Sunday Lyrics – Sunday in the Park With George

Song Overview

Sunday—the softly explosive Act-I finale of Sunday in the Park with George—crystallises 19th-century pointillism in shimmering Broadway polyphony. Since RCA dropped the cast album in 1984, the track has become Stephen Sondheim’s unofficial national anthem: choirs sang it in Times Square three days after his passing in 2021, and almost every major Sondheim tribute now closes with its breath-halting cadence.

Personal Review

The piece opens like a museum whisper: strings hold a single A-natural while Patinkin recites Seurat’s mantra—Order. Design. Tension. Balance. Harmony. Then the choir glides in, voicing colour instead of feeling: “By the blue, purple, yellow, red water…” Each chord adds a new pigment until Georges Seurat’s canvas finally locks into place—fortissimo, E-major, thirty voices fusing into one sun-bright vowel: Sun-day. Goose-flesh every time.

Song Meaning and Annotations

Detailed Annotations

Sunday arrives at the close of Act I like a hush settling over the Lyrics. The stage tableau crystallizes into Georges Seurat’s iconic painting, and Steven Sondheim’s score floats above the dots of color, letting us hear the act of looking. In the Sunday sequence, Mandy Patinkin (singing George) steers a chorus toward a final held chord that feels as broad as the river Seine. Every annotation below lifts a brushstroke from the canvas so we can see— and feel— why this quiet hymn crowns Seurat’s artistic gamble.

Overview

The old lady’s whispered plea, followed by George’s mantra, sets the palette:

Order.
Design.
Tension.
Balance.
Harmony.

Annotation 1 reminds us that, in that instant, the actors freeze as if the painter’s will has turned blood to pigment. These five nouns are Seurat’s commandments; speak them aloud and the park’s inhabitants stir, slipping into their final places. In musical time the audience watches a canvas come alive, then watches it return to stillness.

Musical Techniques

Color enters first through language, not paint:

By the blue / Purple yellow red water.

Annotation 2 calls this cascade a “list of colourful adjectives,” and rightly so. Sondheim’s libretto functions like pointillism— individual syllables of blue pur-ple yel-low red flicker against the ear until the listener’s mind blends them into river. Later he mirrors the device for grass:

On the green / Orange violet mass.

Annotation 5 underlines the effect: up close, dots; from the mezzanine, meadow. Composer and painter collaborate across a century, proving that orchestration can be optical.

George’s sotto-voce vocalise—

Bumbum bum bumbumbum / Bumbum bum...

— earns its own meditation in Annotation 7. These nonsense syllables tap out the rhythm of the brush: dot dot dot, dot dot dot dot dot, dot. The orchestra echoes with muted brass and pizzicato strings, suggesting flecks that shimmer, retreat, and reappear. It is the sound of pigment catching light.

Thematic Elements

When the company invites,

Let us pass / Through our perfect park.

Annotation 3 hears the heartbeat of impermanence. The lyric underscores that the figures are merely passing, yet the painter’s labor renders their passing permanent. Sondheim tightens the paradox into a single word that haunts the entire score:

Forever...

Annotation 4 recounts how the songwriter wept after typing that final syllable, recognizing that immortality is best described by those who will never know they have it. The hush that follows forever feels like the painter drawing one last breath before stepping back from eternity.

Character Dynamics

Annotation 6 links George’s obsession with

flecks of light / And dark

to his relationship with Dot, distilled in the casual afterthought,

And parasols...

The parasol— trivial accessory, circular shadow— becomes a stand-in for the woman he loves yet neglects. Onstage, Dot unfurls it in silence, forgiving him inside the canvas even as real-world time denies them reconciliation. The gesture loads the sunny object with regret, turning a daub of white into emotional chiaroscuro.

Historical References

Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (1886) is the benchmark for pointillism, a technique that scatters unmixed colors across primed linen and lets distance do the blending. The Sunday Lyrics name those raw hues directly, as if reading pigment labels off Seurat’s studio shelf: French ultramarine, cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson. By foregrounding the ingredients, Sondheim invites contemporary listeners to step close, then far, reenacting the optical experiment onstage.

Musical Resolution

The company’s final repetition of the title—

Sunday... Sunday...

— builds from gauzy clusters to an open-fifth triumph. Annotation 8 notes how dissonance melts until a French horn crowns the cadence with two noble notes. Those notes land like church bells across the Seine, announcing that the painting is finished, Act I is done, and the ordinary has turned exalted.

