Passion (1994)
Book: James Lapine
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In short: Passion brings beautiful music, psychological depth, and explores the nature of love in a way that inevitably evokes a strong reaction from the audience. Passion was warmly received by critics and won four Tony Awards, but it often remains misunderstood by a wider audience.
“It’s like Shakespeare. Listen. You’ll hear things that will tell you
John Doyle (theater director, Tony Award-winner)
all you need to know about the human condition.”
Overview Passion - background and excerpts
Passion is a powerful one-act musical exploring overwhelming and uncompromising love. Based on the 1869 novel Fosca by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti and its 1981 film adaptation Passione d’Amore , it is one of three musicals—alongside Sweeney Todd and Road Show — Passion Sondheim personally initiated.
Plot Summary
De musical speelt zich af in het Italië van 1863. Hoofdpersoon is de legerkapitein Giorgio, die een gepassioneerde relatie heeft met Clara, een getrouwde vrouw. Als hij naar een afgelegen militaire standplaats wordt gestuurd, ontmoet hij daar Fosca. Fosca is een ziekelijke, onaantrekkelijke vrouw met hysterische uitbarstingen, die vrijwel onmiddellijk voor Giorgio valt en hem onophoudelijk tracht voor zich te winnen. In de loop van de musical gebeurt wat bijna niet voor te stellen lijkt: Giorgio valt op zijn beurt voor Fosca. De kern van de musical is de transformatie van Giorgio en zijn toenemende begrip en liefde voor Fosca. Het verhaal wordt grotendeels verteld aan de hand van brieven.
Themes
The musical delves into the nature of love in its many forms. Fosca’s love for Giorgio is all-consuming, self-sacrificing, and obsessive, contrasting sharply with the relationship between Giorgio and Clara. Fosca’s love ultimately transforms both herself and Giorgio. The musical also examines the nature of beauty—both internal and external—and its role in attraction and desire.
Additionally, Fosca is portrayed as a deeply intelligent, passionate, and artistic woman in a world dominated by men, where there is little room for such qualities.
Passion is a work that invites audiences to see new perspectives and raises different questions with each viewing.
Oppressive beauty
The atmosphere of Passion is both breathtaking as well as suffocating. This stems partly from the unrelenting intensity of Fosca’s love, which is portrayed with utter seriousness, devoid of humor, irony, or cynicism. Additionally, the structure of the musical contributes to its emotional grip. The near-operatic score runs continuously, with few standalone songs, and the show is performed as a one-act piece. This leaves no natural breaks for applause, forcing the audience to remain immersed until the very end, when the tension is finally released, allowing it to breathe again.
This oppressive quality is both the show’s power and its challenge.
Music and Lyrics
The score is emotionally charged yet minimalistic and intimate. Sondheim employs unconventional harmonies and unexpected melodic turns, amplifying the musical’s intensity. Leitmotifs play a central role, associated with key elements like Fosca, Giorgio, Clara, love, obsession, and the military setting.
In Passion the music and lyrics are deeply interwoven. The melodies underscore and heighten the emotions expressed in the lyrics, creating a holistic and immersive experience.
Sondheim’s text delves into the characters’ psyches, revealing their innermost thoughts, feelings, and conflicts with remarkable depth.
Reception
Critics were rarely as enthusiastic about Sondheim’s work as they were about Passion. Early audience reactions, however, were harsh; the disdain for Fosca during tryout performances was so strong that some spectators shouted at the actors. These responses led to adjustments, but Sondheim suspected that the discomfort stemmed from audiences recognizing uncomfortable parallels between themselves and the characters of Fosca and Giorgio.
The original Broadway production went on to win Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book, Best Original Score, and Best Actress (Donna Murphy). Following this critical acclaim, public opinion began to shift. However, Passion struggled to compete with the blockbuster entertainment musicals of the era, such as Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon and Les Misérables.
Video excerpts (in show's order)
- The clip from the Tony Awards features the original cast performing three scenes: the opening, where Giorgio and Clara make love (“Happiness”); the final section of Scene 3 (“Garden sequence”), where Giorgio and Fosca walk together in the castle garden shortly after their first meeting; and the “Finale”, where Giorgio reads Fosca’s final letter, in which she writes of her imminent death.
- In “I read” Fosca explains that she reads to experience life through the eyes of others. A Dutch version by Vera Mann is featured in the Dutch section of this page.
- The excerpt “I wish I could forget you” is one of the three full songs in the show. In this scene, Fosca dictates a letter from Giorgio to herself, a calculated gesture designed to preserve her memories of him. Giorgio writes the dictated letter, but his presence is driven by guilt—his earlier rejection of her threatens to lead to her death.
