Song and Dance: The Music Behind A Little Night Music Dance with Me “My favorite musical form has always been that of Theme and Variations,” writes Sondheim in Finishing the Hat. Structuring the project which became A Little Night Music as an exploration in theme and variation was one of Sondheim’s first intentions for the musical. It was only after reading Hugh Wheeler’s script that Sondheim decided a “score of waltz variations” would be the most appropriate to the project. The initial inspiration for the waltzes behind A Little Night Music came from a waltz in the style of Maurice Ravel which Sondheim had written some fifteen years prior when he was intending to write a musical adaptation of Ring Round the Moon, Christopher Fry’s English translation of Jean Anouilh’s L’Invitation au Château. Waltzes, it turned out, not only helped match the feeling of Wheeler’s script, but also became an important part of musicalizing the plot’s structure and the character’s emotions. Dartmouth Professor of Music Steven Swayne, who has written about Sondheim in journal articles and in his book How Sondheim Found His Sound, explores Sondheim’s relationship to waltzes (particularly in A Little Night Music) in his essay, “Remembering and Re-membering: Sondheim, the Waltz, and A Little Night Music.” Swayne maintains the Sondheim “adopts the convention of the waltz as a voluptuous and seductive dance only to circumvent it”: “When a waltz occurs, someone is either contemplating — or in the process of — leaving someone for someone else. By evening's end, all of the original couples have engaged in re-membering, an act always accompanied by the waltz…. Hearing the waltz as the aural agent for re-membering breathes new life into the waltz tradition. The modern audience brings to the waltz the expectation of enthralled and entwined couples, and yet that same audience projects this blissful togetherness as something long past.” Swayne also argues against referring to A Little Night Music as a ‘waltz musical’ not only because of the various other styles of dance used in the piece but because it does not adequately describe what Sondheim has done in the score:
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