I Didn㢂¬„¢t Think You Didn㢂¬„¢t Know I Wasn㢂¬„¢t Dead
Stephen Sondheim, Titan of the American Musical, Is Dead at 91
He was the theater's most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the final half of the 20th century and the driving force backside some of Broadway's almost honey and celebrated shows.
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The Terminal Word: Stephen Sondheim
In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat down with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk about his life, career and accomplishments.
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"One of the starting time things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should at that place be songs? You tin put songs in whatsoever story, just what I think you take to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it's unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to exist not very good." Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the most important figure in American musical theater of the last one-half-century. [singing] "Volition information technology be? Yes, it will." In shows like "West Side Story," "Gypsy," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way 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 inverse the nature of the Broadway musical. "I like to change styles. That's ane of the things that appeals to me most stories, is if I've never done annihilation like it before. It has to be some unknown territory. It'due south got to make you lot nervous. If it doesn't make you nervous, and then you're going to write the same thing y'all wrote earlier." We sat downwards with him in June 2008 to talk virtually his own story and his accomplishments. "What is it about the theater that attracted yous and then, that made yous want to spend your career, your life working in it?" "Information technology was very simple. It was when I was 11 years onetime, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate father, and I just wanted to do what he did. And he was a songwriter for the theater, then I became a songwriter for the theater. If he was a geologist, I would have become a geologist. Which is, I'm sure, an exaggeration, merely not much." [music playing] Sondheim wasn't known for Top 40 hits, but one of his songs, "Ship in the Clowns," from "A Little Nighttime Music," rose to the elevation of the charts. [singing] "But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns." He wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the show's stars, and it remains without a doubt his almost popular and financially successful piece of work. "Wrote it during rehearsals, brought information technology essentially overnight. Glynis Johns could not sustain notes, so I idea, I got to write a song with brusk phrases. And if they're going to be short phrases, what are better short phrases than questions? So the whole idea of, 'Isn't information technology rich? Are nosotros a pair?' Question, which ordinarily would not occur to me, came into my head. And once I've gotten that, in one case you go the thought of questions, and then it's quite easy to write." [SINGING] "Isn't it bliss? Don't yous approve?" "Once yous get the notion of, 'Isn't it rich? Aren't we schmucks not to be together?' I mean, you get 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-class parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His father manufactured dresses, and his female parent designed them. Only his babyhood wasn't all privilege. His family unit life was difficult, with a distant and remote mother and parents who didn't get along. "When I was 10 years old, my parents divorced. My female parent got custody of me, and she bought a place in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as a sort of summertime residence. And I was an but child. And because she was a working woman and besides a celebrity hunter, she knew the Hammersteins slightly, and they had a son my historic period, a yr younger, Jimmy. And so we became friends and companions. And Oscar obviously realized that I had some gift for songwriting, so he encouraged me during my teen years, and in fact, taught me. And I brought him a show when I was fifteen years erstwhile that I thought he would desire to produce. It was a show well-nigh the school I went to, George School. And I was very disappointed to find out that he wouldn't produce it. Simply I wanted to be the first 15-year-old on Broadway with a show. But he said, if you desire to know what's wrong with the show, I'll tell you. And he went over information technology page past page, starting from the first judgement. He treated me like an adult instead of like a kid. By the time the afternoon was over, I actually knew more near the nuts and bolts of writing a musical than most people larn 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 next musical, 'Allegro,' in 1947. [singing] "His hair is fuzzy, his optics are bluish." Unusual for its day, information technology 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 then that incurred in me the whole notion of doing experimental stuff, which I've done, one style or another, most of the shows I've washed." Hammerstein laid out a course of education for his teenage protégé, suggesting he write iv musicals, each in a different manner. "The outset one beingness an adaptation of a play that I thought was good. The second being an adaptation of a play that I liked merely was flawed, that mayhap I could feel I could improve. The third, something that was a non-theatrical story, simply adapt it and make it theatrical. And and so the 4th was to write an original. And that'southward exactly what I did over a menstruum of