‘Mid-air’ could mean anything from ‘over there’ to ‘in heaven’, but Sondheim has briefly forced our feet off the ground as well, to hover in this delicate moment. Every audience member is invited to insert their own little gasp: the memory of a relationship gone wrong, or someone we’ve lost. It all takes place in an instant, before landing a seventh below the held note the chord resolves itself straight away, but there’s a lot of room in that tiny pause. The effect is heart-stoppingly buoyant: he takes out the bass just for that beat, and for a second it’s pure suspension and beauty, offsetting the ironies of the lyrics. The highest note of the phrase (and indeed the song) is syncopated, and he asks for it to be held slightly longer than notated: ‘Me here at last on the ground/You in mid-air’ or ‘I thought that you’d want what I want/Sor ry, my dear.’ The result is an immediate sense of lyrical beauty, a familiar texture and gait, but somehow chastened by a sense of uncertainty. In ‘Send in the Clowns’, for instance, from A Little Night Music, he establishes a tension between the steadiness and the beauty of the accompaniment for two bars, followed by a ‘hiccough’ bar, a little shorter than its colleagues, and the resolution comes a bar earlier than a lesser composer might have written.
Stephen Sondheim managed to find the elusive balance: every lyric, every phrase, every chord is poised on the razor’s edge between the cerebral and the emotional, the innovative and the comfortable, between slyness and raw honesty. It’s rare to find an artist who has figured out the sweet spot between the dichotomies that plague any work of art.
When you’re making something there are more ways to get it wrong than right.
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