Stephen Sondheim was the most important musical innovator of the past half century. Not the most successful – by no means. He wrote lyrics and music for about fifteen musicals, not one of which was a real box-office success. But he was the best—the most surprising, the most intelligent, the wittiest, the most inventive. In the pre-eminently commercial genre of the musical, Sondheim was the master of the non-commercial variant. He made musicals for advanced musicians.
Stephen Sondheim, born in 1930 in New York, died November 26 at the age of 91.
The only Sondheim song to ever become a hit is “Send in the clowns.” But even Barbra Streisand, Judy Collins, Shirley Bassey, and Frank Sinatra, who have done well with it, have admitted that, frankly, they barely understood the lyrics. Sondheim wrote specifically for the characters who sang the songs in his musicals. For example, ‘Send in the clowns’ is full of theater jargon because the song is in the musical A little night music (1973) is the wry story of an older actress who finally thinks she has found her love happiness, only to be told that her lover has just chosen a much younger woman: “Making my entrance again with my usual flair / sure of my lines / no one is there…” And in that context, the clowns also get their meaning.
The fact that his songs should primarily contribute to the characterization of his musical characters has always been a prerequisite for Sondheim. That also explains the self-criticism he has often expressed about the coquettish ‘I feel pretty’ from West Side Story (1957) – an imaginative text full of inner rhymes (“It’s alarming how charming I feel”), but for that very reason not appropriate. A humble girl from Puerto Rico who has only just mastered the English language would never express her joy so eloquently. “I should have suppressed my copywriting vanity there,” said Sondheim.
West Side Story was his Broadway debut. He had actually wanted to make his debut straight away with a musical of which he had made text and music. But he didn’t want to pass up the chance to write the lyrics for the brilliant music of the great Leonard Bernstein. And rightly so: the overwhelming success of West Side Story not only made the 27-year-old novice famous, but also mediated.
Since then, however, Sondheim has almost always written his own music. Sometimes the sharp rhythms that sometimes reminded of Bernstein could still be heard, but he was also a master at making music in the atmosphere of the era or the location in which the performance was set. He himself spoke of ‘pastiche’ – as if he were nothing more than a skilled parodist. In reality, this musical flexibility often led to a convincing combination of drama, text and music with an authentic timbre.
Sondheim was by no means coquettish. His songs were often too whimsical for that – he didn’t write melody lines in which the players could lustfully lie down. And furthermore, his musicals rarely had a happy ending. Or the happy ending had itself, as in Into the woods, already completed in the intermission final, after which the second half showed the enormous risks that can arise from the fulfillment of ill-considered wishes.
Sondheim’s musicals were unpredictable in many ways. The first for which he wrote lyrics and music was A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum (1962), after the ancient Greek farces of Plautus. Subsequent musicals have included a New York City in his thirties who is under pressure from his married friends to start a committed relationship (Company), the painful reunion of women who were show girls in the 1930s (Follies), the rise of Western influence in nineteenth-century Japan (Pacific Overtures), a 19th-century London barber turned serial killer (Sweeney Todd), the fantasized origin story of the pointillist painting Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (Sunday in the Park with George) and a – obviously imaginary – gathering of the nine men who have committed an attack on an American president in the last century and a half (assassins).
Stephen Sondheim was above all a theater maker. He rarely wrote single songs. An exception was the song sung by Madonna ‘sooner or later’ from the movie Dick Tracey (1990) that earned him an Oscar for best song in a movie. That was about the only award he hadn’t received before. While he had already been awarded a Tony Award eight times for his theater work – no other musical maker has ever received as many honors as he has. At the age of eighty, a theater in New York was even named after him. Because of its invaluable significance to an easily underestimated theatrical genre.
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