years." In the mid-1950s, when Sondheim was in his early 20s, he wrote his first professional show, 'Sat Night.' [singing] "The moon's similar a million-watt electrical light. It shines on the city —" Information technology was headed to Broadway when its atomic number 82 producer suddenly died, forcing the show to shut out of town. The aggressive immature composer was notwithstanding without a credit, merely so came an opportunity to work on Broadway, albeit as a lyricist only and non as a composer besides. It all began when he bumped into renowned playwright and librettist Arthur Laurents at a party. "And we savage to talking, and I said, 'What are yous doing?' He said, 'I'yard nigh to outset 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 you.' And he literally smote his forehead. And he said, in his typical Arthur Laurents way, he said, 'I didn't much like your music, but I thought your lyrics were kind of good.' I said, 'All correct.' He said, 'Would you similar to come and play for Lenny?' At present, I had no intention of just writing lyrics. I wanted to write music. But I thought, chance to play for Leonard Bernstein? Why not? So the adjacent morning, I played for Lenny. And Lenny said, 'I will know inside a week, and I'll let you know.' And I said, 'Thank you then much, Mr. Bernstein.' Sure enough, a week afterwards, the telephone rang, and he said, 'Would yous similar to practice it?' And I said, 'Let me telephone call you lot back.' Considering I didn't want to do just lyrics. And I chosen Oscar, who's my adviser on everything. And I said, 'You know, I don't desire to exercise this.' But Oscar said, 'Look, you have a chance to piece of work with very gifted professionals on a show that sounds interesting, and you could always write your own music eventually.' He said, 'My advice would be to take the job.' That'southward why I took it. And I learned a slap-up deal." [singing] "Maria. I just met a daughter 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 show, and the only fashion to write the lyrics was to underwrite them and brand them very simple." "You've said over the years that y'all're not really happy with the lyrics you wrote, fifty-fifty though they're so popular. You are?" "No, no, no, they're very cocky-conscious. Lenny wanted everything, the lyrics to be very poetic. But his idea of poesy and my idea of verse are simply not the same. I mean, y'all know, I was 25 years old, and he was a big, big forcefulness, and Lenny kept pushing me to be very fruity. 'Today, the world was just an accost.' That's a perfectly fine line on newspaper, just the boy from the streets is singing that?" [singing] "Today, the world was just an accost, a place for me to live in." "And I've often quoted, y'all know, 'I Feel Pretty': 'It's alarming how charming I feel,' says this girl from the streets, and she sounds like Noel Coward." [singing] "Information technology's alarming how mannerly I feel." "I exercise like 'Something's Coming.' That's my idea of a poetic lyric, in the sense that information technology uses imagery." [singing] "Something'due south coming. I don't know what it is, but it is going to be great." "And I like the 'Jet Song,' as well." [singing] "When y'all're a Jet, you lot're a Jet all the way, from your kickoff cigarette to your final dying day." "Only you lot know, songs like 'Somewhere,' I mean, that's deeply embarrassing. So —" "W Side Story" got mixed reviews when it opened in 1957, and didn't win the Tony Honor equally Best Musical, only information technology was revolutionary in its combination of music and trip the light fantastic, and in its searing plot. Sondheim had made his first mark. He even so longed to write both music and lyrics on Broadway, and it looked every bit if he was going to go the chance with a new musical based on the early life of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. [singing] "You'll be bang-up! Going to have the whole earth on a plate!" Just the show's star objected. "Ethel Merman was already signed to play Rose, the mother, and then information technology was all prepare. And then Ethel Merman said she would non have me as a composer, considering she had but done a show called 'Happy Hunting,' with two young writers, and information technology was a bomb. And she didn't want to have a chance on an unknown composer. And she'due south perfectly happy to have me practise the lyrics. Then I said no, and Arthur tried to persuade me, and I said, 'No, I actually want to write music, this is nonsense.' Again, Oscar stepped into the breach, and he said, 'Do it.' He said, 'At that place are ii advantages. Starting time of all,' he said, 'you have the experience of writing for a star, which is different than just writing a show. I mean, yous're tailoring cloth not only for the character, for the character as played by that specific actor or extra.' That'due south one thing. He said, 'Secondly, it's six months out of your life. Do information technology.' And that's exactly what happened. We wrote that show in most four months. We wrote very rapidly. That's probably the quickest I've always heard of a major Broadway musical being written. Simply it wrote, equally Barbra Streisand would say, similar butter." [singing] "Dear, everything's coming up roses and daffodils!" "Information technology's considered one of the best, if non the best, Broadway musicals of all fourth dimension." "Yeah, admittedly, it is. I think it's probably it's the culmination of that era, that told musicals in chronological club, in a linear style. I'd certainly say it was the all-time." In 1970, Sondheim teamed up with director Harold Prince to write his breakthrough musical, 'Company.' Just as 'Gypsy' had been the