The Sondheim Lyrics Chain

[Leighton]

People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On an ordinary Sunday...

[KathyB]

In the ocean an island waits,
Smooth and sandy and pink.
Filled with lemons and nuts and dates.
Pretty little picture?
Think:

[scenicdesign71]

We'll have a little pink boy,
Then a little pink girl,
Then another.

A little snub nose
And a little spit curl
Like her mother.

[KathyB]

I don't even know where that last lyric comes from. 

QFM, so I don't know if I'm getting all the punctuation accurate:

I've some business
With her mother.
See, it's business!
Oh, no doubt!
But the business 
With her mother
Would be hardly the business I'd worry about.

[scenicdesign71]

Your punctuation looks A-1 to me.

The snub-nosed, spit-curled pink babies were from "Who Could Be Blue?/Little White House", originally sung by one of the young Follies couples, IIRC, as a sticky-sentimental first pass at what later became the perkier, more upbeat four-part counterpoint of "You're Gonna Love Tomorrow"/"Love Will See Us Through".

After being cut from Follies, the original duet was later featured in the 1980 revue Marry Me A Little and preserved on its original cast album.  Later still, that track was included on the 1985 multi-disc compilation A Collector's Sondheim, which is where I became aware of it.

[Leighton]

There's also a lovely version on the Papermill Follies as a bonus track; it's one of my favourite melodies, and I sing it all the time.

[scenicdesign71]

And still you're sorry,
And still you're grateful,
And still you wonder,
And still you doubt.
Then she goes out.

Everything's different,
Nothing's changed.
Only maybe slightly
Rearranged.

[KathyB]

Nothing's gonna harm you,
No, sir,
Not while I'm around.

Demons are prowling
Everywhere
Nowadays.
I'll send 'em howling,
I don't care--
I got ways.

No one's gonna hurt you,
No one's gonna dare.
Others can desert you--
Not to worry,
Whistle, I'll be there.

[scenicdesign71]

(It only took me a little over six months!)

The old deserted beach that we walked — remember?
Remember?
The café in the park where we talked — remember?
Remember?
The tenor on the boat that we chartered,
Belching The Bartered Bride —
Ah, how we laughed!
Ah, how we cried!
Ah, how you promised
And, ah — how I lied.


[FUN INTERNET WORMHOLE]: The Bartered Bride's performance history suggests that — after flopping at its 1865 premiere in Prague, being performed only a scant handful of times over the next quarter-century (still without notable success), and achieving broad popularity only after a much-reworked 1892 revival in Vienna, eight years after Smetana's death — its score wouldn't have been widely-known until very late in the century.  Technically, this should place the boat ride remembered by Mr. Lindquist no more than eight years before A Little Night Music's dramatic date of around 1900 — unless the tenor in question happened to be a (literal) Bohemian, introducing the Swedes to a little-known musical curiosity from his homeland.

[KathyB]

I thought this would take a couple of months, but it just came to me, and I didn't even need to change shows!

It's a very short road
To the ten-thousandth lunch
And the belch and the grouch
And the sigh.

In the meanwhile,
There are mouths to be kissed
Before mouths to be fed
And a lot in between in the meanwhile,
And a girl ought to celebrate what passes by.

[scenicdesign71]

There are rights and wrongs and in-betweens.
No one waits when fortune intervenes!
And maybe they're really magic — who knows?

Why you do what you do: that's the point.
All the rest of it is chatter.

(Look at her.  She's crying!)

If the thing you do is pure in intent, if it's meant,
And it's just a little bent, does it matter?

(Yes.)

No, what matters is that everyone tells tiny lies!
What's important, really, is the size.

[KathyB]

At the palace of the Duke of Ferrara
I acquired some position
Plus a tiny Titian...

Liaisons! What's happened to them?
Liaisons today.
To see them--indiscriminate
Women, it
Pains me more than I can say,
The lack of taste that they display.

Where is style?
Where is skill?
Where is forethought?

[scenicdesign71]

[ 'nother wormhole:]  Boris Aronson's original design for Mme. Armfeldt's dining room was of course predicated on the joke of there being no "tiny" Titians.  (Which isn't necessarily true, strictly speaking, but never mind).  SJS seems to have done his homework, sort of: the Venetian painter was in fact associated with the palace of the sixteenth-century Duke of Ferrara — though there would no longer have been anyone of that title (which no longer existed, and hadn't for more than two centuries) by the mid-nineteenth when Leonora supposedly "acquired some position" there.


This is how Samson was shorn;
Each in her style a Delilah reborn!
Each a gem, a beautiful
Diadem of beautiful —
Welcome them, these beautiful
Girls!


I was hoping that Dionysos's wedding gift to Ariadne, mentioned in the song from The Frogs that is named for her, might have occasioned another instance of the word "diadem".  But no: in keeping with the song's mood of bittersweet simplicity — and perhaps emphasizing the gift's intended function as a power accessory ("if you look like a goddess, you'll feel like a goddess") — Dionysos only ever refers to it, three times altogether, as a "crown".  While I haven't scoured the books, I'm feeling fairly confident that "Beautiful Girls" features the only appearance of "diadem" in SJS's oeuvre.

Hence: welcome.

[KathyB]

You, sir, too, sir,
Welcome to the grave.
I will have vengeance,
I will have salvation!

Who, sir? You, sir?
No one's in the chair--
Come on, come on,
Sweeney's waiting,
I want you bleeders!

[scenicdesign71]

The more he bleeds, the more he lives:
He never forgets and he never forgives.


The razor-sharp writing (no pun intended) in this final "Ballad" reprise always makes me gasp.  Just after the couplet quoted above, the entire following quatrain — with its present-tense callback to the Prologue's "Sweeney heard music that nobody heard" — compresses the character's rage and grief into such spellbinding poetry that I can't resist transcribing it here:

Sweeney wishes the world away,
Sweeney's weeping for yesterday —
Hugging the blade, waiting the years,
Hearing the music that nobody hears.

But, as usual, the effect of the words is inextricable from their musical setting; their chilling nursery-rhyme simplicity on the page is sharpened and pointed by the shape of the melody: rising lyrically over the first line, falling jaggedly on "yesterday," obsessively worrying just two notes for the second half of the stanza (with the slightest jump to prick our ears, just as in the Prologue, on "music that").  For all its speed and urgency, the words compel active listening rather than letting us glide along; while I ended up settling on the punctuation above, part of me wanted to emphasize the staccato stabs of information, as well as of melody, by replacing all of it — the em-dash and all three commas — with full-stop periods.  The emotion being described isn't languid, misunderstood-goth self-pity; it's spluttering, unquenchable fury.