Hello All,
For the last blog I decided to send a couple of videos
concerning, perhaps, Stephen Sondheim’s most famous song – Send in the Clowns
from the musical which you guys are doing in the spring – A Little Night Music.
When I was around 10 years old my mother was involved in
several productions of this musical as Madam Armfelt and I was constantly
dragged to rehearsals. As a result, I
had the entire piece fully memorized and was constantly singing things and
saying things that no 10 year old should sing or say – blissfully unaware of
the meaning of anything. I never much
cared for Send in the Clowns even as
a kid but it occurs to me now that it’s because at that age the entire piece
went completely over my head – like a mile over my head.
As with so much of Sondheim it is an unbelievably
smart/clever piece existing on multiple levels all at once. I still find it hard to believe that a mind
like his exists. All you really need to
know about the song is that the character singing – Desiré is an aging actress
who has gotten herself caught up in a kind of love triangle, quadrangle,
multiangle… she’s gotten herself into a mess; and you need to know that the
idea of sending in the clowns is a circus phrase – if an accident happened
during a circus act – a tightrope walker fell or the lion tamer got eaten –
they would “send in the clowns” to distract the audience from the drama.
The first video is part of a master class with Sondheim
working with a young singer on the piece.
It’s remarkable how concerned he is with diction and how unconcerned he
is with singing. It’s telling. He is making her deal with the words in
excruciating detail because they are the thing.
The second video is of Burnadette Peters performing the song
with Sondheim at the piano.
Why do we work so hard to learn how to sing well? I suppose there are a lot of possible answers
to that question. But for me there is
only one “correct” answer. We work on
our voices so that we may express the words and the music we are performing in
the best way possible. We the singers
are the servant of the creators – the poets and the composers. Perhaps we are artists but we are certainly
interpreters. In this final video,
Sondheim is the artist, the creator and Bernadette Peters gives him voice. He painted on sheet music and she is somehow
the air and light between those pages and our ears. Her voice is working but it is at the
complete service of the text she is putting across. The words couldn’t be more spontaneous or
more carefully pronounced and fitted together.
Sondheim Class
Bernadette Peters and Stephen Sondheim
