Sondheim, Stephen

Stephen Sondheim

Composer, lyricist

Friends With the Hammersteins

Established Reputation with Dance Musical

Extended Musical Limits

Assassins

Selected writings

Selected discography

Sources

“If you told me to write a love song tonight,” Broad-Iway composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim told Samuel G. Freedman in the New York Times Magazine, “I’d have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that’s a lot easier and it makes me free to say anything I want.” Redefining the concept of American musicals, the composer is known for peopling his productions with complex characters, including murderous barbers, lascivious fairy-tale figures, and presidential assassins. While Sondheim has garnered numerous prestigious honors throughout his career, his works are sometimes considered controversial for their serious subject matter and have often elicited mixed response from reviewers. A writer for Opera News, though, stated that “the richest, most complex voice in American music history… does not serve up happy endings. [Sondheim] makes you think and feel and quite often, admit unpleasant truths. His songs are at once simple and multi-textured, easily grasped and elusive; the deeper you mine, the richer the lode.”

Born March 22, 1930, in New York City, Sondheim grew up in the affluent atmosphere of Central Park West in Manhattan. His father was a dress manufacturer, and his mother was the firm’s fashion designer and an interior decorator. Although Sondheim played piano at four years old, his interest in theater began five years later when his father took him to a production of the Broadway musical Very Warm for May in 1939. “The curtain went up and revealed a piano. A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys,” Sondheim divulged to William A. Henry III in Time. “I thought that was thrilling.” The event was one of the happier moments in Sondheim’s childhood before his parent’s divorce. After his mother won custody of Sondheim, she denied the boy any contact with his father. “She would have members of her family follow me to see if I met him in secret,” Sondheim disclosed later in Time. “She would telephone his apartment to see if I answered, then hang up. I was a substitute for him, and she took out all her anger and craziness on me…. It was not a great relationship.”

Friends With the Hammersteins

A few years after his parents divorced, Sondheim found a close friend in a boy his age named Jamie Hammerstein. Jamie’s father was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the songs for Very Warm for May as well as for many other Broadway hits, including South Pacific and Oklahoma! Invited to the Hammerstein’s family farm in Doyleston, Pennsylvania, when he was 12 years old,

For the Record…

Bom Stephen Joshua Sondheim, March 22, 1930, in New York, NY; son of Herbert Sondheim (a dress manufacturer) and Janet Sondheim Leshin (a fashion designer and interior decorator; maiden name, Fox). Education: Williams College, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1950; graduate study in music composition and theory with Milton Babbitt for two years; studied privately with Oscar Hammerstein II

Lyricist and composer of American musicals, including West Side Story, 1957, Gypsy, 1959, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1962, Anyone Can Whistle, 1964, Do I Hear a Waltz, 1965, Company, 1970, Follies, 1971, A Little Night Music (includes “Send in the Clowns”), 1973, Pacific Overtures, 1976, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 1979, Merrily We Roll Along, 1981, Sunday in the Park With George, 1984, Into the Woods (includes “No One Is Alone”), 1989, and Assassins, 1991. Lyricist and composer for Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway production Candide, 1973, and for music for television and movies, including Evening Primrose, 1966, Reds, 1981, and Dick Tracy, 1990. Contributed to Barbra Streisand’s LP Broadway Album, 1985.

Awards: Numerous citations, including Grammy awards, Tony awards, and New York Drama Critics awards for best musical; Pulitzer Prize, 1985, for Sunday in the Park With George.

Addresses: Home— 246 East 49th St., New York, NY 10017. Office—c/o Flora Roberts, 65 East 55th St., New York, NY 10022.

Sondheim remained for the summer. He found a family substitute in the Hammersteins when his mother, who had bought a house in Doyleston that autumn, commuted to her job in Manhattan. Jamie Hammerstein told Time that “by Christmas, Stephen was more a Hammerstein than a Sondheim.” Surrogate father to the adolescent Sondheim, Oscar Hammerstein was also his musical mentor in the years that followed. After he wrote a musical entitled By George at boarding school, the 15-year-old Sondheim requested the elder Hammerstein’s opinion. “I was never allowed to be self-indulgent, because I was brought up by a taskmaster from an early age,” Sondheim related to Freedman. “The first influence I had was a highly professional, highly rule-conscious man. He didn’t say obey the rules, he just pointed them out.” Sondheim revealed in Time that Hammerstein told him his novice musical was “the worst thing I have ever read—but I didn’t say it was untalented.”

One of the most successful American lyricists, Hammerstein influenced Sondheim’s musical development over the intervening years until the young man graduated from Williams College. In 1950 Sondheim won the Hutchinson Prize, which enabled him to study structure and theory with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. During his fellowship with Babbitt, Sondheim told Freedman, he discovered his former and present mentor “represented two different fields. One was theater, the other music. What I was learning from Milton was basic grammar—sophisticated grammar, but grammar. It was a language, whereas what I learned from Oscar was what to do with language.” Sondheim sought a career in show business after finishing his education. Off to a slow start, he went on audition after audition, and one stage show he wrote was called off upon the producer’s death. At one point in his early career, Sondheim found himself in Hollywood writing scripts for the television situation comedy Topper. The turning point in his career came when he was offered the opportunity to write the lyrics for the musical West Side Story in 1957.

