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“You recognize, I had the idealistic notion, after I was 20, that I used to be going into the theater,” Stephen Sondheim as soon as stated. “I wasn’t; I used to be going into present enterprise, and I used to be a idiot to assume in any other case.”
It was a comment attribute of Sondheim, the titan of musical theater whose many years’ value of credit as a composer and lyricist included “West Facet Story,” “Firm” and “Into the Woods.” Right here he was as many had seen him in interviews through the years: unsentimental and a bit flip, self-effacing to the purpose of promoting himself brief.
As a result of amongst musical theater artists of his technology, Sondheim, who died in 2021 at 91, was arguably the most creative — difficult, uncommon, incapable of superficiality in a medium usually dismissed as superficial. He was, maybe to his disappointment, not the very best businessman, with exhibits that not often lasted lengthy on Broadway. And his work was higher for it.
Sondheim has at all times had a devoted fan base, however proper now his musicals are true sizzling tickets with substantial actual property on New York phases. Not too long ago, it was attainable to soak up 4 Sondheim exhibits in a single weekend: “Merrily We Roll Alongside” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway, “The Frogs” in a starry live performance presentation by MasterVoices, and “Right here We Are,” his unfinished closing work, accomplished and in its premiere run on the Shed.
Collectively, they kind a portrait that helps in contemplating Sondheim’s place amongst American composers. I say American as a result of Broadway, alongside jazz, is probably the most homegrown of this nation’s music, and his work always pushed the artwork kind additional. The place so lots of his colleagues have operated inside normal buildings, he, even in writing a 32-bar track, appeared to at all times ask, “What else is feasible?”
It’s additionally necessary to contemplate Sondheim as a distinctly American composer as a result of his writing displays a artistic thoughts repeatedly fixated on the thought of his homeland, with an ambivalence by turns affectionate and acerbic. It’s there in his lyric contribution to “Gypsy,” arguably the Nice American Musical, which the musicologist Raymond Knapp has described as “a model of the American dream that leads, as if inevitably, to striptease.” And it continues, with an unconventional patriotism in “Assassins” and a revealing journey throughout state strains and years in “Street Present.”
In that sense, Sondheim just isn’t solely one of many most interesting American composers, but in addition one of the crucial important.
“He and Lenny are on the high of that checklist,” Paul Gemignani, Sondheim’s longtime music director, stated, referring additionally to Leonard Bernstein. “Most Broadway composers are writing pop tunes. Steve by no means wrote a pop tune. ‘Ship within the Clowns’ acquired fortunate.”
Sondheim appeared fated to create musical theater at a better stage than his colleagues. Like Bernstein, he was pedigreed: His mentor, for lyric writing, was Oscar Hammerstein II, of Rodgers and Hammerstein; for composition, the modernist Milton Babbitt. But he emulated neither.
In an interview with the Sondheim Overview, Sondheim stated that he was educated by Hammerstein “to consider songs as one-act performs, to maneuver a track from level A to level B dramatically.” However he considered them in additional classical phrases: “sonata kind — assertion, improvement and recapitulation.”
And whereas Sondheim composed with the spirit of an avant-gardist, he was extra of a postmodernist than Babbitt, although he described Babbitt as a closet songwriter who admired Kern and Arlen as a lot as Mozart and Schoenberg.
“The primary hour of every of our weekly periods could be dedicated to analyzing a track like ‘All of the Issues That You Are,’” Sondheim recalled, “the subsequent three to the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, at all times concentrating on the tautness of the buildings, the leanness and frugality of the musical concepts.” Style didn’t matter; craft did, which is why one among their most influential classes entailed how a Bach fugue constructed, as Babbitt put it, a whole cathedral from a four-note theme. Sondheim would later do the identical within the rating of “Anybody Can Whistle.”
As a college scholar, Sondheim wrote some juvenilia as a lyricist-composer — most intriguingly, fragments of a “Mary Poppins” musical that predates the Disney film by over a decade. However, after a false begin, his first skilled credit score was because the lyricist on “West Facet Story.” “Gypsy” adopted, with music by Jule Styne, nevertheless it wasn’t till “A Humorous Factor Occurred on the Strategy to the Discussion board” that Broadway noticed its first present with each music and lyrics by Sondheim.
He was usually requested which got here first, the music or the lyrics. Probably the most correct reply might be generally one, generally the opposite, generally each, however with a deference to readability of textual content. Like Wagner, who wrote the librettos of his operas, Sondheim wished his lyrics to be heard and understood; his vocal strains resemble these of Janacek and Debussy, whose dramas unfurl with the rhythm of speech.
Sondheim’s most prolific, and bold, interval started with the idea musical “Firm” (1970) and his collaborations with the eminent producer and director Hal Prince. Gemignani stated that, collectively, they “by no means compromised on bringing their concepts to life.” It was throughout this era that Sondheim emerged as a postmodernist within the vein of John Adams, with a deep properly of references offered with a wink or sincerity, however above all with dramaturgical goal.
That is likely to be why “Follies,” from 1971, has been known as a “post-musical musical.” Its rating abounds in pastiche — what’s “Shedding My Thoughts” if not a Gershwin tune from an alternate universe? — and clever irony, resembling dissonances that betray the darker reality of “The Street You Didn’t Take.”
