” and an entire passage in 4/4 (No. 22 in the Vocal Score—an underscoring passage), the remainder of the score consists exclusively of various permutations of triple time, utilizing for the main part eighteenth- and nineteenth-century generic forms such as the Waltz (“Soon,” “You Must Meet My Wife”), Mazurka (“Remember,” “The Glamorous Life”), Sarabande (“Later,” “Liaisons”), Polonaise (“In Praise of Women”), Etude (“Now,” “Every Day a Little Death”), and Gigue (“A Weekend in the Country”).
There is great symmetry of form here as well as in the book. Sondheim tends here toward trios with the characters separated (“Now,” “Later,” “Soon”) and duets regarding a third person (“You Must Meet My Wife,” “It Would Have Been Wonderful,” “Every Day a Little Death”). These songs of alienation and yearning for cohesion and balance all represent the unstable number three drawn to the stable two—the triangle yearning to be reconciled to the proper couple. This precision of form is combined with a musky romanticism and all-round good humor and warmth. Here is Sondheim at his very best: witty, whimsical, and knowing.
Sondheim’s musicals present an unusual challenge to the orchestrator in that he eschews for the most part the familiar melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic conventions of the Broadway musical. A Little Night Music is no exception to this principle, presenting as it does some particu
larly harrowing problems, such as the cross-hand Etude pattern in the accompaniment of “Every Day a Little Death.” The syncopated eighth-note pattern was originally assigned to the clarinets, who quickly retitled the piece “Every Page a Little Breath” due to the complete absence of rests in their part. (The company was unusually partial to puns and parodies—I recall with particular pleasure Barbara Lang’s “The screens won’t move, they keep falling out of their groove” to the tune of “Night Waltz.”) For the movie version, I thought better of the situation and scored the passage for the nonbreathing strings.
Sondheim provided his typically complete piano accompaniment for each song, meticulously notated as to melody, harmony, and rhythm—much like an art-song accompaniment—and most effective when performed in its original medium—the piano. Although I have never heard him play a note written by another composer (with the single exception of “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story, accompanying Larry Kert at a party), Sondheim plays his own compositions most effectively on the piano and sings the parts of the various characters, usually, like Leonard Bernstein, at an octave below pitch. His piano accompaniments, like those of art songs, suggest the dramatic implications of the songs and their appropriate instrumentation through use of rhythmic, contrapuntal, and coloristic devices such as repeated notes, arpeggios, broken chords, and the use of extreme registers.
Because these devices are idiomatic only to the piano, and are ineffective or even impossible to play on orchestral instruments, the accompaniments must be reduced by the orchestrator to a harmonic and rhythmic abstraction and recomposed, utilizing devices suitable to orchestral combinations. This process results in a full orchestral score that bears little visual resemblance to the original piano accompaniment, and when the orchestral score is reduced by the copyist to a short score or piano-conductor part, thereby reversing the orchestration process, the written notes, now reflecting orchestral rather than piano idioms, suffer in effect when played on the piano.
Aside from developing a general familiarity with the score by having it played and sung by the composer in person and on tape recordings and reading it at home, as well as some general research into the musical and historical milieu of the place (in this case the waltzes of Strauss and Lehar, and late Romantic music in general, particularly Russian and Scandinavian—Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Grieg), there is little for the orchestrator to do until the rehearsal period begins. Not until then is it decided what keys will be appropriate for the various performers—they are invariably different from those in which the songs are originally written—and the songs are expanded by the director and choreographer, working with the dance music arranger at the piano, into full-length numbers. I have wasted what seem to be cubic miles of breath trying to explain to inexperienced producers that any orchestration done before the rehearsal period will invariably be thrown out. The production must be orchestrated as much as the score, and the rehearsal period is as much a creative process as the writing; it cannot be second-guessed.
During the time before the rehearsal period, the orchestrator may plan his instrumentation. The size of a Broadway orchestra is determined by an agreement between the League of New York Theaters and Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, specifying a minimum number of players for each theater. Although it is not unheard of, it is rare indeed for a producer to agree to engage more than the minimum number of players. The minimum, therefore, becomes effectively the maximum.
At the time of A Little Night Music the minimum at the Shubert Theater was twenty-five players, a typical number for a Broadway musical. With such a limited number of musicians available, every player counts, and the orchestrator must choose his instrumentation with great care and accuracy, giving particular attention to balance between sections. (To balance seven brass and five saxophones, for example, against six violins and two ‘cellos is quite a feat, although it can be and has been done.)
Since A Little Night Music is European in setting, turn-of-the-century in time, and romantic in style, and since the score reflects these qualities, containing no musical anachronisms or stylistic deviations, I decided upon a legitimate operetta orchestra, not dependent upon a rhythm section but fully orchestrated in Classical style, and employing traditional combinations of woodwind, brass, string, and percussion instruments, foregoing such inappropriate ones as saxophones and guitars. The score is so delicate that I was tempted to dispense with the trumpets and drums, but decided to include them for safety’s sake. It was, after all, a Broadway musical, a field in which no one has ever suffered due to lack of subtlety.