culmination of the era of the narrative musical, 'Company' broke new ground. It fractured the narrative, told the story in a nonlinear manner, and opened the way for like musicals, like 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago.' Sondheim and Prince followed company with more breakthroughs: 'Follies,' 'A Trivial Night Music,' 'Pacific Overtures.' They were revolutionary, but mostly, they weren't financial hits. "It takes an audience a while to get used to new ways of storytelling. There are infrequent plays that break with the tradition, like 'Death of a Salesman,' and are hits at the same time. But usually, if you bring a new way of storytelling to the phase — 'Oklahoma!' is the perfect example of taking a chance and is a gigantic hitting, but 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 past many to be Sondheim'due south all-time and most powerful work. A gruesome tale of death and revenge, information technology shows the composer at the tiptop of his talent. [singing] "Is that just disgusting —" "Information technology was full of blood and gore and controversy. And though information technology, too, didn't make money in its original run, it has often been revived, has been performed by opera companies, and in 2007 was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp." [singing] "I will take vengeance!" "You want to talk about nighttime?" "Well, it's non so nighttime. It'south really kind of funny, that show, you know? I mean, nobody takes it seriously. Information technology's not night the fashion — it'south a melodrama. I don't recollect melodramas are dark. Anyway, but I become it. The signal is, yes, there's a lot of blood." "And there'due south a lot of comic relief, there's no uncertainty about it." "Information technology's not about comic relief. It'southward the fact the attitude is non a existent mental attitude. They're all cartoon figures. I mean, it'southward an operetta. These are not real people, and they're non supposed to exist. They're supposed to be big, larger than life." "Merely isn't there a real sense in it most injustice and evil?" "If there is for yous, then there is for y'all. I know Hal always thinks, always thought it was about the Industrial Revolution. I thought information technology was about scaring people." "You all know Steve is a great dramatist and our greatest living composer and lyricist." In 2010, Sondheim received an ultimate phase laurels. "I cry easy." A Broadway theater was renamed in his accolade. "This is so much more moving, to christen a theater the Stephen Sondheim equally opposed to the British Petroleum Playhouse or —" "What do you retrieve — if you think virtually this, what would you like your legacy to exist?" "Oh, goodness. Oh, I just would similar the shows to keep getting done. Whether on Broadway, or in regional theaters, or schools or communities, I would just similar the stuff to be done. Simply done and done and done and done and done. Y'all know, that would be the fun."
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history'southward songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the creative standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his dwelling 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 sick and that the decease was sudden. The day earlier, Mr. Sondheim had historic Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Mr. Pappas said. [His death certificate, obtained by 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'southward most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last one-half of the 20th century, if not its most popular.
His work melded words and music in a way that enhanced them both. From his earliest 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 2 adventurous musicals, "Assassins," giving vocalism to the men and women who killed or tried to kill American presidents, and "Passion," an operatic probe into the nature of true dearest, he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The first Broadway bear witness for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy "A Funny Thing Happened on the Fashion to the Forum," won a Tony Laurels for all-time musical and went on to run for more than two years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his most productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including "Visitor" (1970), "Follies" (1971), "A Little Nighttime Music" (1973), "Pacific Overtures" (1976), "Sweeney Todd" (1979), "Merrily We Roll Along" (1981), "Sunday in the Park With George" (1984) and "Into the Woods" (1987).
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In the history of the theater, just a handful could phone call Mr. Sondheim peer. The list of major theater composers who wrote words to back-trail their own scores (and vice versa) is a curt 1 — information technology includes Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Jerry Herman and Noël Coward.
Though Mr. Sondheim spent long hours in solitary labor, unremarkably 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 once 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 subsequently the author and managing director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form across the premises of merely entertainment.
Mr. Sondheim'south music was ever recognizable as his ain, and yet he was dazzlingly versatile. His melodies could be deceptively, disarmingly simple — like the title song of the unsuccessful 1964 musical "Anyone Can Whistle," "Our Time," from "Merrily," and the nearly famous of his individual songs, "Send In the Clowns," from "Night Music" — or jaunty and whimsical, similar "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid," from "Forum."
