Quote of the day:
There are many roads to success, but only one sure road to failure; and that is to try to please everyone else.
—Benjamin Franklin
At the request of his friend Warren Beatty, Stephen Sondheim wrote five songs for the movie Dick Tracy, and he won an Oscar for “Sooner or Later”, the song where Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) claims she always gets her man, and she sets her sights on Tracy (Beatty).
I happen to like some of the other songs better than the Oscar winner, not that I have anything against “Sooner of Later”, of course.
For example, there’s “Back in Business”, which I featured in yesterday’s post, and there’s “What Can You Lose?”, a song about a fellow who is in love with his friend and trying to decide whether to tell her or not. After all, what can you lose? Until he realizes that “once the words are spoken, Something may be broken.” He sadly concludes, “With so much to win, There’s too much to lose.”
Who said Sondheim couldn’t write a love song?
In his book, How Sondheim Found His Sound, Steve Swayne analyzes the song:
The wistful, descending lines of the opening include a glittering arpeggio high in the piano (mm. 1-4) that sets up the lyric, with its sentiment of love wilting before it has had a chance fully to blossom, a love weighed down with the anguish of having to make a decision: risk disclosure and possible rejection or remain both silent and unfulfilled. Two tempo indications rest on top of each other: the singer is told to sing a “lazy blues (quarter note = 108),” while the pianist is told to play “rubato.” The call simultaneously for metronomic precision and rhythmic flexibility illustrates the indecision that the song sets out to explore. The voice enters haltingly, only four syllables to a breath, as though the opening question is so difficult to utter that the singer finds it hard to move forward (mm. 4ff.).
Not until he begins to reflect on the possibility that his intended may already see how he feels does the song take flight (mm. 12-16), only to stall because of another, more depressing possibility: that the object of his love knows how he feels and chooses not to acknowledge it (mm. 16-24). Twice as long as the flight of rapture, this sober realization leads the singer to start all over again, and the music signals this change of direction by returning to the music of the opening interrogative phrase (mm. 24ff.). This second time, however, when the song reaches its highest arc, the lyrics have a change of tone: before, they spoke of the possibility of love; now they speak of the likelihood of loss. Immediately the melodic line responds by sinking down to its lowest point, whereupon the singer resolves to be stoic in the face of unrequited affections: “With so much to win (love, companion-ship, completion, emotional fulfillment), there’s too much to lose (friendship, affection, what emotional satisfaction already exists).”
The chord that accompanies this final word shows the pain of the loss, with its harmonization of the melodic tonic with the flat supertonic; the dissonance of the major seventh helps to portray the sorrow brought on by the lack of a conclusive resolution of love. The upward turn of the melody for this final word also underscores the pain, as the vowel and pitch of the word “lose” approximate the involuntary sound one makes when experiencing discomfort. The final five notes of the piano affirm the singer’s resignation, as they hark back to the arpeggio in the introduction, now slowed to near stasis. What was once wistful now sounds paralyzed. The song has indeed lost a lot, and its pathetic recollection of the opening of the song echoes the sentiment of the text—that indeed there is very much to lose.
Swayne reproduces the full piano score of the song, which I include here, in case you want to follow along, and I’m embedding the video of Mandy Patinkin and Madonna performing the song in the movie.
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