The instrumentation that I planned was that of a typical operetta orchestra, but held to a somewhat inadequate number of strings mandated by Broadway budgets. It is composed of the following:
Five woodwinds: flute, oboe, two clarinets, and bassoon, each player alternating on one or more doubles, or secondary instruments, such as the piccolo, English horn, bass clarinet, and so on. This system of doubling in the woodwinds permits a section of four or five players to do the work of many more. When Follies was performed by the New York Philharmonic, for example, seventeen nondoubling woodwind players—four flutes, four clarinets, a bass clarinet, an oboe, an English horn, a bassoon, and five saxophones—were required to execute the parts written for five doublers. The woodwinds—the quirky, temperamental prima donnas of the orchestra—are the most difficult to write for, but they provide essential color and personality to the orchestra and are well worth the trouble.
Three horns were employed. Such a large section is unusual in musicals, although Don Walker used three in The Most Happy Fella and She Loves Me, as did Russell Bennett in South Pacific and The King and I. They give an elegant, rounded middle to the ensemble, as well as a brilliant unison in forte passages such as my rather blatant quotation from Der Rosenkavalier in “A Weekend in the Country.”
The brass section consists of two trumpets and a single trombone. Although they are little heard from, they make themselves valuable in the full tuttis as well as various mock-military effects (mostly involving Carl-Magnus) and coloristic passages such as the chattering trumpets in “Now.” At one period during tryouts there were so few notes in the trombone part (I once counted them at 113) that the instrument was in danger of losing its place in the orchestra. I had this problem in mind as I approached my next assignment, “It Would Have Been Wonderful.” Fortunately the number involved the strutting dragoon Carl-Magnus, and I was able to feature the trombone in a solo obbligato, making the instrument indispensable and thereby saving its job, for which it has never thanked me.
Although the presence of a piano is dictated by both the score and the script, being necessary to portray Fredrika’s piano exercises, the instrument has no place in this type of orchestra and aside from these passages remains tacet, taking no part in the orchestration. The pianist doubles on the celesta, which is liberally used, due to its charming, bell-like tone. The harp, with its intense romantic associations, was assigned an elaborate and necessarily difficult part, particularly complex for the harpist in that the highly chromatic nature of the score requires a virtual tap dance among the pedals that provide the sharps and flats. The harp figures prominently as an accompanying instrument, so evocative of the romantic past and far more idiomatic than the commonplace piano or the homely guitar.
The strings form the most important element of the Night Music orchestra, although the minimum of twenty-five players restricted me to six violins, two violas, two ‘cellos, and a bass, which is what we laughingly refer to on Broadway as a full string section. Generations of theater orchestrators, however, have over the years developed an arsenal of trick voicings, mostly unknown to classical composers, in order to achieve a fuller resonance from their skimpy string sections. It is customary to double the number of strings in the orchestra for cast recordings, so that the string sound that one hears on cast albums is far richer, sometimes to a fault, than what one hears from the pit.
In Broadway sho
w orchestration, and commercial work in general, string writing is pretty much confined to the following:
Melody and countermelody, unison or harmonized
Sustained harmonic accompaniment (“footballs”)
Runs, trills, tremolos, and other decoration
The ubiquitous afterbeats, so abhorred by players.
The score demanded more ambitious use of the string group, particularly for rhythmic accompaniment passages, due to the absence of a rhythm section. It was necessary to draw upon my studies of classical and modern music in order to employ such devices as pizzicato, spiccato, double and triple stopping, and harmonics, which permitted a wider and more flexible use of the strings as background. They replaced the customary but inappropriate pianos, guitars, and other rhythm instruments, for which I am greatly indebted to Debussy, Mahler, Bartók, and Stravinsky.
Customarily the units of the string group (violins, violas, ‘cellos) play in unison. In addition to this necessary tutti writing, I call for an unusual (for Broadway) number of divisi passages as well as solos for the violin, ‘cello, and even the viola, and occasional duets and trios for solo string instruments. The ‘cello obbligato in “Later” stands out, as does the gypsy-like violin solo at the very end of the show—a chromatic scale, quite awkward for the violin, climbing to an altissimo E natural. Of all the violinists that I have heard attempt it, none played it better than the toupeed contractor of the tryout orchestra in Boston.
Sondheim’s original concept was of a dark, somewhat Chekhovian, yet romantic and erotic musical taking the form of a theme and variations, the first act forming the theme and the second the variations. This idea was to take shape as a farce at the country house, using the device of Madame Armfeldt’s dealing the cards each time the plot went wrong, and starting again. Wheeler’s book, however, did not support this notion, and some of the darker elements of Sondheim’s score were replaced during the rehearsal period by lighter material. Such numbers as “Bang!” and “My Husband the Pig” gave way to the more easygoing “In Praise of Women” and “Every Day a Little Death.”
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