Daniel Okrent

I'm very happy to be here.

Well, Epiphany, this horrifying and overwhelming song near the end of Sweeney Todd, I had listened to and been impressed by, I don't know how many scores of times, but when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song.

It's all tied together.

in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective.

Right.

He steals his wife.

Well, he steals his wife.

And discards her.

And wounds her permanently.

It was a chord that the very young Stephen Sondheim, he was a teenager, heard and he just fell in love with that chord.

And he went back to see the movie again because he wanted to be able to retain that chord and be able to use it for his own purposes.

Now, he was not yet a composer at that point, but he was an incipient composer.

And in fact, that chord that he called the Herman chord shows up in his work and shows up particularly in Sweeney Todd, I believe, three times.

Sure.

In an interview that he gave to his first biographer, Meryl Seacrest, back in 1996, he

Sondheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs, the beginning songs of Sweeney Todd.

She was his closest friend, his self-acknowledged muse, and she often would do this.

He would play them for her before anybody else.

So she came over.

He had told her before that, that it was a horror show.