Are you ready for some Stephen Sondheim dense melodies about a murderous barber that looks like the older, decrepit uncle of Edward Scissorhands?
Of course you are. As you surely know by know (and as we’ve reported) Johnny Depp is playing the singing, bloody barber in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1979 Tony Award–winning musical “Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street.”
The soundtrack is due December 18 and the macabre musical and typically goth film hit theaters December 21. As for those inelegant melodies, even Depp thinks they’re hard to take, not to mention hard to sing. “It’s really obtuse stuff. When you start to take those pieces apart, melody line by melody line, it’s a lot of half-steps, which is not real easy to do,” Depp told EW recently. “Kind of go G to A-flat to A to B-flat. It’s super, ultra complicated, these notes that shouldn’t work together at times. But he made them so.”
Nothing like shoe-horning in melodies. Oh yeah, Depp skipped any formal training for this one too.
The cast, who sing all their parts, include aside from Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, and Sacha Baron Cohen among others. Eager nerdlinger fans of this soundtrack have already been taking parts of the audio and making their own videos on youtube (other examples below).
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street tracklist
01. Opening Title
02. No Place Like London
03. The Worst Pies in London
04. Poor Thing
05. My Friends
06. Green Finch & Linnett Bird
07. Alms Alms
08. Johanna
09. Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir
10. The Contest
11. Wait
12. Ladies and Their Sensitivities
13. Pretty Women
14. Epiphany
15. A Little Priest
16. Johanna
17. God, That’s Good!
18. By the Sea
19. Not While I’m Around
20.Final Scene
Watch/Listen: Epiphany by Johnny Depp
I wonder if Depp was thinking of some other word when he said “obtuse?” That word usually connotes stupidity of the stubborn sort (“ob-” meaning, “in the way of,” like an obstruction). “Obtuse” angles are wide and fat, and yet Depp seems to be commenting on the “acute” intervals in the music: literally “sharp”-edged.
I’ve tried to pick some of the melodies and accompaniment out on the piano, and discover that, playing the melody to one, I’m also playing the accompaniment to the other. Sondheim, a puzzle-lover and a trained composer, likes to cross-reference bits of songs this way.
For instance:
– the main theme played so loudly in the opening credits is hundreds of years old, going to the words “Dies Irae, Dies Illae” (“Day of wrath, day of mourning”) of the ancient Catholic requiem.
– The same pattern of notes, played rapidly and softly (in musical terms, an “ostinato” because it’s stubborn or “obstinate!”) then altered a bit, show up often in the score (associated with the phrase, “There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit,” and with Mrs. Lovett’s song “Wait”).
– While that same pattern plays in the low strings during the opening title, we hear some wind instruments play a counter melody above — and that becomes the second phrase that Sweeney sings in the movie: “Life has been kind to you,” and appears all the way through the movie. The melody that fits over those becomes, “There was a barber and his wife. . .”
– and the notes for the words “There was a barber and his wife” also begin each phrase of Sweeney’s lovely melody where the movie is most gross, a song called “Johanna,” when he sings, “And are you beautiful and pale . . . Johanna?” though the melody turns in another direction.
So maybe Depp meant “angular?” “Obscure” (in the sense of dark)?
“Ostinator?” All of these: but not obtuse!