“Shhh! If we don’t listen to the overture, we won’t recognize the musical themes when they come back later.” So says Darryl Philbin to Michael Scott, in the third episode of the seventh season of The Office. The episode is called “Andy’s Play,” and the ‘play’ in question is Sweeney Todd.
Darryl (Craig Robinson), initially warehouse foreman of the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch, spends much of the show being looked down upon by Michael (Steve Carell), who is regional manager. Darryl’s remark above is a delightful reminder that, of the two men, he is in fact the more culturally well-versed. So, A Funny Thing Happened at the Play with the Foreman.
However, this exchange is somewhat undermined by the music that we hear playing as he shushes Michael, which anyone even slightly familiar with Sweeney Todd will recognize as the opening bars of “Johanna.” This is emphatically not the music with which the show begins. Now, it would be churlish to complain too much about this. The Office is a beauty of a show, and continues to be phenomenally popular more than 10 years after its final season first aired. In 2020, in the US alone, more than 57 billion minutes of it was viewed on Netflix, an all-time streaming record only recently surpassed by Suits. It is a glorious thing for a show with that kind of reach to offer even the smallest of windows into Sondheim’s world; any fleeting inaccuracies can surely be forgiven.
But it does prompt an interesting question: to what extent would Darryl’s comment really apply to Sweeney Todd anyway? The show opens not with an overture but with a prelude. The line between these two terms can seem a little blurred, but generally speaking, we can think of an overture as a potpourri of musical themes (as Darryl correctly observes), and a prelude as being more of a general mood-setter, though of course not devoid of musical material that will be returned to later. Richard Wagner models this sometimes subtle distinction well: Der fliegende Höllander, Rienzi, and Tannhäuser are among his operas that begin with an overture; Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and the four operas which comprise Der Ring des Nibelungen all open with preludes. As a side note, if you are looking for a route into Wagner’s music, the prelude to Tristan makes for a great place to start.
There are several overtures to be found in Sondheim’s body of work—although, ironically enough, for Pacific Overtures he actually opts instead for a prologue. (But, as a certain witch might say, that’s another story. Never mind. Anyway…) It is worth noting, though, that the Sondheim shows which feature overtures tend to be either his earliest works as composer-lyricist (Saturday Night, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), or else those shows that most readily deal in nostalgia and retrospection (Follies, Merrily We Roll Along). In Sweeney Todd, though, we have a prelude. Let’s take a closer look at it.
First, it is worth addressing the harmonic elephant in the room. Much has been written about the so-called ‘Sweeney chord,’ a chord so central to this particular score that it can seem to hide in plain sight. What exactly is this chord? Well, in technical terms it is a third-inversion minor/major seventh chord. That is a bit of a mouthful, and will sound like word salad to the less music theory-oriented among us, so let’s break it down. First, the chord is minor:
Next, it includes a major seventh note, which Maria and the von Trapp children would call ti. In the key of C, this added note is a B:
Finally, there is the matter of it being in what is known as third inversion. The simplest way to think about the process of inverting a chord is that its lowest note becomes its highest, moving up an octave. Do this once to a chord in root position, and you have yourself a first-inversion chord. If you do this three times to the chord above (hence third inversion), you get this chord, which can then appear in any octave:
So the Sweeney chord, despite its intimidating name, is really just a minor triad with a little extra scrunch. Like many of the juiciest chords that composers have at their disposal, it sits precariously between suspension and resolution. More precisely, it is both of those things at once: question and answer, setup and punchline. So often Sondheim makes use of these types of chords; like his characters, they contain multitudes. And, as the Baker’s Wife reminds us in Into the Woods, “Just remembering you’ve had an and when you’re back to or makes the or mean more than it did before…” By leaning into and prolonging dissonances such as these, moments of relative consonance become balm for the soul.
This minor/major seventh chord, in its various inversions, has its own rich history independent of Sweeney Todd. It is a prominent feature of Bernard Herrmann’s film scores—just think of Hitchcock’s Psycho and you might well hear this very chord in your head. As we might expect, the same chord is easy to find in twentieth-century classical music, in a variety of contexts. Listen (by clicking the underlined text) to how playfully it is incorporated, arpeggiated, into the final movement of Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata. The first four notes you hear make up the chord in question. Listen also to the end of the first movement of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto. Once you get an ear for this chord, it is unmistakable. More surprisingly, we can also find it as far back as the early eighteenth century, albeit functioning as a dissonance which swiftly resolves. Listen to the final few seconds of Bach’s St Matthew Passion; our chord appears in the very last measure.
The last words we hear sung—in German, admittedly—in the St Matthew Passion are these:
We sit down in tears
And call to thee in the tomb:
Rest softly, softly rest!
It seems fitting, then, that Sondheim takes that final chord that Bach resolves, leaves it forever in limbo, and builds his Sweeney score around it. For, as we know, there is plenty of the tomb about this show, and precious little rest. And this chord is indeed the very first thing we hear in Sweeney Todd. Welcome to the grave…
Sweeney’s prelude begins with its most important chord not in its third-inversion so-called ‘Sweeney chord’ form, but in root position. The first true ‘Sweeney chord’ comes in the fourth measure (see above). But our ears are drawn at the outset to the third of the chord, which is uppermost, and then to the four-note descending melodic figure it initiates. We will later hear this same motif in “Epiphany,” first when Sweeney laments that he will “never see Johanna. No, I’ll never hug my girl to me,” and then for the devastating “And my Lucy lies in ashes, and I’ll never see my girl again.” That these are the very first notes we hear in the whole show is as poignant as it is fitting: after all, who might we suppose is foremost in Sweeney’s mind as he sails back to London after his years in exile? As this prelude begins, we are already inside our title character’s head.
As Sweeney’s prelude continues, it is as if we too are aboard the good ship Bountiful, sailing through unpredictable harmonic waters, tossed this way and that, at the mercy of Sondheim’s tides. When these waters first seem to settle, we hear a version of the melody we will later come to know as “Green Finch and Linnet Bird.” Here, the tune is haunting, hollow-sounding, with none of its later warmth—but still, Johanna sails with her father, if only in his mind. Soon, this modal “Green Finch” theme is accompanied by Sondheim’s first complete use of the dies irae, dies illa motif that this score is also so famous for incorporating. It seems clear that we are nearing London: death hangs in the musical air like morning mist.
As Sweeney Todd’s prelude builds toward its factory whistle conclusion, we might turn our attention once again to “Andy’s Play.” It was entirely reasonable for Darryl to expect an overture, and sensible too to anticipate various musical themes played one after another, in the more usual manner for a musical. But in Sweeney, Sondheim gives us something subtler. Despite its more full-throated moments, there is an interiority about this prelude, a sense that we are already inside our title character’s mind as the show begins. The ‘Sweeney chord,’ the dies irae figure, and the “Green Finch” motif are Sondheim’s chosen building blocks: an unholy trinity of self, death, and family. It is as if we, like Sweeney himself, are hearing the music that nobody hears.
Brilliant and riveting analysis. Thank you for making so understandable.