Stephen Sondheim’s 1994 one-act musical, Passion, is a variation on the beauty and the beast story.
When the curtain rises, Giorgio, a handsome 19th-century Italian army captain, is making love to his ravishingly beautiful mistress, the married Clara. Their ecstatic reverie is interrupted when he tells her that he is about to be transferred to a remote, provincial military outpost. While separated, they continue to communicate through a stream of letters. At the same time, Giorgio becomes the object of the obsessive love of Fosca, the physically repulsive, sickly, and reclusive cousin of his Colonial. Fosca is manipulative and unrelenting. Yet ultimately, Giorgio abandons Clara for Fosca, with whom he experiences “love without reason, love without mercy, love without pride or shame; love unconcerned with being returned, no wisdom no judgment, no caution no blame…” (“No One Has Ever Loved Me“) Sondheim believed that Passion was about how “the force of somebody’s feelings for you can crack you open, and how it is the life force in a deadened world.”
With a book by James Lapine, Passion was based on Ettore Scola’s 1981 film Passione d’Amore, an adaptation of the obscure 1869 novel, Fosca, by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti. Unfolding in a continuous melodic stream, Passion has been described as a chamber opera. Sondheim approached the haunting, lush score as “one long rhapsody.”
The legendary Broadway singer, Barbara Cook, performed three excerpts from Passion. Happiness is heard in the first scene, and becomes a recurring and developing Idée fixe as the drama unfolds. It begins with a disquieting vamp which returns throughout the score as a leitmotif for obsession. Loving You is Fosca’s scene 12 soliloquy.
I Wish I Could Forget You is Giorgio’s love letter to Fosca. Opening with a wrenching, descending vamp, the song is both bittersweet and soaring. The final bars drift away with a sense of dreamy stasis.
Recordings
- Barbara Cook Sings Mostly Sondheim Amazon
- Barbara Cook: I Wish I Could Forget You
- Passions, (Original Broadway Cast Album)
Featured Image: A manuscript musical quotation from “Passion.”