What a perfect day!
Here We Are with motifs, combustion engines and a game of cards (kinda)
One of the most fundamental building blocks of music is the motif—a recurring sequence of notes that forms a recognizable musical idea. You can think of motifs as the 'words' of the language of music, with individual notes acting like the letters that compose those words. While all genres use motifs to help convey specific emotions and themes, in works of musical theater these motifs are often connected to specific characters and concepts to help guide the audience through the story. This use of motifs is known as lietmotif (German for "leading motif" - it's a motif that leads you through the piece!), and as you may have guessed, Sondheim makes extensive use of lietmotif throughout his career. As he relates to Mark Horowitz in Sondheim on Music:
I'm very much a leitmotif man - I really like the notion that an audience will register certain tunes, or rhythmic ideas, or even harmonies, with given characters. And you can build on that. It's very convenient. I don't know why more people don't do it. If I have a theme for you, and a theme for her, then when the two of you get together, I don't have to wonder about what I should write: I'll take your music and her music and combine them. So you're building up a bank for yourself. (Horowitz 73)
We'll get to his somewhat unconventional use of lietmotif in the Road Songs the "core six" sing in Here We Are in just a moment, but first I thought it would be helpful to talk about how Sondheim employed their use in earlier works. Into the Woods is a particularly good candidate for this kind of examination as Sondheim made extensive use of lietmotif to help keep track of the play's somewhat unweildy cast of characters.
Consider the opening Prologue to Into the Woods where each character introduces with them a unique musical "idea" that will follow them throughout the play. There's a straight(ish) musical line between Little Red asking the baker and his wife for a basket and the realizations she comes to after her re-birth from the belly of the wolf.
In Sondheim on Music, Horowitz includes these diagrams of the motif "bank" from Into the Woods (p 82-83 Horowitz). I'm not particularly musically inclined, but even at a glance you can see similarity in the patterns of notes - Sondheim refers to the motifs as having "little echoes of each other". Horowitz points out that nearly all of them start with either a major or minor second - building off of the first 2-note motif we see in the bank: "I Wish".
In a video produced by MTI for licensees of the play, Sondheim describes the wishes embeded in the motifs as "individual wishes" that must be combined together into a "community wish" in order to "save the world, so to speak".
In "Here We Are" the "core six" - with one or two exceptions that I'll get to in a future post - exclusively sing collectively. This effectively coalesces the individual members of the group into "the bourgeoisie", a richly expanded version of "the Blob" from Merrily We Roll Along. The traditional approach to lietmotif - assigning a theme to each character as we've explored in Into the Woods fails to get at the almost incestuous interconnectedness of this group. Rather than aligning these motives with characters, Sondheim instead chooses to pair them with conversational "goals" allowing each individual character of the "core six" to align with or distance themself from that aspect of the group. In doing so, the tensions that the group is trying to ignore (that will come back to haunt them in Act 2) bubble up to the surface.
Each "road song" begins with a combustion-engine like fanfare that "smooths out" into a nice easy rhythm - suggesting the gliding of a luxury automobile down a city street. This sets the stage for characters to "play" motifs like a conversational card game. Other characters can "play in" to agree, or "trump" the card by switching to a different motif completely. Consider the rapid-fire motivic shifts in The Road (part two). It begins with Leo playing what I've been calling "if it isn't the X it's the Y" motif (or perhaps, the "bitching" motif).
LEO:
If it isn't the food it's the service...
FRITZ: (spoken)
CAN YOU HEAR?
RAFAEL:
If it isn't the noise it's the queue...
FRITZ: (spoken)
ARE YOU INSANE?
PAUL:
Or the backs of the chairs...
LEO:
Or the waiter with airs...
CLAUDIA:
Or the long flight of stairs to the loo...
MARIANNE:
There's always something...
The motif shifts to the "Morandan seduction" motif that Rafael originally introduces:
RAFAEL:
You know, you're hot when you're angry
FRITZ: (spoken)
Forget it, Rafi, I've been gay since I was 3
The main motif shifts to the underscoring of the "road" and other motifs come in shards as Fritz takes a phone call from Inferno and the other characters wonder what they're up to - eventually we return to Rafel's seduction, this time to Claudia:
RAFAEL:
I have to have you... now.
CLAUDIA: (spoken)
What way do you want me?
RAFAEL:
The way I had you... last Tuesday.
CLAUDIA: (spoken)
I love that way...
RAFAEL:
I miss you every day...
CLAUDIA:
Say it, say it...
RAFAEL:
...every day.
CLAUDIA: (spoken)
Okay, okay...
RAFAEL:
..in my heart, in my mind, in my bed...
CLAUDIA: (spoken)
More, more...
RAFAEL:
I miss the way you give me comfort,
courage... head.
Claudia.... I must murmur your name...
A phone call interrupts, this time for Rafael. There's more underscoring and conversation and Leo comes in with the "end of the world" theme Fritz originally introduced to the group:
LEO: (sarcastically)
What if it's the end of the world, hey folks!
PAUL:
Maybe it's the end of the world...
FRITZ (spoken):
Yeah, laugh.
RAFAEL:
Maybe it's the end of the world indeed.
MARIANNE:
In that case...
(she switches motives to "buy this day")
MARIANNE:
Buy this day for us sweetheart,
buy this perfect day.
CLAUDIA (playing in):
Agreed.
End the world? Okay.
But this day?
Let it stay.
PAUL:
And as they say...
(he switches motives to the "life's a tit" motive)
PAUL:
La vadida ay estada eltidada!
Olé!
Which of course, is a callback to a motif Rafael introduced to Marianne who failed to engage with it the way he intended and got turned into an in-joke amongst the group. The song goes on from here, but I think that's illustrative enough.
This card game analogy highlights how each character is partially engaged, listening enough to play along but always ready to redirect the flow towards their own ends. Marianne and others transformation of Rafael's seductive "La vadida ay estada eltidada!" (life's a tit!) motif into an inside joke showcases how motifs can be manipulated or repurposed within their interpersonal exchanges.
Moreover, Leo’s sarcastic use of Fritz's "Maybe it's the end of the world" motif exemplifies how these musical elements are not just passed back and forth but are also transformed, gaining new meanings and implications with each iteration. The motifs are thus dynamic, evolving with the characters’ interactions, echoing the fluidity and the tactical exchanges found in card games where players continuously adapt to the evolving state of play.
What we see here is that the music is not heading towards the eventual merging together of their wishes into a community as in Into the Woods but instead a group that is tied together not by shared goals but rather by convenience, social standing, or proximity, each pursuing their individual desires at the potential cost of the group's stability. The motifs in "Here We Are" underscore the dissonance between the characters' outward unity and their internal, individualistic agendas.
Once the group successfully eats at the Morandan embassy, we still hear a few more versions of the "road songs" - only the characters instead remain stationary at the embassy. Instead of the engine startup, we hear either bombfire (End of Act One, Double Duet) or Leo belching (Digestion, Shine). The explosions are no longer safely contained in the engine - they're out in the world and also in there with them now.