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Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater'due south most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century and the driving force behind some of Broadway'south most beloved and historic shows.
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The Terminal Give-and-take: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat downwardly with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk about his life, career and accomplishments.
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"One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should there exist songs? You lot tin can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If information technology'due south unnecessary, then the bear witness mostly turns out to be non very skillful." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the about important effigy in American musical theater of the terminal half-century. [singing] "Will it exist? Yes, information technology will." In shows similar "West Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Matter Happened on the Style to the Forum," "Company," "Follies," "Sweeney Todd" and "Sunday in the Park With George," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, he created songs essential to the stories and changed the nature of the Broadway musical. "I like to alter styles. That'southward one of the things that appeals to me nigh stories, is if I've never done annihilation like information technology before. Information technology has to exist some unknown territory. Information technology's got to make you nervous. If information technology doesn't brand you nervous, then y'all're going to write the same thing you wrote before." Nosotros sat down with him in June 2008 to talk about his ain story and his accomplishments. "What is it virtually the theater that attracted y'all so, that fabricated yous want to spend your career, your life working in it?" "It was very simple. It was when I was xi years onetime, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate begetter, and I just wanted to do what he did. And he was a songwriter for the theater, and then I became a songwriter for the theater. If he was a geologist, I would take become a geologist. Which is, I'g sure, an exaggeration, but not much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Summit 40 hits, merely ane of his songs, "Ship in the Clowns," from "A Little Nighttime Music," rose to the superlative of the charts. [singing] "Merely where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns." He wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the show'south stars, and it remains without a doubt his most popular and financially successful piece of work. "Wrote information technology during rehearsals, brought it essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could non sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song with brusk phrases. And if they're going to be short phrases, what are better brusk phrases than questions? So the whole idea of, 'Isn't it rich? Are nosotros a pair?' Question, which ordinarily would not occur to me, came into my head. And once I've gotten that, once you get the thought of questions, then information technology's quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it bliss? Don't you corroborate?" "Once you get the notion of, 'Isn't it rich? Aren't we schmucks not to be together?' I hateful, you lot become that tone, that takes a very short period of time." [singing] "Transport in the clowns." Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, to upper-middle-form parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His begetter manufactured dresses, and his female parent designed them. But his childhood wasn't all privilege. His family life was difficult, with a afar and remote mother and parents who didn't go along. "When I was x years one-time, my parents divorced. My mother got custody of me, and she bought a identify in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as a sort of summer residence. And I was an only kid. And considering she was a working adult female and also a glory hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my historic period, a year younger, Jimmy. And and so we became friends and companions. And Oscar obviously realized that I had some gift for songwriting, then he encouraged me during my teen years, and in fact, taught me. And I brought him a show when I was xv years old that I thought he would want to produce. It was a evidence nigh the school I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to discover out that he wouldn't produce it. But I wanted to be the first xv-yr-former on Broadway with a show. Only he said, if you lot desire to know what's wrong with the show, I'll tell you. And he went over information technology page by page, starting from the first sentence. He treated me like an developed instead of like a kid. By the time the afternoon was over, I really knew more about the basics and bolts of writing a musical than near people learn in a lifetime." Hammerstein and his partner Richard Rodgers were fresh from the success of 'Oklahoma!' and 'Carousel' when they hired the teenage Sondheim to work on their side by side musical, 'Allegro,' in 1947. [singing] "His pilus is fuzzy, his eyes are blue." Unusual for its solar day, it followed the life of an everyman from birth to age 35. It was their first failure, but it would influence Sondheim tremendously. "It was experimental, and and then that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental stuff, which I've done, 1 style or some other, most of the shows I've done." Hammerstein laid out a course of pedagogy