The catalogues of most Broadway composers – your Jule Stynes, your Jerry Hermans – are divided between hits and flops. When we consider the output of Stephen Sondheim, however, we have to paraphrase a famous line of Susan Sontag, who might have described Mr. Sondheim’s output as containing two distinct kinds of works: classics and not-yet-classics. Virtually all of the works that the world has regarded as minor or lesser Sondheim have recently been reclaimed as masterpieces, including “Assassins,” “Pacific Overtures,” and now “Passion.”

“Passion” ran for 280 performances in 1994 and won a Tony award for best musical but was generally regarded as not being up to “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd,” or “A Little Night Music.” It has now been produced by the Lincoln Center American Songbook series (produced at Rose Hall) in a semi staged “concert” production, which opened Wednesday, was broadcast last night on “Live From Lincoln Center,” and ends its run tonight.

At it’s heart, “Passion” is the story of a love triangle, and this must be the all starriest production of it yet, with Michael Cervivis as a sensitive captain caught between two very dysfunctional loves, played by Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald. “Passion” is based on “Fosca,” by the 19th-century Italian novelist Iginio Uno Tarchetti and on the 1981 film of the story, “Passsione d’amore” by director Ettore Scola.

Unlike other composers, Sondheim makes his shows “about” something – “Sweeney Todd” is about revenge, “Pacific Overtures” is about cultural conflict, “Assassins” is about perverted ambition, “Sunday in The Park With George” is about the creative impulse – and “Passion” is about the highly subjective boundaries between love and obsession. If the show were to be made into a contemporary Hollywood film (not a bad idea, actually), the tagline of the trailer would be “How far would you go for love?”

“Passion” differs from other musicals – not just in Mr. Sondheim’s canon – in its compactness. It is a brief, 96-minute, single-act work that feels incredibly complete in its brevity. In fact, any more of this overwhelming story about the power of love – more destructive than redemptive – would have been too much. And the streamlined, fast-moving book by James Lapine also suits the nature of the theme. When you’re trapped in an obsessive love, you don’t have time for a lot of frills and niceties. The story of Captain Giorgio (Mr. Cerveris), his beautiful, self-absorbed and married lover, Clara (Ms. McDonald), and Fosca (Ms. LuPone, looking so cadaverous she could be Steve Buscemi’s sister), the physically impaired and mentally preoccupied cousin of Giorgio’s commanding officer who becomes obsessed with Giorgio, is the whole story. There are one or two other characters: Fosca’s cousin, the Colonel (Allen Fitzpatrick), and the post’s doctor (Richard Easton), but their purpose is only to move the machinations along.

The score is sung entirely by the three principals, there are no subplots, there are no “charm songs,” there are no songs that establish characters or settings, there is no comedy whatsoever in the songs or the dialogue. In short there is nothing that gets in the way of the story building steadily – rather like a spanish bolero – to a highly emotional climax.

Mr. Sondheim long ago perfected the art of composing a score that is completely at the service of the material, never attracting attention to itself or distracting from the narrative. One almost never thinks about the score, except when he sets the florid, dainty musical monologues of Clara (much of the communicating is done via recited love letters) in waltz time and has the military men sing to a march tempo.

Most of the score is in a very oppressive, heavy minor key, and one of the reasons that “Loving You” became the only “breakout” song from the show (although far from a hit, unfortunately, it is pretty much only heard in Sondheim programs) is that “Loving You” is the only time we get to a straight-ahead, major key love ballad. Even though Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine were deliberately avoiding trying to create an Andrew Lloyd Webber “Les Miz”-like cheap shot tearjerker with heavy, false sentiment, by the time Ms. Lupone sang “Loving You” there isn’t a dry cheek in Rose Hall.

Early in the show, Ms. McDonald sang of how when people sleep you can see their aura and their souls. Mr. Sondheim has created a world where musical expression serves the same purpose, where characters walk around exposing their souls in song.

Tonight at 8 p.m. (Time Warner Center, 212-721-6500).