For “Pacific Overtures” (1976), Sondheim took an identical method to Puccini in “Turandot,” by placing genuine sounds — on this case, Kabuki music — by way of his personal idiomatic prism. However, like Puccini, he suggests reasonably than represents, unable to flee a Western perspective whereas purportedly telling a narrative from a Japanese viewpoint. It’s a contradiction that doesn’t serve the musical in addition to the extra globalist model of “Somebody in a Tree,” a track that introduced a simplistic American Minimalism to Broadway.
Impressed by the spareness of Japanese visible artwork, Sondheim composed an analogue in a track that does little greater than develop a single chord, again and again. As Philip Glass and Steve Reich have been making use of a world-music sensibility to the classical sphere, Sondheim wrote his personal form of repetitive part music. “It’s not insignificant that after I met Steve Reich,” Sondheim later wrote, “he advised me how a lot he liked this present.”
He was on culturally surer floor with “A Little Evening Music” (1973), wherein the thought of variation is utilized to waltz-like melodies in three. He wrote that his favourite kind was the theme and variations, and that he revered Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” This musical got here nearer to that piece than anything Sondheim wrote, with a touch of Sibelius.
Sondheim’s sound, like that of any good postmodernist, was each constant and chameleonic, by no means extra so than in “Sweeney,” which shows his genius and misguided musical beliefs in equal measure.
Except for “Ardour” (1994), it’s Sondheim’s most operatic work in sensibility and craft, but he bristled on the thought of “Sweeney” being known as an opera or an operetta and as soon as wrote that “when ‘Porgy and Bess’ was carried out on Broadway, it was a musical; when it was carried out at Glyndebourne and Covent Backyard, it was an opera.” (That’s not true. It was at all times an opera, and performed on Broadway at a time when many operas did.)
All advised, “Sweeney” is a hybrid of music theater, one which brings in one more medium: cinema. Sondheim believed that, with all due respect, “John Williams is liable for ‘Jaws,’ not Steven Spielberg.” His rating for “Sweeney” is equally wealthy with edge-of-your-seat underscoring, whereas the lyrics are each ingenious and inherently melodic. Sondheim was pleased with the opening line of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” and rightfully so: “Attend the story of Sweeney Todd” units a temper of theatrical artifice and anachronism, with a piercing consonance within the T’s as unsettling as Nabokov’s “tip of the tongue taking a visit of three steps down the palate to faucet, at three, on the tooth” in “Lolita.”
Right here, it should be stated, that the sound of Sondheim wouldn’t be such with no essential collaborator: Jonathan Tunick, his orchestrator to at the present time. (The scores of all 4 exhibits I not too long ago attended have been organized by him.) Sondheim composed at his piano, then sang by way of whereas accompanying himself; from there, Tunick teased out the textures of his taking part in into whole instrumental ensembles.
In an interview, Tunick stated that you may’t overthink the method. “I used to be in a position to inform an excellent deal, not solely from the precise notes however from the best way he performed them,” he added, “the best way he phrased, the best way he attacked a chord.” He described the transformation as, greater than something, “Dionysian.” At its fullest, the association on Broadway now, the “Sweeney” rating abounds in colourful prospers and bone-rattling horror, the fluttering within the winds in a single track as delicate because the low brasses are chilling in the beginning of “Epiphany.”
If “Sweeney” displays a worldview, a reasonably dismal one, that speaks to America solely allegorically, a extra direct view of the nation emerges in later works. “Merrily” feedback obliquely on the interval of historical past it covers, with the space-age promise of Sputnik giving method to cynical neoliberalism. And American themes are much more overt within the exhibits that introduced Sondheim again along with John Weidman, the e-book author of “Pacific Overtures”: “Assassins” (1990) and “Street Present,” a troubled musical that went by way of a number of revisions and titles earlier than premiering in its closing kind in 2008. Each exhibits are flawed — “Street Present” structurally, and “Assassins” for its disturbing pageant of psychological sickness — however mirror the promise and tragedy of the American dream.
“Assassins” goes as far as to suggest “One other Nationwide Anthem,” which reads as a litany of disenfranchisement from a solid of characters who all really feel let down by a system that was imagined to work for them; it’s not removed from the complaints that fueled mistrust of presidency at present and the rise of Donald J. Trump.
Extra barbed but is “Right here We Are,” in its sendup of elitism and the privilege of each apathy and revolt. For higher and worse, the rating has a valedictory spirit, recalling earlier work with out quoting it precisely, and the lyrics comprise satirical observations that wouldn’t be misplaced in “Firm.”
My technology of theater followers got here of age loving “Into the Woods,” which, due to its enduring reputation as theater for youngsters, will stay onstage far into the longer term. However the Sondheim works almost certainly to final, from a purely musical perspective, are those who least readily present their age, and occur to be classical-leaning and postmodern: “Follies” is timelessly Broadway; “A Little Evening Music,” universally elegant; “Sweeney,” perennially efficient.
Gemignani known as “Sweeney” Sondheim’s “Porgy and Bess.” Like that present, it has performed in Broadway theaters and opera homes alike. And like that present, it’s the masterpiece of an excellent American composer.