for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write four musicals, each in a different manner. "The commencement i being an accommodation of a play that I thought was good. The 2nd existence an adaptation of a play that I liked but was flawed, that maybe I could experience I could improve. The third, something that was a non-theatrical story, but adapt it and brand it theatrical. And then the fourth was to write an original. And that'due south exactly what I did over a period of years." In the mid-1950s, when Sondheim was in his early 20s, he wrote his beginning professional show, 'Sat Night.' [singing] "The moon's like a million-watt electric lite. It shines on the city —" Information technology was headed to Broadway when its pb producer suddenly died, forcing the show to close out of town. The ambitious immature composer was all the same without a credit, but and so came an opportunity to piece of work on Broadway, albeit as a lyricist only and non as a composer as well. Information technology all began when he bumped into renowned playwright and librettist Arthur Laurents at a party. "And we fell to talking, and I said, 'What are yous doing?' He said, 'I'grand about to start on a musical version of "Romeo and Juliet."' And I said, 'And who's doing the score?' He said, 'Leonard Bernstein.' I said, 'Who's doing the lyrics?' And he said, 'Oh, my god. Well, I never thought of yous.' And he literally smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical Arthur Laurents fashion, he said, 'I didn't much similar your music, only I thought your lyrics were kind of good.' I said, 'All right.' He said, 'Would you like to come up and play for Lenny?' At present, I had no intention of just writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. But I thought, hazard to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? And so the side by side morning, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I volition know within a week, and I'll permit you know.' And I said, 'Thank you so much, Mr. Bernstein.' Sure enough, a week later, the phone rang, and he said, 'Would y'all similar to do information technology?' And I said, 'Permit me call you dorsum.' Considering I didn't want to do just lyrics. And I called Oscar, who's my adviser on everything. And I said, 'You know, I don't want to do this.' But Oscar said, 'Look, you accept a chance to work with very gifted professionals on a show that sounds interesting, and yous could always write your ain music eventually.' He said, 'My advice would be to accept the job.' That's why I took it. And I learned a great bargain." [singing] "Maria. I just met a girl named Maria." Sondheim didn't always agree with Bernstein on how the lyrics should be written. "I knew that there were great dangers of pretension with this whole bear witness, and the only way to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and make them very uncomplicated." "Yous've said over the years that you're non actually happy with the lyrics you lot wrote, even though they're then popular. You are?" "No, no, no, they're very self-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to exist very poetic. Only his idea of poetry and my idea of poetry are simply not the same. I hateful, you lot know, I was 25 years old, and he was a big, big force, and Lenny kept pushing me to exist very fruity. 'Today, the globe was simply an address.' That's a perfectly fine line on newspaper, only the boy from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the world was but an address, a place for me to live in." "And I've often quoted, you know, 'I Experience Pretty': 'Information technology's alarming how mannerly I experience,' says this daughter from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "It's alarming how charming I feel." "I do similar 'Something's Coming.' That's my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that it uses imagery." [singing] "Something's coming. I don't know what it is, merely information technology is going to be neat." "And I like the 'Jet Song,' too." [singing] "When you lot're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying solar day." "Simply you know, songs like 'Somewhere,' I mean, that'due south securely embarrassing. And then —" "Due west Side Story" got mixed reviews when it opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Award as Best Musical, merely it was revolutionary in its combination of music and dance, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his first mark. He yet longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and it looked as if he was going to get the chance with a new musical based on the early life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "Yous'll be great! Going to have the whole world on a plate!" Simply the prove'south star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the female parent, so it was all fix. And so Ethel Merman said she would not have me every bit a composer, considering she had just done a show called 'Happy Hunting,' with two immature writers, and information technology was a bomb. And she didn't desire to accept a adventure on an unknown composer. And she'due south perfectly happy to have me practice the lyrics. So I said no, and Arthur tried to persuade me, and I said, 'No, I really desire to write music, this is nonsense.' Again, Oscar stepped into the alienation, and he said, 'Do it.' He said, 'There are two advantages. First of all,' he said, 'you accept the experience of writing for a star, which is different than just writing a show. I mean, you're tailoring cloth not simply for the graphic symbol, for the character every bit played by that specific actor or actress.' That's 1 thing. He said, 'Secondly, it's six months out