They could also be brassy and bitter, like "The Ladies Who Lunch," from "Company," or sweeping, similar the grandly macabre waltz "A Petty Priest," from "Sweeney Todd." And they could be desperately yearning, like the plaintive "I Read," from "Passion."
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Tonys and a Pulitzer
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets. He exploited fourth dimension 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 similar "Next by Sondheim," "Putting It Together" and the autobiographical "Sondheim on Sondheim." Five of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and six won for all-time original score. A show that won neither of those, "Dominicus 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 it had non previously been on Broadway. (It 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 Honour for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in perhaps the ultimate show business award, a Broadway firm on Westward 43rd Street, Henry Miller's Theater, was renamed in his honor.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of "Visitor" was planned, with a woman (played by Katrina Lenk) in the cardinal function of Bobby, merely information technology was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times published a special section devoted to him, and a virtual concert, "Take Me to the Earth: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration," was streamed on the Broadway.com YouTube channel, featuring Broadway performers singing his songs.
Mr. Sondheim, who also maintained a abode in Manhattan, a townhouse on East 49th Street, had been spending most of his fourth dimension during the pandemic in Roxbury, in western Connecticut.
But he returned to New York this calendar month to nourish revivals of two of his musicals: on Nov. 14, for the opening night of "Assassins," at the Classic Stage Company in Lower Manhattan, and the next dark for the long-delayed first preview, since Broadway reopened, of "Company," also starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was "extremely" pleased past both productions, Mr. Pappas, his lawyer, said.
In improver to his theater work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for "Stavisky," Alain Resnais'south 1974 motion picture about a French financier and embezzler, and his song "Sooner or After (I Always Get My Homo)" for Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" won an Academy Honor in 1991. Six cast albums from his shows won Grammy Awards, and "Send In the Clowns" won the Grammy for vocal of the twelvemonth in 1975.
With the exception perhaps of "Forum," Mr. Sondheim's shows had hefty ambitions in subject field matter, form or both. "Visitor," which was built from vignettes featuring several couples and their mutual single male person 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 bloody tale nigh a vengeful barber in 19th-century London, approached Grand Guignol in tone and opera in staging and scoring. "The Frogs," which was get-go performed in the Yale University pond puddle 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.
Paradigm
Mr. Sondheim liked to remember of himself less equally a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very brusk plays and fix them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were often impossibly clever just rarely merely clever; his linguistic communication was sometimes erudite but seldom majestic. He was a globe-class rhyming gymnast, non just at the ends of lines but within them — one of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in "Sweeney Todd" was "shepherd'south pie brindled with actual shepherd" — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.
Rhymes and Beats
His 2010 artistic memoir, "Finishing the Hat" (the proper name was taken from a song title in "Dominicus in the Park"; a follow-upwardly, "Expect, I Made a Lid," 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 insufficient attention to a melodic line. In the song "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 most unimportant give-and-take in the opening line is the one that gets the most important note," he wrote.
In another case from "West Side Story," he complained near a stanza from "America," which was sung past a chorus of immature Puerto Rican women.
"Words must sit on music in order to become clear to the audition," he said to his biographer Meryle Secrest for her 1998 volume, "Stephen Sondheim: A Life." "You don't get a chance to hear the lyric twice, and if it doesn't sit and bounce when the music bounces and rise when the music rises, the audience becomes confused."
In "America," he added, "I had this wonderful quatrain that went: 'I like to exist in America/OK by me in America/Everything free in America/For a small fee in America.' The petty 'for a small fee' was my zinger — except that the 'for' is absolute and 'small-scale fee' is incommunicable to say that fast, and so it went 'For a smafee in America.' Nobody knew what information technology meant!"
What nearly distinguished Mr. Sondheim'south lyrics, however, was that they were by and large character-driven, frequently probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish or securely felt conflict. In "Send In the Clowns," for example, he couched the famous plaint nearly missed romantic chances largely in the language of the theater, because the character singing it is an aging extra:
Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my archway again with my usual flair,
Certain of my lines,
No one is there.
Prototype
In the title song for "Anyone Can Whistle," he wrote from the point of view of a woman who found it hard to love:
Anyone can whistle,
That's what they say —
Easy.
Anyone can whistle,
Any old day —
Easy.
It's all and so simple:
Relax, allow get, let wing.
So someone tell me why
Can't I?
I can trip the light fantastic toe a tango
I tin can read Greek —
Easy.
