Sweeney Todd is a musical written by Stephen Sondheim in 1979.
Warning: Spoilers!
It tells the story of Benjamin Barker (Aka Sweeney Todd) returning to London to find his wife dead and his daughter locked up by Judge Turpin.
Seeking revenge with the help of Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney opens a barber shop to kill his customers, who are then baked into pies. Yum.
After playing on broadway for over a year and then the West end for half a year, it has sparked many important revivals, productions, and of course a movie.
It is regarded as Stephen Sondheim's best musical or even the best musical ever written.
In addition to being extremely entertaining, beautiful, thrilling, and witty; I believe it is one of the most compositionally complex musicals ever written.
In this video and in the next few, I will discuss a few of the techniques Sondheim uses to tell the story. In fact in this video, we'll literally just look at the first 6 measures of the musical.
First off, lets define two music terms: motif and leitmotif.
A motif is a recurring theme or idea that is symbolic to the story.
Literature uses this a lot, like how incest keeps recurring in Hamlet. Movies uses motifs too, like the spinning top in Inception.
And of course in music, motifs are prevalent.
A leitmotif is a musical theme that associates with a specific person, place, object, or idea (and etc).
This term was created by opera composer Richard Wagner in the 19th century.
. To help distinguish things in his sometimes 5-hour long operas, he would introduce these leitmotifs.
Check out a short video in the description box below introducing leitmotifs and showing examples.
These leitmotifs might not only be represented in the melody, it might be associated with the rhythm, the color, or even the instrument playing it.
Another Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, utilizes leitmotifs extensively.
The most important and most prevalent motif that Sondheim uses is a melody called 'Dies Irae'.
CBC has a great short video that is worth checking out;
the link is in the description box below. Basically it is a medieval hymn that is associated with death.
It is literally the song of death. It goes like this:
You've heard this theme before, because it is so prevalent in music and movies today.
. Just watch the clip please. We're only going to be focusing on the first phrase of the Dies Irae:
Sondheim basically uses this motif or the structure of this motif in almost every song.
The very first song reflects this very well.
Right off the bat, when the voice comes in there's no mistaking the dies irae melody. Have a listen:
Now have a listen of the dies irae again:
now listen to Sweeney again:
I mean, get rid of the first note, and change the second note up two pitches, and we have an identical replica:
Now lets really have a closer look at the Dies Irae in regards to pitch relationships.
We first start with a half step down (aka a minor second),
then it goes back up. we then jump three half steps (aka a minor third).then we go 2 half steps (aka a whole step, aka a major second) back up.
. Then 4 half steps down (aka a major third), then finally going back up 2 half steps to end the melody
It is worth noting that we've gone through every leap between one and four halfsteps, and we never made a leap larger than a third.
lets have a closer look at the beginning of the ballad. I bet you missed something!
The first three notes. These three notes quote the beginning of the dies irae.
One half step up, then one half step back down. However, this upside-down from what the dies-irae is,
which is instead goes down then up. This is what is known as an inversion.
Although it is a small inversion, you'll see the significance it has throughout the entire musical. Hold it, I'm not done!
The bass is playing this F# down here:
if I bring the F# up an octave, you can hear the dies irae's first four notes:
This is called octave displacement. This is when a note stays the same but moves across the range to a different octave.
So we've got the strings and clarinets playing the first dies irae motif:
But that's not the only thing that happens. Because we also have a counter-motif (played by the horn, harp, and cello):
Here's that by itself:
We have these three notes. And once again, if we move the bottom note, D, up an octave, we get this.
Another inversion! Instead of the dies irae's down one, up one, and down three; with these pitches we can do an up one, down one, and up three.
This is another hidden dies-irae that Sondheim had already hidden in the first dies irae.
Put the melody on top of that and we have three dies irae motifs simultaneously. That's just amazing.
That's all for this video. In the next videos, I promise, we will go way further into the musical and look at more than just a couple measures.