of your life. Exercise it.' And that'southward exactly what happened. We wrote that evidence in about four months. We wrote very quickly. That's probably the quickest I've e'er heard of a major Broadway musical being written. Simply it wrote, equally Barbra Streisand would say, like butter." [singing] "Honey, everything's coming up roses and daffodils!" "It's considered one of the best, if not the best, Broadway musicals of all time." "Aye, absolutely, information technology is. I recall it'south probably it'south the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological order, in a linear mode. I'd certainly say information technology was the best." In 1970, Sondheim teamed up with director Harold Prince to write his breakthrough musical, 'Company.' But as 'Gypsy' had been the culmination of the era of the narrative musical, 'Company' broke new basis. Information technology fractured the narrative, told the story in a nonlinear manner, and opened the way for similar musicals, like 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago.' Sondheim and Prince followed company with more breakthroughs: 'Follies,' 'A Piffling Nighttime Music,' 'Pacific Overtures.' They were revolutionary, merely mostly, they weren't financial hits. "It takes an audition a while to get used to new means of storytelling. There are exceptional plays that pause with the tradition, like 'Death of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same fourth dimension. Just commonly, if yous bring a new manner of storytelling to the phase — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect example of taking a chance and is a gigantic hit, only that is not the usual case." [singing] "These are probably the worst pies in London!" 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Hairdresser of Fleet Street' is considered by many to be Sondheim's best and virtually powerful work. A gruesome tale of death and revenge, it shows the composer at the acme of his talent. [singing] "Is that just disgusting —" "It was full of blood and gore and controversy. And though it, too, didn't make coin in its original run, information technology has often been revived, has been performed by opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a flick starring Johnny Depp." [singing] "I will accept vengeance!" "Y'all desire to talk most dark?" "Well, information technology's not so dark. Information technology's really kind of funny, that testify, you know? I mean, nobody takes it seriously. It's not nighttime the way — information technology's a melodrama. I don't think melodramas are nighttime. Anyway, merely I get it. The point is, yep, there's a lot of claret." "And there's a lot of comic relief, there'due south no dubiousness almost it." "It'southward not about comic relief. It's the fact the attitude is not a real attitude. They're all cartoon figures. I mean, it's an operetta. These are not real people, and they're not supposed to be. They're supposed to be big, larger than life." "Simply isn't at that place a real sense in it almost injustice and evil?" "If in that location is for you, then there is for you. I know Hal ever thinks, always thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was about scaring people." "You all know Steve is a smashing dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist." In 2010, Sondheim received an ultimate stage accolade. "I cry piece of cake." A Broadway theater was renamed in his honor. "This is so much more moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim as opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What practise you think — if you call back about this, what would you like your legacy to be?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I merely would like the shows to keep getting done. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just like the stuff to exist washed. Just done and done and washed and washed and done. You know, that would exist the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history's songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91.
His lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, announced the death. He said he did not know the cause but added that Mr. Sondheim had not been known to be ill and that the decease was sudden. The day before, Mr. Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Mr. Pappas said. [His death certificate, obtained past The Times on Dec. 2, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.]
An intellectually rigorous artist who perpetually sought new creative paths, Mr. Sondheim was the theater's nearly revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last one-half of the 20th century, if not its near popular.
His work melded words and music in a way that enhanced them both. From his primeval successes in the late 1950s, when he wrote the lyrics for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," through the 1990s, when he wrote the music and lyrics for two adventurous musicals, "Assassins," giving vocalisation to the men and women who killed or tried to impale American presidents, and "Passion," an operatic probe into the nature of true dear, he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The starting time Broadway show for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," won a Tony Honor for all-time musical and went on to run for more than two years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his most productive menses, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Company" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Little Dark Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily Nosotros Gyre Along" (1981), "Sunday in the Park With George" (1984) and "Into the Wood" (1987).
