Nor ten men,
Nor a hundred
Can assuage me—
I will have you!The final line—“And I’m full of joy!”—is the musical climax of
the role, standing out in harrowing detachment from the rest
of the song and demanding the kind of voice that allows opera
singers to play this part gladly.
What tells everyone this is a musical and not an opera, how-
ever, is the aftermath of the song. We are into a book scene
now, where Mrs. Lovett is not all that impressed with Sweeney’s
rage. “That’s all very well,” she says, but there is the problem
of corpses. Sweeney’s first victim, the rival barber Pirelli, al-
ready lies slaughtered in the barbershop. “All that matters is
him,” says Mrs. Lovett. What should be done with the corpse?
Sweeney has conventional ideas about burying it, but Mrs.
Lovett is thinking more imaginatively, and within two minutes
she has swung into hernumber, the real climax of act 1:
Seems an awful waste...
Such a nice plump frame
Wot’s his name
Has...
Had...
Has...Sweeney’s aria has given way to something entirely different, a
music-hall waltz tune on the taste treats that will follow from
the barber’s wide-ranging revenge if only the corpses are used
profitably, as the filler for meat pies. This may be the height of
incongruity in dramatic literature—comic cannibalism in 3/4
taking over from Sweeney’s passion for revenge. It is certainly
the epitome of the musical, for the sense of parody and incon-
gruity that runs through the history of the genre has never
been used to such disconcerting perfection before. “It’s fop,”
Mrs. Lovett sings as she thinks of new flavors,
Finest in the shop
Or we have some shepherd’s pie peppered