One of the greatest works of art about art is Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1984 musical, “Sunday in the Park With George.” In its first act, the show imagines the creation of “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884,” Georges Seurat’s enormous pointillist landscape-with-figures, painted between 1884 and 1886. Sondheim’s anthemic “Sunday” is the Act I finale.
Take a few minutes and listen to Mandy Patinkin and the rest of the cast on the original Broadway cast recording:
By the time we get to this scene, the painter, name anglicized to George, has visited the sun-dazzled island in the Seine, sketching everyone: quarreling picnickers; his estranged lover, Dot; frolicking dogs. People mean mayhem, and for the perfectionist artist placing his finishing touches, that emotional turbulence is less inspiration than distraction.
Sondheim was a perfectionist and pointillist too; he could draw a picture using only musical notes. Amid the hubbub, we hear a scampering sound, almost as if a dog were running across the piano keys.
Suddenly, George arrests the performers in their onstage tracks. Hectic movement becomes stillness. There’s an arpeggiated chord, one we’ve heard before when he is creating a work of art. “Order!” George calls out.
With every arpeggio, George names another quality: “Design! Tension! Balance!” These progressions each chase upward to a D, shimmering in the strings. “Sunday” is in the key of G, and D is G’s perfect fifth, the top note in the key’s home, or tonic, triad. This stable, consonant interval hints that the creation George is making will last. Then, after passing through a dissonant, descending sequence, the orchestra settles into the key’s major chord. “Harmony!”
As a painter, Seurat used a strict number of colors to fool the viewer: Tiny specks of red and blue, for instance, seen from just a foot away, look violet. “Divided on the palette / mixed by the eye,” George explains, at one point. The dots in the Seurat moved Sondheim deeply. “Each one of those is a choice,” he marveled. “Three million choices.”
Sondheim very rarely composed for chorales; his spiky, plot-driven lyrics tend to sit most comfortably in individual voices. But here he had his company begin in deliberately restrained unison, and we hear it fuse them, in an instant, from noisy striving into a beautifully blended choir.
Perhaps you can also hear the figures stepping into their assigned places on George’s canvas. Their voices gain strength, and that crescendo creates one of the great operatic consolations in Sondheim’s oeuvre. All human messiness and care have fallen away; these perfected hieroglyphic shapes will be in this landscape, they exult, “forever.” (This is the word in the libretto that apparently always made Sondheim cry.)
The chromaticism — or the use of notes outside the key — makes each delayed tonic chord seem sweeter. Listen to how the chromatic E-flat on the next-to-last syllable of “forever” creates tension … only to resolve to that gorgeous, familiar D above the G.
Sondheim’s rhythm begins stately and processional. Our hearts beat in time; somehow George is directing our own steps too. As trumpets sound, we feel as if we move, as a company, in jubilation.
Even though we are messily alive, we too experience Order! Balance! Harmony! “Sunday” is, for me, the sound of hope triumphant. The song carries the promise of resolution within art — it’s Sondheim’s melodic portrait of defying dissonance to choose the major key.
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