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In the history of the theater, only a handful could telephone call Mr. Sondheim peer. The listing of major theater composers who wrote words to accompany their own scores (and vice versa) is a short one — it includes Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Noël Coward.
Though Mr. Sondheim spent long hours in solitary labor, ordinarily late at night, when he was composing or writing, he often spoke lovingly of the collaborative nature of the theater. After the first decade of his career, he was never again a writer for hire, and his contribution to a show was always integral to its conception and execution. He chose collaborators — notably the producer and director Hal Prince, the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and later the writer and director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form across the bounds of simply entertainment.
Mr. Sondheim's music was always recognizable every bit his own, and nonetheless he was dazzlingly versatile. His melodies could be deceptively, disarmingly uncomplicated — similar the championship song of the unsuccessful 1964 musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "Our Time," from "Merrily," and the most famous of his private songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, like "Everybody Ought to Accept a Maid," from "Forum."
They could also be brassy and bitter, similar "The Ladies Who Dejeuner," from "Company," or sweeping, like the grandly macabre waltz "A Footling Priest," from "Sweeney Todd." And they could exist desperately yearning, like the plaintive "I Read," from "Passion."
Paradigm
Tonys and a Pulitzer
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets. He exploited time signatures and forms; for "Dark Music," he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — nearly an entire score written in permutations of triple fourth dimension.
Over all, he wrote both the music and the lyrics for a dozen Broadway shows — not including compendium revues like "Side by Side by Sondheim," "Putting It Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." Five of them won Tony Awards for all-time musical, and six won for all-time original score. A show that won neither of those, "Sunday in the Park," took the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Of the many revivals of his shows, three won Tonys, including "Assassins" in 2004, even though information technology had not previously been on Broadway. (Information technology was presented Off Broadway in 1990.)
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In 1993, Mr. Sondheim received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Laurels for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in perhaps the ultimate prove business accolade, a Broadway house on Due west 43rd Street, Henry Miller's Theater, was renamed in his award.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of "Company" was planned, with a adult female (played past Katrina Lenk) in the fundamental office of Bobby, but it was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times published a special department devoted to him, and a virtual concert, "Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Altogether Celebration," was streamed on the Broadway.com YouTube channel, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who too maintained a habitation in Manhattan, a townhouse on Eastward 49th Street, had been spending most of his fourth dimension during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
Merely he returned to New York this month to attend revivals of two of his musicals: on Nov. xiv, for the opening night of "Assassins," at the Classic Phase Company in Lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed start preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Visitor," also starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was "extremely" pleased by both productions, Mr. Pappas, his lawyer, said.
In addition to his theater work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais's 1974 movie about a French financier and embezzler, and his song "Sooner or Later (I Always Become My Man)" for Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" won an Academy Honour in 1991. Six cast albums from his shows won Grammy Awards, and "Ship In the Clowns" won the Grammy for song of the twelvemonth in 1975.
With the exception perhaps of "Forum," Mr. Sondheim's shows had hefty ambitions in subject area matter, form or both. "Company," which was congenital from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual single male friend, was a bittersweet reflection on marriage. "Pacific Overtures" aimed to tell the story of the modernization of Japan from the Japanese perspective. "Sweeney Todd," a encarmine tale about a vengeful barber in 19th-century London, approached Grand Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. "The Frogs," which was start performed in the Yale Academy swimming pool in 1974 (with Meryl Streep in the cast) before it was revised for Broadway in 2004, blended the Greek comedy of Aristophanes with present-day political commentary.
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Mr. Sondheim liked to think of himself less as a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit ane who wrote very brusk plays and set them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were often impossibly clever but rarely only clever; his linguistic communication was sometimes erudite but seldom purple. He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but inside them — i of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in "Sweeney Todd" was "shepherd's pie peppered with bodily shepherd" — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at to the lowest degree tried to.
