'Laura' and 'Being Alive': Saving (and Savoring) the Tonic

I didn't necessarily just notice this about two of my favorite songs, David Raskin's sumptuous "Laura" and Stephen Sondheim's wrenching "Being Alive," but I hadn't thought to connect them this way until just today, as I played through the former and realized one thing it has in common with the closing number of Company: Both tunes end their long-lined melodies with a resounding touchdown on the tonic, made all the more satisfying because both studiedly withhold that landing for (nearly) the entirety of the song. Indeed for most of their duration, both "Laura" and "Being Alive" milk the full ambivalence and ache of chords that are neither triadic nor tonic. I'm thinking not just about the iconic minor-9th that opens "Laura"

or the irresolute resolutions of the opening phrase (an A, then an E, over a G chord; a G over an F chord)

but also the way "Being Alive" throbs (sobs?) on a B note even as the chords move under it:

That final landing on the A note is a bit of a reprieve, as it sounds over a kind of Dm chord (though hardly a settled one). Admittedly, the song does give us a fully unencumbered C note over a C major chord in the bridge:

One might argue that the bridge has a different key center so it doesn't "count," but then again, this isn't math, so it's not about counting but about the overall emotional effect of the writers' many craft choices. I'd say that the biggest choice both songs make is this calculated avoidance of the tonic until literally their last note, and that the cumulative impact of this choice is integral to the storytelling in both cases: "Laura," composed for the 1944 noir film, is about the search for an elusive, possibly illusory woman ("but she's only a dream"), while "Being Alive" is about the lead character's desperate search for a partner—or rather, about what such a search reveals about his own existential emptiness.

In the case of the former, the final C note offers a kind of knowing smile (the underscoring is for a C6, the signature chord of world-weary ambivalence) after a lot of sensuous indirection; in the latter, the final C is as a kind of triumphal rage against the dying of the light; after a swelling, surging repetition of the title line over the V chord, it is the literal sound of a breakthrough.

As I've said so many times before: The music tells the story.

Postscript: I'm married to a Laura, and "Being Alive" was played at our wedding. I guess I've found my own kind of closure.