I can slay a dragon
Whatever erstwhile week —
Piece of cake.
What's hard is simple,
What's natural comes hard.
Maybe you could show me
How to allow go
Lower my guard.
Acquire to be free.
Maybe if you whistle,
Whistle for me.
Over the years, many people theorized that "Anyone Can Whistle" was a cri de coeur by the author, though Mr. Sondheim denied it. "To believe that 'Anyone Can Whistle' is my ideology is to believe that I'one thousand the prototypical Repressed Intellectual and that explains everything almost me," he wrote in "Finishing the Hat."
Still, it's true that he lived a largely lone romantic life for many years.
"I always thought that song would exist Steve's epitaph," the playwright and director Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for "Anyone Can Whistle," as well equally "Westward Side Story," "Gypsy" and "Practise I Hear a Waltz?," told Ms. Secrest.
For a fourth dimension in his 60s, Mr. Sondheim shared his Manhattan townhouse with a immature songwriter, Peter Jones, and in 2017 he married Jeffrey Romley, who survives him, forth with a one-half brother, Walter Sondheim.
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Box Role Struggles
For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of bailiwick matter, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Mr. Sondheim'south shows, though mostly received with critical accolades, were almost never popular hits. He suffered from a reputation that he didn't write hummable tunes and that his outlook was austere, if not 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 Cook and Bernadette Peters.
Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the fizzy, feel-practiced musical experience or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to look. He too didn't give them the opulent spectacle, the anthemic score or the melodramatic storytelling that became the ascendant musical theater way of the 1980s and '90s with the inflow from Uk of Andrew Lloyd Webber'due south megahits "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's "Les Misérables" and "Miss Saigon," followed by 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 2d, "Anyone Tin can Whistle," lasted nine. "Merrily We Scroll Along," a famously problematic adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart opposite-chronology play well-nigh how idealistic young artists grow contemptuous as they age, closed afterwards just 16. But even his successes were barely successful. Most of his Broadway shows, in their initial runs, failed to earn back the coin it cost to put them on.
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"I have always conscientiously tried not to exercise the same matter twice," Mr. Sondheim said, reflecting on his career in an interview with The New York Times Mag in 2000, when he turned 70. "If you're broken-field running, they tin can't hitting you with so many tomatoes. I certainly experience out of the mainstream considering what's happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I'm out of fashion, I'm out of mode. Being a bohemian isn't just virtually beingness different. It's nearly having your vision of the way a evidence might be."
Solitary With Mother
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his mother, the onetime Etta Janet Play tricks, known every bit Foxy, worked for her husband as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10. He was sent for a time to military schoolhouse, and after to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 Stephen, her only kid, lived mostly with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life. (His father remarried and had two more than sons.)
In the years following his parents' separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his mother treated him precisely as she had her husband: flirting with him sexually on the 1 hand, belittling him on the other. As an developed, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the night earlier she was to have middle surgery, she wrote a letter to her son and had it hand delivered. It read, in part, "The only regret I accept in life is giving you nativity."
His female parent was, nonetheless, responsible for the near determinative relationship of her son's life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; 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 vii, went for a visit and stayed for the summertime.
His mother after bought a home nearby, and Stephen was so often at the Hammersteins' that he was thought of as a family fellow member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — "Information technology was because of my teenage adoration for him that I became a songwriter," Mr. Sondheim wrote in "Finishing the Hat," although he later assessed Hammerstein as a lyricist of soaring ability simply often flawed work. Hammerstein brutally criticized the male child'southward first musical, written at the George School, every bit "the worst affair I've always read," adding: "I didn't say that information technology was untalented, I said it was terrible. And if you desire to know why it's terrible, I'll tell you."
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An afternoon-long tutorial followed, teaching him, by Mr. Sondheim'due south business relationship, more than about the craft than most songwriters larn in a lifetime. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: Adapt a good play into a musical; suit a flawed play into a musical; adjust 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 Higher in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious composition study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, as he put it, "that art is piece of work and non inspiration, that invention comes with craft." Mr. Sondheim would later on written report independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim's first professional prove business job was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s television comedy, "Topper," about a fussbudget broker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts. (Much later, Mr. Sondheim wrote a whodunit motion-picture show script, "The Last of Sheila," with the actor Anthony Perkins; it was produced in 1973 and directed by Herbert Ross.) By the '50s he had become a connoisseur of word games and puzzles, and an inventor of elaborate games. From 1968 to 1969, he created cryptic crosswords for New York magazine.