Rhymes and Beats
His 2010 artistic memoir, "Finishing the Hat" (the name was taken from a vocal title in "Sun in the Park"; a follow-up, "Look, I Fabricated a Hat," came out in 2011), was in many ways a primer on the craft of lyric writing. In it, he took himself to task for numerous sins, including things like adding unnecessary adjectives to fill out lines rhythmically and paying bereft attending to a melodic line. In the vocal "Somewhere" from "West Side Story," for example, the highest note in the opening phrase is on the second beat, which means that in the well-known lyric — "There's a place for us" — the emphasis is on the word "a."
"The about unimportant discussion in the opening line is the one that gets the near important note," he wrote.
In another example from "West Side Story," he complained nigh a stanza from "America," which was sung by a chorus of immature Puerto Rican women.
"Words must sit down on music in order to go clear to the audience," he said to his biographer Meryle Secrest for her 1998 volume, "Stephen Sondheim: A Life." "You lot don't get a risk to hear the lyric twice, and if it doesn't sit and bounce when the music bounces and ascent when the music rises, the audience becomes dislocated."
In "America," he added, "I had this wonderful quatrain that went: 'I similar to exist in America/OK past me in America/Everything free in America/For a small fee in America.' The fiddling 'for a minor fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is accented and 'small fee' is impossible to say that fast, so it went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what it meant!"
What virtually distinguished Mr. Sondheim's lyrics, notwithstanding, was that they were by and large character-driven, frequently probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish or deeply felt conflict. In "Send In the Clowns," for example, he couched the famous plaint about missed romantic chances largely in the linguistic communication of the theater, because the character singing it is an crumbling actress:
But when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No 1 is there.
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In the title vocal for "Anyone Can Whistle," he wrote from the point of view of a woman who found information technology hard to love:
Anyone tin can whistle,
That'southward what they say —
Piece of cake.
Anyone can whistle,
Any quondam twenty-four hour period —
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
It's all and so simple:
Relax, let go, let fly.
So someone tell me why
Can't I?
I tin dance a tango
I tin read Greek —
Easy.
I tin can slay a dragon
Any old week —
Easy.
What's hard is unproblematic,
What'due south natural comes hard.
Possibly y'all could show me
How to let go
Lower my guard.
Learn to be complimentary.
Possibly if you whistle,
Whistle for me.
Over the years, many people theorized that "Anyone Can Whistle" was a cri de coeur past the writer, though Mr. Sondheim denied it. "To believe that 'Anyone Can Whistle' is my credo is to believe that I'grand the prototypical Repressed Intellectual and that explains everything about me," he wrote in "Finishing the Hat."
Notwithstanding, it's true that he lived a largely alone romantic life for many years.
"I always idea that vocal would be Steve's epitaph," the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for "Anyone Can Whistle," as well as "Westward Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Practice I Hear a Waltz?," told Ms. Secrest.
For a time in his 60s, Mr. Sondheim shared his Manhattan townhouse with a young songwriter, Peter Jones, and in 2017 he married Jeffrey Romley, who survives him, along with a one-half blood brother, Walter Sondheim.
Paradigm
Box Part Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of subject thing, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim's shows, though generally received with critical accolades, were about never popular hits. He suffered from a reputation that he didn't write hummable tunes and that his outlook was ascetic, if non grim. For some of the same reasons, non all performers were suited to his shows, though over the years several well-known singers became his stalwart interpreters, among them Elaine Stritch, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Melt and Bernadette Peters.
Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the fizzy, feel-good musical feel or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to expect. He as well didn't give them the opulent spectacle, the anthemic score or the melodramatic storytelling that became the dominant musical theater fashion of the 1980s and '90s with the arrival from Uk of Andrew Lloyd Webber's megahits "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's "Les Misérables" and "Miss Saigon," followed past the corporate productions of Disney.
Of the shows for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, his first, "Forum," had the longest Broadway run at 964 performances; his second, "Anyone Can Whistle," lasted nine. "Merrily Nosotros Roll Forth," a famously problematic adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart reverse-chronology play most how idealistic immature artists abound contemptuous equally they historic period, closed after only sixteen. Just even his successes were barely successful. Nearly of his Broadway shows, in their initial runs, failed to earn back the money it cost to put them on.
