Passion is effectively a musical without songs. Which may in part explain why it appears to have divided even fully paid-up members of the Stephen Sondheim Appreciation Society. And yet Passion represents a new and searching level of refinement in the relationship between the play – the book – and the score. Passion feels 'through composed', not in the literal sense, but rather in the way that it integrates, fuses, that which is spoken and that which is sung. James Lapine's book and Stephen Sondheim's music and lyrics are one, or rather the one flows into the other: the word is made poetry is made music. Passion is songful.
Ettore Scola's movie Passione D'Amore was Sondheim's and Lapine's starting point. The notes describe Passion as a ''rhapsody on the theme of love'' – and that it is, a rhapsody on the power of love unconditional, that most potent of all life- forces. The piece, like the emotions it chronicles, is more complex, more intricate than it might at first seem. Sondheim has a way of deploying thematic ideas so that they subliminally play on our senses: sometimes he's blatant (the Leitmotif principle), sometimes he goes for the subtle derivation. But Passion's musical imperative is in the dream-like current of its narrative. It is at once the most febrile and effulgently lyrical of Sondheim.
At its heart is a powerful and recurrent juxtaposition. Sondheim plants it right there at the opening. The clatter of military drum and shriek of dissonant winds rapidly dissolve into gentle palpitations – post-coital rhythms. The two principal love themes emerge and bond, ravishing creations, both, the latter ''God, you are so beautiful'' graced with an exquisite ornateness in the phrase ''I love to see you in the light''. Clara and Giorgio (the excellent Marin Mazzie and Jere Shea) physically, vocally, musically entwine. The drums invade once more. Love and War – backdrop and metaphor: fierce emotions, passion running high.
Of course, the album of the show gives us only highly selective bits of the book as it relates to the score. But the flow, balance, and symmetry of the piece has been skilfully preserved. I do think it is remarkable that the writers manage to see-saw our emotions between irritation at the sickly, self-pitying Fosca and overwhelming compassion for her. One of the show's most electrifying and unsettling scenes comes with a letter she dictates to Giorgio. But it's a letter to herself from Giorgio, a fantasy in which she presumes to read his heart and mind. It is, of course, deeply prophetic. Sondheim gives Fosca the most hauntingly elusive of themes, a consumptive Chopinesque plaint (minor key, of course), heard first on distant piano but soon impatient for the oboe. Donna Murphy's extraordinary voice (a husky alto colour which belongs among the cellos) plumbs the depths of her melancholy: on her very first entrance, a bass clarinet accompanies her into shadow. The scoring throughout (orchestrations are by Jonathan Tunick, masterly as ever) is most seductive (the 15-piece pit band gets 26 extra strings for the recording). This composer has to adore Ravel. It's the fastidiousness, the harmonic luminosity that gives him away.
There is some beautiful music in Passion – vocal lines that really do take wing. But equally, much – too much? – that is greyly recitative-like in character. Add to this the Sondheim mannerisms, the familiar rhythmic and intervallic tics that now and then begin to get to you.... Then again, Sondheim just wouldn't be Sondheim without them. Certain of his little melodic tugs will always insinuate their way into the memory: ''I thought it was no more than a name for yearning''/''I thought it was what kindness became''/''I'm learning'' is a case in point, the slip from B natural to A natural, from 'yearning' to 'learning', is echt-Sondheim and especially provocative in his context. And the big gestures are so much bigger for being so sparing. When the music from Clara's and Giorgio's first encounter is recalled for Fosca and Giorgio in the penultimate scene, when Fosca sings ''All this happiness, coming when there's so little time'', the effect is devastating. It's so fleeting a reprise. Time is so short. And then the orchestra washes over the lovers with ''God, you are so beautiful'' and, in a powerful mirror image of the opening scene, the military drums cut it short. In Fosca's words: ''They hear drums, we hear music...''. Some of us do.
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