Sondheim Supplement #29
An exclusive Passion essay, a "cut songs" crossword, and more...
Just another love story?
In the week that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement, we turn our attention to a somewhat less glittering romance… Our Supplement this week features an exclusive essay looking at Passion’s “I Wish I Could Forget You.” Plus, our crossword is themed around Sondheim’s cut songs, there’s more from our conversation with Michael Mitnick, a look back at our conversation with Josefina Gabrielle, and there’s our survey of This Week in Sondheim, too.
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Lyric Essay: “I Wish I Could Forget You”
I don’t know how I let you
So far inside my mind.
But there you are and there you will stay,
How could I ever wish you away?
I see now I was blind.
And should you die tomorrow,
Another thing I see:
Your love will live in me.
In Passion’s “I Wish I Could Forget You,” Fosca achieves something remarkable: she scripts her own seduction. She dictates these lines to Giorgio as part of a letter supposedly from him to her, the emotional nakedness of her words wrapped in elaborate artifice. It is a manipulation as audacious as it is heartbreaking.
In these lines, we encounter a closed circuit of desire that generates its own electricity, requiring no actual reciprocal emotion from Giorgio. Fosca literally puts words of love in Giorgio’s mouth, then accepts them as his authentic feelings. While he serves as her unwitting mouthpiece, she functions as playwright, director, and sole audience member for a romance she has authored entirely herself.
But what exactly does she have him say?