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"I accept always conscientiously tried not to do the same thing twice," Mr. Sondheim said, reflecting on his career in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2000, when he turned lxx. "If you're broken-field running, they can't hit you with so many tomatoes. I certainly feel out of the mainstream considering what's happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I'thousand out of fashion, I'one thousand out of fashion. Being a bohemian isn't just about existence unlike. It'due south nigh having your vision of the way a testify might be."
Alone With Mother
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived outset on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his mother, the former Etta Janet Trick, known as Foxy, worked for her husband as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was ten. He was sent for a time to military machine schoolhouse, and after to the George Schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 Stephen, her only child, lived generally with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life. (His male parent remarried and had two more sons.)
In the years following his parents' separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his female parent treated him precisely as she had her hubby: flirting with him sexually on the one hand, belittling him on the other. As an developed, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the night before she was to have center surgery, she wrote a alphabetic character to her son and had it hand delivered. It read, in part, "The but regret I have in life is giving you nativity."
His mother was, however, responsible for the most formative relationship of her son'southward life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose hubby was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein Two; their son Jamie became friends with young Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania farm, Stephen, who had begun playing the piano at seven, went for a visit and stayed for the summer.
His female parent subsequently bought a home nearby, and Stephen was so ofttimes at the Hammersteins' that he was idea of as a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — "It was because of my teenage adoration for him that I became a songwriter," Mr. Sondheim wrote in "Finishing the Lid," although he afterward assessed Hammerstein as a lyricist of soaring ability only frequently flawed piece of work. Hammerstein brutally criticized the boy's offset musical, written at the George School, as "the worst thing I've ever read," calculation: "I didn't say that it was untalented, I said it was terrible. And if y'all want to know why it'southward terrible, I'll tell you lot."
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An afternoon-long tutorial followed, teaching him, by Mr. Sondheim's account, more virtually the craft than almost songwriters learn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Adapt a expert play into a musical; adapt a flawed play into a musical; adapt a story from another medium into a musical; and, finally, write a musical from your own original story. This the immature Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious limerick study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, as he put information technology, "that art is work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft." Mr. Sondheim would later study independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim's get-go professional show business chore was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s idiot box comedy, "Topper," about a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much afterward, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit picture show script, "The Final of Sheila," with the actor Anthony Perkins; information technology was produced in 1973 and directed past Herbert Ross.) Past the '50s he had become a connoisseur of give-and-take games and puzzles, and an inventor of elaborate games. From 1968 to 1969, he created cryptic crosswords for New York mag.
His affinity for theatrical misdirection and mystery was best-selling by his friend, the playwright Anthony Shaffer, who based the cunningly vengeful cuckold in his play "Sleuth" partly on Mr. Sondheim. (The play was once tentatively titled "Who's Agape of Stephen Sondheim?")
Breaking Into Broadway
Mr. Sondheim was in his early 20s when he wrote his kickoff professional prove, a musical called "Sat Dark," which was an adaptation of "Front Porch in Flatbush," a play by Philip Chiliad. and Julius J. Epstein. He got the job, to write both words and music, after the composer Frank Loesser turned information technology downwards. The show was scheduled to be presented in 1955, just the producer, Lemuel Ayers, died earlier he had completed raising the money for it, and the production came to a halt. The show was not presented until 1997, by a small company in London; it afterward appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to have either of his get-go Broadway gigs, "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," because he felt he was a composer, not just a lyricist — "I enjoy writing music much more than than lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Hat." Merely he agreed to both on the advice of Hammerstein, who told him that he would benefit from working with the likes of Bernstein; Laurents (who wrote the volume), and the director Jerome Robbins, in the first example, and from writing for a star like Ethel Merman in the 2nd, even though it was she who had wanted a more experienced Broadway manus, Jule Styne, every bit the composer.
