That was Stephen Sondheim's reply to a question (at a San Francisco
Symphony press conference today) if his works can be classified as operas.

[This is an "age-old controversy" and just to put my cards on the table,
I am with Beverly Sills on this - she successfully produced Sondheim works
at the NYC Opera, and I believe that "Passion," specifically, is among the
best of contemporary *operas*...  but I didn't ask the question, knowing by
now perfectly well how Sondheim feels about it - although I still don't
understand what appears to be an aversion to this particular label.]

"If people want to call something an opera..." Sondheim said, not finishing
the sentence.  "I often said an opera is something that's performed in an
opera house, in front of an opera audience:  that's what distinguishes it.

"Those of you who heard this before, forgive me, but when `The Medium' and
`The Telephone' were done on Broadway, they were Broadway shows.  When they
were done in an opera house, they were operas - exactly the same shows.  It
all has to do with the audience's expectations.

"If I had to label `Sweeney Todd,' I would say it's an operetta, a black,
a dark operetta.  It has dialogue passages in it, it's not through-composed
in the sense that there is an over-arching design, although it does have
motivic composition.  I just find labelling unimportant and uninteresting.
If you want to call it an opera, fine; it's certainly not about inventing
a new form [responding to an earlier question], it's just...  content
dictates form.

"I cannot imagine how else to write `Sweeney Todd' except with a lot of
music.  It's a thriller, I want the music to be continuous because it's a
horror movie.  The way to scare you is with that continuous music - `Jaws'
scares you partly because of the shark, partly because of John Williams."

His best experience of audience response to "Sweeney Todd," Sondheim said,
was at the New York production when "I was wandering down the aisle during
the second act, and saw the audience didn't know they were sung to."

Janos Gereben/SF
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