There has been some confusion about the source of this song, which has the same title of the 1965 musical, with lyrics by Sondheim, Do I Hear a Waltz? The show included a title song that attained some popularity.
The playbill for the Broadway production of Putting It Together identified the song as coming from Do I Hear a Waltz?
The song heard in Putting It Together is, however, completely different from the title song of Do I Hear a Waltz?
Eric Schaeffer, who directed the original Los Angeles and Broadway productions of the revised Putting It Together and helped devise the revision, said the following in an article titled "A Softer, Lighter Tone for Putting It Together," which appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of The Sondheim Review: "There's a brand new number that Steve wrote when he was working on his own version of Do I Hear a Waltz?, where he wrote the music and the lyrics. So it's not the Richard Rodgers version, it's the Steve version of 'Do I Hear a Waltz?' which we're putting in."
An article titled "Putting It Together Heads for Broadway," in the Fall 1999 issue of The Sondheim Review, identified the song as "Sondheim's pre-Rodgers version of 'Do I Hear a Waltz?'."
Stephen Banfield seems to confirm the existence of such a song in his book Sondheim's Broadway Musicals. In a passage discussing the show Do I Hear the Waltz? he writes, "At some stage Sondheim tried his own hand at a title number, tune and all."
Contradicting all of this, however, is an article titled "Sondheim on TV: The list goes on and on," which appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of The Sondheim Review. This article lists, among Unproduced Television Work, an unproduced television musical titled Do You Hear a Waltz? and says "The title song was included in the revue Putting It Together in 1999."
This seems to be correct as it’s supported by the information in the booklet for CD Sondheim Sings: Vol. 2, 1946-1960, which includes a recording of Sondheim singing the song. The song's source is listed as being Do You Hear a Waltz?
In addition, the booklet contains detailed notes by Peter Jones's that give further information on the song. According to those notes, “Laurents had an idea for a television musical based on a line from his 1952 play, The Time of the Cuckoo. In it, the lead character, Leona, speculates that when she sees the man who will be the love of her life, she'll hear a waltz. The would-be television adaptation was intended for Judy Holliday, playing a woman who leaves her small town, going to a far away place with hopes of falling in love. Do You Hear a Waltz? never materialized, but Sondheim did write one song, ”Do I Hear a Waltz?", changing the 'you' to an 'I; as the character questions herself about the waltz she is indeed hearing upon seeing the train conductor . . . and then the man on the street and every man she meets in her travels."
