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One of my mother’s worst decisions as a parent, by her own account, was permitting me to perform in the ensemble of “Spring Awakening” at a local theater when I was 13.
Had she known prior to opening night that the alt-rock musical’s narrative was studded with plot points about teen promiscuity, suicide and back-alley abortions, that it featured songs with quaint titles like “The Bitch of Living” and “Totally F—ed” or that it depicted obscured but unambiguous sexual acts among the older cast members on stage, she would never have permitted it. In her defense, I knew all of these things prior to opening night and failed to disclose them.
It was a quiet drive home.
I’ve been thinking about this saga since last Friday, when I learned that Duncan Sheik, the composer behind “Spring Awakening,” had died from heart failure leading to cardiac arrest at 56. The musical, based on an 1891 play of the same name by Frank Wedekind, first opened on Broadway in 2006, launching the careers of Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff with it. Sheik’s death on Sept. 17 came just months before the show’s 20th anniversary in December, set to be celebrated with a limited Off-Broadway run.
The decision to compose a Broadway musical was a marked pivot for Sheik, whose ticket to fame came from his 1996 indie hit song “Barely Breathing” and critically lauded eponymous debut album. In the years prior to “Spring Awakening,” the Broadway marquees were dominated by titles like “Jersey Boys,” “Hairspray,” “Mamma Mia” and “Seussical.” That this soft-rock wonderboy—that cool, dispassionate face from the album cover—might write the score to a hit Broadway musical seemed improbable. “Spring Awakening” made no promises of sequins or boas.
Set in provincial Germany in 1891, the show follows Wendla, a 14-year-old whose mother is reluctant to teach her about the birds and the bees. She unwittingly ends up pregnant and dies from a botched abortion. It also follows Moritz, a tightly wound teen who believes his erotic nightmares are a sign of insanity. Rendered sleepless, he fails out of school and is driven to suicide. And it follows Melchior—lover to Wendla, best friend to Moritz, rebel with aplomb—whose every conviction dissolves after the deaths of his two closest companions.
But besides all that, it’s just like “Suessical.”
To me, “Spring Awakening” has always been about young people exploring darkness for the first time—that age at which one becomes blinkingly aware of the world and skeptical toward its boundaries.
But for a show like that to be anything more than a voyeuristic trauma montage, it would need to cling to its score. Sheik’s music would be the vessel to raise and redeem “Spring Awakening” from its own unrelenting darkness. Wedekind’s play was, at its most forgiving, sardonic, but Sheik could offer a show that was sentimental in spite of itself.
So when Moritz was on the verge of suicide, you would not only see a teenager nearing breakdown but also hear the twitching viola strings edging him toward psychic collapse. And when you later found yourself at his funeral, you would hear those same strings, heaving in long, bereaved strokes. Similarly, when Melchior and Wendla are first intimate, the discordance of her confusion and naivete is amplified by the ensemble serenading them with a sprightly worship song. And when Wendla discovers she is pregnant, the foreboding piano progression looping beneath her soliloquy doesn’t sound discordant at all—it sounds hauntingly resolute.
In the wake of his death, Sheik’s family, friends and collaborators offered tributes dotted with adjectives like “introspective,” “unapologetic” and “mercurial”: words just as likely to have cropped up in a tribute to his music. The score to “Spring Awakening,” in all its alt-rock menace, places the audience not as voyeurs of the characters but in solidarity with them, invested in their grief but also its catharsis.
It couldn’t have been easy—especially given the surprising fidelity the musical shows to its source material. I imagine it would have been simpler, more pragmatic, to adapt “Spring Awakening” as a modern retelling, and to perhaps refurbish some of its more vivid psychosexual fixations. But despite this overall loyalty, one difference sticks out: the ending.
In the play, Melchior stumbles upon Wendla’s grave and, in a bout of grief, contemplates joining her. Just then, Moritz, “with his head under his arm, comes stamping across the graves.” (That Wedekind offered no instruction as to how such an effect might be achieved on stage is a flourish particularly revealing of his whimsy.) Moritz urges Melchior to join him in the afterlife, promising a nirvana “infinitely above all despair and rejoicing.”
But then an elusive figure, listed only as “Masked Man,” appears and exposes Moritz as a liar: The afterlife, it turns out, is frigid and lonely. “I’ll give you the chance to widen your horizon in astonishing ways,” the Masked Man promises Melchior. “I’ll introduce you to every single interesting thing in the world.” He and Melchior exit: “END OF PLAY.” Melchior chooses to live, but under ambiguous pretenses. As far as endings go, it’s a frantic one.
In the musical, however, both Wendla and Moritz come to visit Melchior in his moment of despair, coaxing him not into the darkness but back to the light. On either side, both hold his arms as he sings:
All alone, but still I hear their yearning
Through the dark, the moon, alone there, burning
The stars too, they tell of spring returning
And summer with another wind
That no one yet has known
The instrumentation—strings, piano, dampened percussion—touches by its very simplicity.
Sheik studied semiotics at Brown University, and once, when the singer and actress Kathryn Gallagher asked him why he hadn’t studied music instead, he replied, “I already knew about music, I wanted to learn about the world.”
My local production of “Spring Awakening” was 10 years ago. It is clear to me now that my months-long obsession with the show and desire to be in it was, in itself, the kind of inquiry into darkness that “Spring Awakening” typifies. I am less driven toward this curiosity today. At some age, we all decide whether we will be the kind of people who run from darkness or into it. Choosing the latter has its consequences. Still, I’m left in awe of someone like Sheik, who chose not to retreat from darkness but to salvage it—to sublimate it into something greater. He wanted to learn about the world but, like any true artist, would not accept it as it appeared.
In the musical’s finale, the entire cast comes out on stage for “The Song of Purple Summer.” It’s a soft sort of anthem, all warmth and wonder: like the breaking of a spell. It is only through a song like that, I believe, that a show like “Spring Awakening” could impart a sense of hope.
The barren darkness gives way to a softly lit, fecund clearing: a big wide purple summer in all its promise. The Melchior that Sheik brought to life found that relief, and in his own way, I think Sheik did too.
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