Sunday

This is not the Sunday of rest — it's the Sunday of creative ecstasy, the one that justifies every other day of the week. The song builds from near-silence, just a piano and a voice at first, tentative and exploratory, before the full orchestra enters in stages as though the painting itself is being populated. Sondheim wrote it as a kind of artistic manifesto disguised as a love song — the object of desire is the work, the canvas, the act of making something permanent out of light and color. The harmonic language is unusually rich for musical theater, drawing on impressionism in ways that deliberately echo Seurat's own aesthetic, so the music is trying to do with sound what the painter did with dots of color — approach meaning obliquely, through accumulation. The voice that sings it needs a quality of awe that doesn't tip into sentimentality, because the emotion here is specifically the emotion of an artist at the height of his powers recognizing it. There's no conflict in this song, which is part of what makes it unusual — it exists entirely in a state of pure affirmation, the character simply inhabiting a perfect moment. Culturally it represents the peak of a certain strand of Broadway ambition, the 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning show that asked whether beauty and human connection were fundamentally in tension. Reach for it on the days when your work is going exactly right.