"For Good" from Wicked-Memory, Friendship, Music of Becoming

"Our family saw Wicked together last Thanksgiving. This year, we saw it again-together, yet separately, different cities, different schedules, the same emotional landing place. At the final chords, Sara's six-year-old blurted, "It's over? Is it really over?" He captured something adults often try to hide: the uneasy truth that we don't know what comes next, but we do know we've been changed."

"Some songs are heard and absorbed. Slipping into your emotional bloodstream and then surfacing: graduations, funerals, weddings, hospital rooms, long car rides, end-of-year ceremonies, or nights before a child heads off to armed services or college. -One of Those Songs Before teaching artist rosters, children's concerts, or the beautiful chaos of parenting, Sara first sang it in a rehearsal space that smelled like wood, rosin, possibility. She didn't know then how much the song would follow her, how its meaning would shift over time."

"For Good was written by composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz for the 2003 Broadway production of Wicked. Schwartz has said that crafting the finale duet was the most essential musical problem of the entire show, noting that "if we didn't solve this song, we didn't have the show." Breakthrough came during a conversation with the show's writer, Winnie Holzman, who remarked that Elphaba and Glinda had "changed each other for good." Those words became the song's emotional anchor."

The song For Good from Wicked evokes profound emotional responses tied to memory, identity, friendship, rupture, repair, and people who shape us. Shared performances can trigger visible tears and unguarded questions about change and uncertainty. The song resurfaces at life milestones such as graduations, funerals, weddings, hospital rooms, long drives, and departures for college or service. The piece originated when Stephen Schwartz composed the finale duet, solving a central musical problem for the show. A remark that the characters had "changed each other for good" became the song's emotional anchor, and the impact reaches both emotional and neurological levels.

Read at Psychology Today