- When Fosca unexpectedly and unwelcome boards Giorgio’s train to Milan, he tries to convince her that he doesn’t love her and that she must let him go. Her response is the poignant “Loving you” .
This is why I live.
You are why I live.
I read to live
in other people’s lives.
I read about the joys the world dispenses to the fortunate,
And listen for
the echoes.
I read to live,
to get away from life.
Why is love
so easy to give and
so hard to receive?
Love without reason,
love without mercy,
love without pride
or shame.
Love unconcerned with being returned –
No wisdom, no judgment, no caution, no blame.
I do not dwell on dreams.
I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation.
Stephen Sondheim about Passion
“Fulfilled by James [Lapine, red.]’s theatrically inventive staging, the piece worked for me, but certainly not for everyone. As the hostility during previews indicated, the story struck some audiences as ridiculous. They refused to believe that anyone, much less the handsome and saintly Giorgio, could come to love someone so manipulative, relentless and menacing, not to mention physically repellent, as Fosca. As the perennial banality would have it, they couldn’t “identify” with either of the main characters.
The violence of their reaction, however, strikes me as an example of “The lady doth protest too much.” I think they may have identified with Fosca and Giorgio all too readily and uncomfortably. The idea of a love that’s pure, that burns with D.H. Lawrence’s gemlike flame, emanating from a source so gnarled and selfish, is hard to accept. Perhaps they were reacting to the realization that we are all Fosca, we are all Giorgio, we are all Clara. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is what gives Tarchetti’s stodgy novel and Scola’s elegant movie such profound power.”
More Passion: audio and video
Full shows
Go to More Sondheim for our Sondheim Archives.
Passion in the Netherlands
Most recent large production
STAGE ENTERTAINMENT
Opening: August 30, 2004, Koninklijke Schouwburg Den Haag
Cast: Vera Mann (Fosca), Stanley Burleson (Giorgio), Pia Douwes (Clara), and others.
Translation: Daniël Cohen
Director: Paul Eenens
Audio and video
Reviews of Passion
Original Broadway production (1994)
“Once in an extraordinary while, you sit in a theater and your body shivers with the sense and thrill of something so new, so unexpected, that it seems, for those fugitive moments, more like life than art. Passion is just plain wonderful — emotional and yes, passionate . . . Sondheim’s music — his most expressive yet — glows and glowers, and Tunick has found the precise tonal colorations for its impressionistic moods and emotional overlays. From the start of his career, Sondheim has pushed the parameters of his art. Here is the breakthrough. Exultantly dramatic, this is the most thrilling piece of theater on Broadway.” – Clive Barnes, New York Post (1994)
“Passion is a great, great show. Not just because Stephen Sondheim has finally approved the notion of love as more than a conjugating verb, though that is certainly the show’s chief revelation. It’s great because, with 15 musicals behind him, our theater’s most provocative composer and lyricist is still reinventing the form while honoring it, still writing shows that tell haunting tales while delighting the ear and the eye, still prodding us to think about love even as his protagonist concludes that beauty is skin deep but love, as one character sings, “is as permanent as death.”” – Jeremy Gerrard, Variety (1994)
New York (2005)
“This pared-down production of one of Mr. Sondheim’s most challenging works, a gothic romance about a young military officer drawn into an intense relationship with a sick, ugly woman, illuminates the shapely beauty and emotional vibrancy of Mr. Sondheim’s score with unsettling, ultimately shattering force. More than a decade after its Broadway premiere, Passion may have found its purest, most persuasive and most powerful form.” – Charles Isherwood, The New York Times (2005)
Off-Broadway production (2013)
“Mostly, however, the show’s pervasive appeal to the senses comes through the music, which seems to fill the theater like a churning ocean. Orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick, Mr. Sondheim’s frequent and brilliant collaborator, that music swirls in sweet and somber contradictions of tone and meter, given visual equivalents by Mr. Doyle’s circular staging and Jane Cox’s fire-and-ice lighting. […] I haven’t dwelt much on the vocal performances, which seems strange for a show that is mostly sung. They’re all impeccable, from the rakish harmonies of the soldiers to the soaring, diving solos of the three leads. But while I was there, I didn’t stop to think that I was listening to songs. I was hearing thought. And at moments I was hearing a distillation of pure emotion.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times (2013)
“In keeping with the romantic tradition, Sondheim’s luxuriously harmonic and unabashedly operatic score pours out in a continuous flow of melody. Flawlessly played by a small orchestra under the musical direction of Rob Berman, this intoxicating soundscape largely consists of a musical duel between the radiant romanticism of Clara’s tender love and the frightening ferocity of Fosca’s pathological obsession.” – Marilyn Stasio, Variety (2013)
