A Little Night Music and the Art of Sacred Waiting
An Advent vigil | Sondheim Supplement #44
A vigil is a watch kept during the hours when sleep would be natural.
In religious tradition, it marks the night before a feast day—the Easter vigil, the Christmas vigil, the expectant darkness before celebration breaks into light. In military life, it is the night watch, the sentinel’s duty to remain alert while others rest. At the deathbed, it is the keeping of company through final hours. Before a wedding, it is the last night of one life before another begins.
What unites these disparate forms is their shared grammar: vigil is time held taut between what has been and what will be, active preparation married to passive endurance, the discipline of staying present to a threshold that has not yet been crossed.
Advent, the Church calendar’s season of preparation for Christmas, is a somewhat paradoxical vigil. It celebrates something that has already occurred—the Incarnation, God’s arrival in human form—while also keeping watch for what is still to come, the promised return. This “already/not yet” quality, this doubled consciousness of completion and anticipation, makes Advent not only a countdown but a sustained meditation on how we inhabit waiting itself. And it is precisely this quality that permeates so much of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music.
An Advent Calendar in Three Acts
Let’s consider first “A Weekend in the Country,” the Act I finale that propels each character toward Madame Armfeldt’s estate.
The number is structured as pure preparation: invitations received, objections raised and overcome, schemes set out, cases packed. “We’ll be laying our plans while we’re playing croquet,” we hear, and in that single phrase Sondheim captures the essence of the vigil: the apparent leisure masking intense purposefulness, the surface play concealing deeper strategy.
Everyone is preparing for something. Fredrik prepares to reclaim Desiree, Anne prepares to assert her youthful claims, Carl-Magnus prepares for confrontation, Charlotte prepares her counter-moves. Petra anticipates the weekend with delight, dreaming of romantic possibilities. Madame Armfeldt, though skeptical of the whole affair, prepares her estate to serve as the stage for all these intersecting dramas. The weekend itself becomes the ultimate threshold, the promised transformation that will justify all this preparation.
But arrival brings no relief from waiting.