His analogousness for theatrical misdirection and mystery was acknowledged 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 first professional show, a musical called "Saturday Night," which was an adaptation of "Front end Porch in Flatbush," a play past Philip Chiliad. and Julius J. Epstein. He got the job, to write both words and music, after the composer Frank Loesser turned it down. The evidence was scheduled to be presented in 1955, but the producer, Lemuel Ayers, died before he had completed raising the coin for it, and the production came to a halt. The show was not presented until 1997, by a small company in London; information technology later appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was loath to take either of his offset Broadway gigs, "West Side Story" and "Gypsy," considering he felt he was a composer, not merely a lyricist — "I enjoy writing music much more lyrics," he confessed in "Finishing the Hat." Only he agreed to both on the communication of Hammerstein, who told him that he would do good from working with the likes of Bernstein; Laurents (who wrote the book), and the director Jerome Robbins, in the first example, and from writing for a star like Ethel Merman in the second, even though it was she who had wanted a more than experienced Broadway hand, Jule Styne, every bit the composer.
Merely once afterwards "Gypsy" would Mr. Sondheim write lyrics for another composer: an unhappy collaboration with Richard Rodgers, "Do I Hear a Flit?," based on Laurents'south play "The Time of the Cuckoo."
Epitome
Mr. Sondheim was asked to take the job by Laurents and by Mary Rodgers, Richard'southward elder daughter, whom he had met as a teenager at the Hammersteins' and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years. However, the two men proved antagonistic as writing partners — years later Mr. Sondheim was quoted as saying that Hammerstein was "a man of limited talent and infinite soul" and Rodgers the reverse — and though the show ran for 220 performances in 1965, it never had a Broadway revival, and neither human being considered it a success.
The catamenia of Mr. Sondheim's greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director. They were sometime friends, having been introduced past Ms. Rodgers in the tardily 1940s or early '50s, and Mr. Prince had been the producer of "Due 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 Little Night Music," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd'' — and though not all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the production of two supremely talented artists whose individually authoritative visions were, for the most part, complementary. As Mr. Prince naturally saw a show's big picture, 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 idea 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 Along," a bear witness that was hampered in part by the youth of its bandage members, who had to play not only immature characters but likewise the disillusioned adults they become, and by Mr. Prince'due south acknowledged failure to find an appropriate look for the evidence equally a whole.
"I never knew how to direct it because I 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 show. I never could figure it out."
"Merrily" has had several lives since then, Off Broadway, in regional theater and overseas, as producers and directors accept tried to solve its problems and showcase what is generally acknowledged to exist a vivid and poignant score.
A Younger Collaborator
In whatsoever case, the two men parted artistic company for more than two decades, not working together once more until they hammered out a version of a much-revised musical about a pair of entrepreneurial American brothers in the early 20th century that in other incarnations, earlier and afterward, was variously titled "Gold," "Wise Guys" and "Road Bear witness." Under Mr. Prince, it was called "Bounce," and it was produced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and the Kennedy Eye in Washington.
During Mr. Prince'due south absence from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed upwardly with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the nigh cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim'due south 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 "Sunday in the Park With George," a work whose offset deed ingeniously creates the artistic process of the painter Georges Seurat equally he produces his masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte," and whose 2d act jumps ahead a century to illustrate how a gimmicky artist makes art in a more consumer-conscious historic period.
With no dancing and a slim plot, there was little of musical theater convention in the show, but, equally Frank Rich wrote in The Times, information technology was startlingly original and deeply satisfying. "It's anyone'due south guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted past 'Lord's day in the Park,' " Mr. Rich wrote. "What I practise know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine have created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching piece of work."
Image
It was one of Mr. Sondheim's nearly critically admired shows, running for 604 performances. And many critics and other Sondheim-ophiles found in it his most personal statement, equally if he had used Seurat's view of the creative person's life every bit a surrogate for his own. In the show's signature song, "Finishing the Hat," faced with the loss of the woman he loves because his devotion to painting has superseded his devotion to her, Seurat offers a sad simply forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the globe. It ends:
And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That, however yous live,
There'south a role of y'all e'er standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat
Starting on a hat
Finishing a hat
Await, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat.
William McDonald and Michael Paulson contributed reporting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-dead.html
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