“Sweeney Todd” had been open for a few months on Broadway when, one Saturday afternoon in June 1979, I passed by the theater where it was playing.
Amazingly, there was a great one available — fourth row center.
What were those harmonies, the chords that the rippling figure was tracing? What were those notes that seemed to escape from the orchestra and jab me with touches of dissonance? When the bass line that grounds the music took a sudden low plunge, it seemed, briefly, like the harmonic floor had opened a chasm.
Twenty-two years later, by then the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, I found myself seated at a piano, playing that opening music to “Sweeney” in front of its composer and asking Sondheim questions about it.
Then, Sweeney adds, “And she was beautiful.” At that final word — “beautiful” — the chord below, which repeats three times, is piercingly, hauntingly dissonant.
Yet, as we learn, it was this young woman’s beauty that made her the prey of the lecherous, powerful Judge Turpin.
I also played excerpts from “Merrily We Roll Along,” never his most popular but perhaps my desert-island Sondheim musical, and one of his most appealing, ingeniously intricate and moving scores.
Sondheim mostly just smiled and listened, nodding and saying, basically, “Yep, that’s it.” He never liked to discuss the inner workings of his music in front of the public.
Between my first time seeing “Sweeney” — I went back twice! — and getting to know him personally in the late 1990s, Sondheim was a singular presence in my life and work.
In the early ’90s, at several memorial services for friends who had died of AIDS, I played “Good Thing Going,” a wistful song about recalling imperfect but cherished relationships.
In 2010, I made an 80th birthday tribute video to him for the Times website, in which, among other excerpts, I played and analyzed the wondrous chords at the start of “Sunday in the Park with George.” Here, the hero, Georges Seurat, speaking to the audience, explains the elements of painting, how the artist must bring “order to the whole” through design, composition, balance, light — and, finally, harmony.
In 2016, I posed to Sondheim the question of why such a master composer so seldom wrote a purely instrumental work.
I express it musically.” He was endlessly fascinated by the “puzzle of music,” he added.
I’ve been thinking since his death about a trip to the Bronx Zoo my husband and I took in the spring of 2019 with Sondheim and his husband, Jeff Romley.