STEPHEN SONDHEIM
(1930 -)

He wrote almost no "hit" songs, the kind that are included in collections, sung by many artists, and familiar to almost all lovers of popular music. (His Send in the Clowns is an exception.) Yet the composer and librettist for A Little Night Music is one of the most important and influential in the history of twentieth century Broadway. He produced a new genre for the generation after Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, and others. Before them, song lyrics had not been conversational and often had nothing to do with the story.

Sondheim went one step further. One of the few who wrote both the words and the music of the songs, he made the two a generic whole, completely related to the story and the action and, since they were so important, was careful to write lyrics which could be understood when sung. Moreover, he wrote differently for every show. His songs are serious works of art.

CHILDHOOD
Stephen's first ten years were typical of those of Jewish upper middle class boys in the New York City of the 1930s. His father Herbert, the grandson of German Jewish immigrants was a newly rich, successful dress manufacturer. Many of the dresses were designed by Stephen's mother, Janet Fox or 'Foxy'. They lived in an elegant apartment on Central Park West, he went to private, progressive schools, and he started piano lessons at six. As a child, he was often taken from bed in his pajamas to play for company. For a while he considered a career as a concert pianist, but gave up that idea. Extremely bright, he went to pre-kindergarten and then, at the age of five, skipped to the first grade By then he could read the New York Times!

He loved school and had several after school-friends but saw little of his parents. He was cared for by servants and, when he was sick, his mother's cousin left work to care for him. His father did take him to ball games occasionally. He had plenty food and clothing, but others commented on how lonely he seemed. However he does not remeber being unhappy. He saw his first live theatre at age six, the operetta White Horse Inn. Then, when he was nine he saw Very Warm for May. He later remembered: "The curtain went up and revealed a piano; a butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling". Wa this a possible inspiration for the opening of A Little Night Music.

YOUTH AND THE HAMMERSTEINS
Then, when he was ten, his life changed. His father left home for another woman, and the boy was sent to military school. He still saw his father weekly, and they went to various stage and movie theatres, but he seldom saw his mother. He enjoyed the school very much, appreciating the structure, and he was still scholastically two years ahead of those his same age. Still the musician, he learned to play the school's big pipe organ even though his feet could hardly touch the pedals.

The next summer he was supposed to go to camp, but he met the librettist Oscar Hammerstein and his wife Dorothy (Showboat, Oklahoma and others) who were to become an important influence in his life. He also he became fast friends with their son Jamie. The boys enjoyed playing Monopoly and went to see Oklahoma together. Camp was forgotten and, from then on, Stephen spent most of his free time with the Hammerstein family on their farm near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In time he had his own bed there and was almost a part of the family, "the boy who came to dinner". His mother was not welcome, but there was a whole crew of "stepchildren". Another of those was Mary Rodgers, the daughter of Richard Rodgers, and they became close friends.

Stephen was reported to have a quick temper. He was brittle, competitive, sarcastic and brilliant. Although he learned some Yiddish from his father, he doesn't remember ever going to temple and did not have a bar mitzvah. He studied Greek on his own, He taught Oscar Hammerstein to play chess, and dreamt of being a Broadway librettist, just like his mentor. (Before that he had considered becoming a mathematician.) Even as a child he had liked to take things apart to see how they worked and remained very found of puzzles and games of all kinds. Later he was famous in Broadway circles for his puzzles; a number of his crossword puzzles were published.

From military school he went to The George School a Friends Society (Quaker) school in Pennsylvania. Because he was still two years ahead of his age group and wanted to be accepted, he tried not to flaunt his good grades. He got through the four year Latin class in two years. At the age of 15 he wrote the songs for a school musical By George. It had a cast of 50 and twenty songs, and it was a hit at the school because it was all about life there.

LEARNING HIS TRADE
When he finished at the George School, he enrolled in Williams College in Massachusetts as an English major, but there he learned music. After he finished By George, Stephen had asked Oscar Hammerstein to critique it honestly as though it was by someone he did not know. His mentor's disappointing response was: "It's the worst things I ever read in my life", but then offered to tell him why and spent two hours going over it in detail. He set Steven a task composed of four parts:

1. Pick a good play and write a show (book, music and libretto) for it. Stephen chose to write All That Glitters based on Beggar on Horseback by George S, Kaufman and Mark Connelly.
2. Pick a flawed play and do the same, improving it. Stephen chose Maxwell Anderson's High Tor.
3. Write a musical based on a short story or novel. Mary Poppins was the choice
4. Write a completely new musical. The result was Climb High based on the experiences of a college classmate.

It took Sondheim many years to accomplish all of this. (He finished Mary Poppins just before he graduated from college.) None of the results were ever produced professionally because of copyright issues, but he had learned how to write. Soon after finishing All that Glitters he played the score for Cole Porter. He would start a bit and Porter would go to the piano, pick it up, comment and make suggestions. He taught Sondheim that, when starting to write lyrics, one should have a rhythm in mind even if there was no music yet.

During Sondheim's first summer while at Williams, Hammerstein got him a job as a gofer with a New York theatre which was getting Rodgers and Hammerstein's Allegro ready). Wanting to know everything about music, after graduating from collage magna cum lauda and winning a prize in music, he continued to study composition and theory. He didn't plan to write classical music himself, but he wanted to understand it all. His goal was to write well structured good music but he asked his teacher Milton Babbitt to study atonality. However, Babbitt didn't think him ready and discouraged him. All his music is tonal if not always melodic.