In less than six minutes, Sunday flicks between painter’s eye and composer’s ear, between fleeting Sunday leisure and the endless shelf life of art. Sondheim writes no grand narrative here— only water, grass, parasols, people strolling— yet the Lyrics deliver a quiet coup: they let an audience feel what immortality sounds like. The parkgoers may never learn that they have been saved in pigment, but we in the dark of the theater know, and for a breathless beat after the last chord, we share their silent, sunlit forever.

A caption in search of breath. Sondheim called this the only lyric he ever built as one long, unfinished sentence—a museum wall-card describing Seurat’s painting.

Colour as grammar. The words cycle through a painter’s palette—blue, purple, yellow, red—always in that order, always anchoring the listener’s eye before drifting into geometry: “cool blue triangular water… soft green elliptical grass.” Each adjectival burst sits on a rising third, the musical equivalent of a brush dot.

Sound-pointillism. Orchestrator Michael Starobin assigns separate hues to instrument families: flutes for water, muted horns for grass, high strings for parasols. When Patinkin intones “Made of flecks of light and dark,” percussionists deploy pizzicato harp and celesta—aural paint-dots.

Sondheim’s trick. The lyric never utters the word “painting,” yet every noun points at the canvas. By omitting emotion, Sondheim exposes it; by naming colours, he colours us. It’s the most objective Broadway lyric ever written—and it makes grown artists sob.

“Forever…”

The longest fermata in 1980s musical theatre: seven bars, four key changes, one audience suspended in chromatic mist.

Verse Highlights

Opening Whisper

Bassoon doubles Patinkin’s spoken mantra in octaves—order in stereo.

Middle Build

Women’s voices split into stacked sixths on “arrangements of shadows,” imitating overlapping tree limbs.

Final Tableau

The choir lands on a fortissimo E-major chord; Seurat’s “frozen” pose locks, Patinkin steps aside, house lights fade like dusk over the Île de la Grande Jatte.

Song Credits

• Lead: Mandy Patinkin (Georges Seurat)
• Ensemble: Original Broadway company featuring Bernadette Peters (Dot) and 24 voices
• Composer & Lyricist: Stephen Sondheim
• Producer: Thomas Z. Shepard
• Orchestrator: Michael Starobin
• Recording Date: June 17 – 18, 1984, RCA Studios NYC
• Release Date: July 1 1984
• Genre: Chamber-Broadway / Art-Song
• Length: 4 min 55 s
• Label: RCA Red Seal
• Language: English
• Poetic meter: Free verse, cascading trochees
• Copyright: © 1984 Seurat Partners / Rilting Music

Songs Exploring Art-About-Art

“Finishing the Hat” – Sunday in the Park with George (1984): George’s solitude aria; where “Sunday” captions finished art, this number captures making it.

“Putting It Together” – Sunday Act II (1984): Sondheim’s meta-montage on modern gallery politics—art’s present-tense hustle versus Act I’s plein-air reverie.

“Art Isn’t Easy” – Company (2006 revival): A satirical cousin; same composer, but the painter is now a socialite sculptor wrestling patrons instead of pigments.

Questions and Answers

Did “Sunday” ever chart?

No single release, but the cast album won the 1985 Grammy for Best Cast Show Album.

Why is it always used in tributes?

The slow build to a cathedral-like final chord embodies Sondheim’s view that art is community—perfect for memorials and galas.

Are there notable covers?

Eleri Ward’s 2021 indie-folk cover on A Perfect Little Death; Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford’s 2017 Broadway revival recording; the 2022 Proms mass-choir rendition.

Was the song part of the Pulitzer citation?

Indirectly. The Pulitzer committee cited the musical’s “freshness of viewpoint,” a phrase many critics linked to the tableau power of “Sunday.”

Sheet-music range?

Soprano line: A3–E5; Tenor: C3–G4; Ensemble splits SATB, top note A5 for first sopranos.

Awards and Chart Positions

Year	Award	Result
1985	Grammy – Best Cast Show Album	Winner
1985	Pulitzer Prize for Drama (entire musical)	Winner
2021	Times Square Sondheim Tribute – Finale Choice	Performed

How to Sing?

Breath-craft: Plan staggered breathing through the eight-bar sustain on the final “Sun-day.”
Blend: Sopranos should float, not belt—think watercolor, not oil.
Dynamics: Start pianissimo; build one dynamic notch per colour word.
Interpretation: See yourself as a dab of paint: hold still, then bloom in light.

Fan and Media Reactions

“When that final chord blooms, you can feel the theatre exhale.”

“Sondheim paints with voices; ‘Sunday’ is his Sistine ceiling.”

“Times Square singing it at dusk? I ugly-cried on 46th Street.”

“Eleri Ward’s folk version proves the lyrics are bullet-proof.”

“Forty years on, no musical tableau has topped it.”