Established Reputation with Dance Musical

Considered one of the masterpieces of the American theater, West Side Story established Sondheim as a prominent Broadway lyricist at the age of twenty-seven. He followed the successful show with Gypsy in 1959. Calling Gypsy “the most perfectly achieved dance musical” in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Rich postulated that Sondheim “made his reputation with the dance musical.” While 1962 marked the success of the burlesque comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Sondheim was composer and lyricist for plays with varying degrees of acceptance over the next decades. His movement away from the traditional musical format of snappy tunes and happy endings toward a darker design offended critical sensibilities. “While praising Sondheim’s brilliance,” wrote Steven Holden in Atlantic, “theater critics have routinely complained that his work is cold and decadent and called his music tuneless.” Offbeat and experimental productions such as Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Do I Hear a Waltz?(1965), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), the operatic Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), and Merrily We Roll Along (1981) brought Sondheim an intellectual cult following.

Extended Musical Limits

“The world has finally caught up with Stephen Sondheim. After 20 years of wary regard as, variously, the savior of the American musical, a heartless antimelodist or a closet opera composer, Sondheim—who is all the above and much more—is currently on a roll on the New York musical scene,” wrote Allan Rich in Newsweek with the appearance of Sondheim’s 1984 musical Sunday in the Park With George. A lyricist and composer who has been known to find inspiration in unlikely sources, Sondheim based Sunday in the Park With George on pointillist art. Portraying painter George Seurat and the characters from Seurat’s neo-impressionist work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the unusual musical was a commercial success as well as a prize winner. A writer for Time reported: “From his big-time debut in 1957 as the lyricist of West Side Story to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park With George …, Sondheim… has steadily pushed toward—or beyond—the limits of what the score, the narrative, the very premise of a musical can be.”

“A new show by Stephen Sondheim is still the most exciting event in the American theater,” wrote Jack Kroll in Newsweek in 1987 with the advent of Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods. Sondheim found the impetus for Into the Woods from child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s discussion of fairy tales in The Uses of Enchantment. Reviewers were divided in their opinion of the show, but advance ticket sales netting $2.3 million illustrated that Sondheim had found his audience. One of the songs, “No One Is Alone,” entered the ranks of standard Sondheim ballads. Throughout his career Sondheim has battled unfavorable comparisons with his mentor Hammerstein in many reviews. Into the Woods was an exception. Ash De Lorenzo noted in Vogue that “the score of Into the Woods accomplishes what the score of Oklahoma! and Carousel did: it makes the whole piece come together. A circle has been completed.”

Assassins

Sondheim followed Into the Woods with the musical Assassins. Reviewing the play in 1991, a writer for Newsweek cited the Sondheim collage of persons, including John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and “Squeaky” Fromme, who murdered, or attempted to murder, U.S. presidents, “the most audacious, far out and grotesque work of his career.” A reviewer for Time reported that “even fans of [Sondheim’s] acerbic wit and nonpareil invention wondered how such a show could be put together. The work… amply, at times brilliantly, demonstrates how. The question that lingers is why.” Robert Sandla in Theatre Crafts offered the challenge of the project as explanation for why Sondheim would produce the play. “Put aside, for a moment, the queasiness you might feel when you learn that presidential assassins are the subject of a brand new musical…. And consider, instead, the purely technical imperatives confronted by the designers of Assassins.”

Dubbed “Broadway’s brightest hope,” Sondheim “may yet become the giant he saw his teacher [Hammerstein] to be—one who leaves our theater profoundly and permanently changed,” New York Times Magazine reviewer Frank Rich prophesied in 1984. The subject of a book by Craig Zadan titled Sondheim & Company, which delves more into the composer’s career accomplishments than his life story, Sondheim is required reading in musical theater history. Not always praised but generally acknowledged for expanding the limits of the American musical, Sondheim alternately irritates and moves his audiences with songs and subject matter. “Of course,” Kroll proposed, “Sondheim would write a musical about amoebas, or aardvarks.”

Selected writings

Topper (television script), NBC, 1953.

Stephen Sondheim’s Crossword Puzzles, Harper, 1980.

Also author of other television scripts and screenplays. Contributor to books on theater and theatrical biographies, including Oscar Hammerstein’s biography Getting to Know Him, Random House, 1977. Contributor of crossword puzzles to New York magazine.

Selected discography

West Side Story, Columbia, 1957.

Gypsy, Columbia, 1959.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Capitol, 1962.

Anyone Can Whistle, Columbia, 1964.

Do I Hear a Waltz?, Columbia, 1965.

Company, Columbia, 1970.

Follies, Capitol, 1971.

A Little Night Music (includes “Send in the Clowns”), Columbia, 1973.

Sondheim: A Musical Tribute, 1973.

Pacific Overtures, RCA, 1976.

Side by Side by Sondheim, RCA, 1977.

Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, RCA, 1977.

Merrily We Roll Along, RCA, 1981.

Sunday in the Park With George, RCA, 1984.

Into the Woods, RCA, 1987.

Assasins, RCA, 1988.

Sources

Books

Zadan, Craig, Sondheim & Company, 2nd edition, Harper, 1986.

Periodicals

Atlantic, December 1984.

Library Journal, December 1986.

Newsweek, October 29, 1984; November, 16, 1987; February 4, 1991; June 22, 1992.

New York, December, 8, 1986; August 20, 1990. New Yorker, July 2, 1990.

New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1984; October 21, 1984.

Opera News, November 1985.

People, February 17, 1986; March 17, 1986; October 1, 1990.

Psychology Today, January/February 1989.

Stereo Review, October 1982; October 1985.

Theatre Crafts, March 1991.

Time, June 16, 1986; November 16, 1987; December 7, 1987; September 25, 1989; February 4, 1991.

U.S. News& World Report, February 1, 1988.

Vogue, February 1988.

—Marjorie Burgess