To save money, he moved in with his father, sleeping on a cot in the dining room. With his teacher he began each day's study with an hour of analyzing a good popular song before turning to the classics. He also worked on orchestration, something few Broadway composers did (nor did he do his own later). Like Bernstein, he is one of the few composers of musicals interested in theory. From Hammerstein he learned to write for the audience, not for himself or the actors, and that songs should have a beginning, a middle and an end, like a short story.

Sondheim later commented that, at that time, he knew little of the world outside of the "hothouse" existence he had led until then. He thought of the writing of lyrics as a craft while music was an art. On looking back he thought, although the music was pretty good, the lyrics of his early songs were lacking. His later lyrics were never cookie cutters. They are different! (See Send in the Clowns). He compared the matching of lyrics and words to meter, accents, etc. to the working out of a crossword puzzle. He carefully chose words that can be understood when sung, and he used complex polyphony rather than melody, especially in choruses.

SOME WORKS*
Once he finished college, Sondheim started writing many songs and looking for backers. One of his first paying jobs was writing music for the television version of the Topper movies. However, he did not stay in Hollywood saying he did not like movie musicals. His first Broadway assignments involved only lyrics. Later he wrote both the music and lyrics for a given musical but was never interested in writing the book, i.e. the spoken words. Two of the other few who also wrote both music and lyrics were Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.

The following are some of his most popular musicals.

West Side Story 1957: This was his first involvement with a big hit. He worked with Bernstein on the lyrics, but the reviews ignored him. Later he was dissatisfied with the lyrics saying they don't always fit the characters and are too poetic. 732 performances.

Gypsy 1959: Approached to write lyrics for Gypsy, he wanted to do the music also, but Ethyl Merman vetoed that because he was unknown. The lesson he learned with this work is that when writing for such a famous person and a known cast, he was writing for the performer. Everything written for the roles had to fit and please the actors as well as the characters. 702 performances

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 1964: For this he finally wrote the score and got great reviews. 964 performances.

Company 1970: Sondheim did the music for this production but, contrary to what he had been told, the lyrics of the songs had nothing to do with the story. He couldn't find words for songs in the story. Although he was disappointed, it cemented him as a composer; he won a Critics' Circle Award.

A Little Night Music 1973: The title is a mistranslation of Mozart's Serenade #13: Eine klaine Nachtmusik. It is the most operatic of all his scores, and it won a Tony for best score.

He wrote new lyrics for the 1974 production of Bernstein's Candide

Sweeney Todd (1979): The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was a well known London story, but there is no hard evidence that the man ever existed. He owes something to Titus Andronicus who tricks a woman into eating her sons by cutting them up and serving them in pies. He went to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Angela Lansbury in the play Sweeney Todd. (He wanted to see some Grand Guignol.) He immediately asked to be allowed to write a musical version of the play. It won a Tony for best score .

Sunday in the Park with George 1984: A fictional version of the life of the painter George Seurat. Inspired by his pointillist picture A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La grande Jatte, he tried to reproduced the artistic technique with his music. The set was a copy of the painting.

Into the Woods 1987: With James Lapine (book). Sondheim wanted to write a new fairy tale from scratch but actually used characters from other stories including Little Red Riding Hood, a wolf, Cinderella, Rapunzel and her Prince, Jack's cow, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.. It was tried out at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego where it ran for 50 performances before moving to Broadway with Bernadette Peter as the witch. It won a Tony for best score,

For a complete list of his works see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Sondheim and other web sites.

THE MAN
Soon after he became established on Broadway, Sondheim formed his own publishing company and so did much better financially than most lyricists. He bought a five story house in Manhattan and rented the top floors to friends. He soon discovered that Katherine Hepburn was a neighbor, but he lived there ten years before he actually met her. They became good friends.

At first Sondheim was a sloppy dresser and ungroomed; he always looked tired and unkempt. He claimed he had no lifestyle because he spent all his time writing. Although successful he was not recognized by the public unless he was in the company of someone like Leonard Bernstein or Katherine Hepburn. However, after success of Follies, Company and A Little Night Music this began to change. He became clothes conscious and grew a beard.

Never on good terms with his mother, he tried to sever all contact with her. After he became famous she had kept trying to contact him, and he finally he wrote her a letter saying he never wanted to see her again. He would still support her; if she needed anything she should contact his business manager. He did not go to her funeral. Once, in acknowledging the gift of a plate from a friend, he wrote: "Thanks for the plate, but where was my mother's head". In contrast, when Dorothy Hammerstein died he was completely overcome and ran from the memorial service crying so hard he could not go back.

In total Sondheim won seven Tonys including a special one for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. Among the the many other awards there is a Grammy Awards for Sweeney Todd and Song of the Year for Send in the Clowns, the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, and the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award. He was President of the Dramatists Guild from 1973-1981.'

While his heart is in Broadway and he loves Bach, his favorite musical period is from Brahms to Stravinsky. Like many of his generation, he doesn't admire current musicals saying they are: "easy to take, audiences don't want to be challenged". He does no serious composing now, saying age has made him less likely to spend the energy to write a complete musical.

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Revised December 2009
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