Only one time after "Gypsy" would Mr. Sondheim write lyrics for another composer: an unhappy collaboration with Richard Rodgers, "Exercise I Hear a Waltz?," based on Laurents'due south play "The Time of the Cuckoo."
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Mr. Sondheim was asked to have the job past Laurents and past Mary Rodgers, Richard's elder girl, whom he had met as a teenager at the Hammersteins' and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years. Nonetheless, the 2 men proved combative as writing partners — years afterward Mr. Sondheim was quoted as proverb that Hammerstein was "a human of limited talent and infinite soul" and Rodgers the opposite — and though the testify ran for 220 performances in 1965, it never had a Broadway revival, and neither homo considered it a success.
The period of Mr. Sondheim's greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director. They were one-time friends, having been introduced by Ms. Rodgers in the late 1940s or early '50s, and Mr. Prince had been the producer of "West Side Story." He had proved his chops as a managing director as well, with musical successes like "She Loves Me" (1963) and "Cabaret" (1966).
Mr. Prince would direct five Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — "Company," "Follies," "A Niggling Nighttime Music," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd'' — and though non all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the product of ii supremely talented artists whose individually authoritative visions were, for the most part, complementary. As Mr. Prince naturally saw a testify's large motion-picture show, its wait and its pace, Mr. Sondheim, who had inherited the Rodgers and Hammerstein belief that the songs are critical elements of the play, pushed the thought farther — not merely integrating the words and music but imbuing the songs with the concerns of a playwright; that is, providing singers with the material to deepen their character portrayals, and in rehearsals concentrating on their delivery and diction.
The partnership foundered on "Merrily We Roll Forth," a show that was hampered in role past the youth of its cast members, who had to play not only young characters but besides the disillusioned adults they become, and past Mr. Prince'southward acknowledged failure to discover an appropriate wait for the show as a whole.
"I never knew how to direct it because I piece of work so much from 'What is it going to look like?' " Mr. Prince told Ms. Secrest for her Sondheim biography. "That becomes the motor of the bear witness. I never could figure information technology out."
"Merrily" has had several lives since then, Off Broadway, in regional theater and overseas, equally producers and directors have tried to solve its problems and showcase what is mostly best-selling to exist a vivid and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In any instance, the two men parted artistic company for more two decades, non working together over again until they hammered out a version of a much-revised musical virtually a pair of entrepreneurial American brothers in the early 20th century that in other incarnations, before and later on, was variously titled "Gold," "Wise Guys" and "Road Show." Under Mr. Prince, information technology was called "Bounce," and it was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Centre in Washington.
During Mr. Prince'south absence from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed up with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the most cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim's career. These included "Into the Woods," which reimagined familiar children's fairy tales into darker adult fables; "Passion," a nearly operatic meditation on the nature of love; and "Lord's day in the Park With George," a work whose first act ingeniously creates the creative procedure of the painter Georges Seurat equally he produces his masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," and whose 2nd act jumps ahead a century to illustrate how a gimmicky artist makes fine art in a more consumer-conscious historic period.
With no dancing and a slim plot, at that place was little of musical theater convention in the show, but, as Frank Rich wrote in The Times, it was startlingly original and deeply satisfying. "It'southward anyone'south guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted by 'Lord's day in the Park,' " Mr. Rich wrote. "What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine accept created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal mode, touching work."
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It was 1 of Mr. Sondheim's most critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles institute in it his most personal statement, as if he had used Seurat'due south view of the artist'southward life as a surrogate for his own. In the show's signature song, "Finishing the Hat," faced with the loss of the woman he loves considering his devotion to painting has superseded his devotion to her, Seurat offers a sad merely forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the globe. It ends:
And when the woman that yous wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't look for you knows
That, however you live,
There'southward a part of you e'er standing past,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat
Starting on a chapeau
Finishing a lid
Expect, I made a chapeau
Where there never was a hat.
William McDonald and Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html
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