Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical. He received numerous accolades, including eight Tony Awards, an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, five Olivier Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1982 and awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Sondheim was mentored at an early age by Oscar Hammerstein II and later frequently collaborated with Harold Prince and James Lapine. His Broadway musicals tackle themes that range beyond the genre's traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics are characterized by their complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence.
Sondheim began his career by writing the lyrics for both West Side Story and Gypsy. He transitioned to writing both music and lyrics, including for five works that earned Tony Awards for Best Musical: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Passion. He is also known for Follies, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Assassins.
Theaters are named after him both on Broadway and in the West End of London. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Sooner or Later" from Dick Tracy. Many of his works have been adapted for film, including West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Into the Woods, and West Side Story. He published three books, including two involving his collected lyrics.
Early life and education
Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, into a Jewish family in New York City, the son of Etta Janet and Herbert Sondheim. His paternal grandparents, Isaac and Rosa, were German Jews, and his maternal grandparents, Joseph and Bessie, were Lithuanian Jews from Vilnius. His father manufactured dresses designed by his mother. Sondheim grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he began taking piano lessons at age 7. After his parents divorced, he lived on a farm near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The only child of affluent parents living in the San Remo at 145 Central Park West, he was described in Meryle Secrest's biography Stephen Sondheim: A Life as an isolated, emotionally neglected child. When he lived in New York City, Sondheim attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. He spent several summers at Camp Androscoggin, where Tom Lehrer was a counselor.His mother sent him to New York Military Academy in 1940. From 1942 to 1947, he attended George School, a private Quaker preparatory school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he wrote his first musical, By George, in 1946. After graduating from high school, Sondheim attended Williams College, where he initially majored in mathematics but switched to music after taking a music elective during his first year. During his time at Williams, he participated in Cap & Bells, the college's student-run theater group, and wrote his first two full musicals. Sondheim graduated magna cum laude in 1950, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and received the Hubbard Hutchinson Prize, which included a two-year fellowship to study music.
Sondheim traced his interest in musical theater to Very Warm for May, a Broadway musical he saw when he was nine. "The curtain went up and revealed a piano", Sondheim recalled. "A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling."
Sondheim detested his mother, who was said to be psychologically abusive and to have projected her anger from her failed marriage onto her son: "When my father left her, she substituted me for him. And she used me the way she used him, to come on to and to berate, beat up on, you see. What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time." She once wrote him a letter saying that the only regret she ever had was giving birth to him. When she died in 1992, Sondheim did not attend her funeral. He had been estranged from her for nearly 20 years.
Mentorship by Oscar Hammerstein II
When Sondheim was about ten years old, he formed a close friendship with James Hammerstein, son of lyricist and playwright Oscar Hammerstein II, who were neighbors in Bucks County. The elder Hammerstein became Sondheim's surrogate father, influencing him profoundly and developing his love of musical theater. Sondheim met Hal Prince, who later directed many of his shows, at the opening of South Pacific, Hammerstein's musical with Richard Rodgers. The comic musical Sondheim wrote at George School, By George, was a success among his peers and buoyed his self-esteem. When he asked Hammerstein to evaluate it as though he had no knowledge of its author, he said it was the worst thing he had ever seen: "But if you want to know why it's terrible, I'll tell you." They spent the rest of the day going over the musical, and Sondheim later said, "In that afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime."Hammerstein designed a course of sorts for Sondheim on constructing a musical. He had the young composer write four musicals, each with one of the following conditions:
- Based on a play he admired; Sondheim chose George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly's Beggar on Horseback
- Based on a play he liked but thought flawed; Sondheim chose Maxwell Anderson's High Tor
- Based on an existing novel or short story not previously dramatized, which became his unfinished version of Mary Poppins
- An original, which became Climb High
Hammerstein's death
Hammerstein died of stomach cancer on August 23, 1960, aged 65. Sondheim later recalled that Hammerstein had given him a portrait of himself. Sondheim asked him to inscribe it, and said later of the request that it was "weird... it's like asking your father to inscribe something." Reading the inscription choked up the composer, who said, "That describes Oscar better than anything I could say."
Education and early career
Sondheim began attending Williams College, a liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts, whose theater program attracted him. His first teacher there was Robert Barrow:everybody hated him because he was very dry, and I thought he was wonderful because he was very dry. And Barrow made me realize that all my romantic views of art were nonsense. I had always thought an angel came down and sat on your shoulder and whispered in your ear "dah-dah-dah-DUM." It never occurred to me that art was something worked out. And suddenly it was skies opening up. As soon as you find out what a leading tone is, you think, Oh my God. What a diatonic scale is—Oh my God! The logic of it. And, of course, what that meant to me was: Well, I can do that. Because you just don't know. You think it's a talent, you think you're born with this thing. What I've found out and what I believed is that everybody is talented. It's just that some people get it developed and some don't.
The composer told Meryle Secrest: "I just wanted to study composition, theory, and harmony without the attendant musicology that comes in graduate school. But I knew I wanted to write for the theater, so I wanted someone who did not disdain theater music." Barrow suggested that Sondheim study with Milton Babbitt, whom Sondheim called "a frustrated show composer" with whom he formed "a perfect combination". When they met, Babbitt was working on a musical for Mary Martin based on the myth of Helen of Troy. The two met once a week in New York City for four hours. According to Sondheim, they spent the first hour dissecting Rodgers and Hart or George Gershwin or studying Babbitt's favorites. They then proceeded to other forms of music, critiquing them the same way. Fascinated by mathematics, Babbitt and Sondheim studied songs by a variety of composers. Sondheim told Secrest that Kern had the ability "to develop a single motif through tiny variations into a long and never boring line and his maximum development of the minimum of material". He said of Babbitt, "I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery". At Williams, Sondheim wrote a musical adaption of Beggar on Horseback that had three performances. A member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity, he graduated magna cum laude in 1950.
"A few painful years of struggle" followed, when Sondheim auditioned songs, lived in his father's dining room to save money, and spent time in Hollywood writing for the television series Topper. He devoured 1940s and 1950s films, and called cinema his "basic language"; his film knowledge got him through The $64,000 Question contestant tryouts. Sondheim disliked movie musicals, favoring classic dramas such as Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, and A Matter of Life and Death: "Studio directors like Michael Curtiz and Raoul Walsh... were heroes of mine. They went from movie to movie to movie, and every third movie was good and every fifth movie was great. There wasn't any cultural pressure to make art".
At age 22, Sondheim had finished the four shows Hammerstein requested. Screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein's Front Porch in Flatbush, unproduced at the time, was being shopped around by designer and producer Lemuel Ayers. Ayers approached Frank Loesser and another composer; both turned him down. Ayers and Sondheim met as ushers at a wedding, and Ayers commissioned Sondheim for three songs for the show; Julius Epstein flew in from California and hired Sondheim, who worked with him in California for four or five months. After eight auditions for backers, half the money needed was raised. The show, retitled Saturday Night, was intended to open during the 1954–55 Broadway season, but Ayers died of leukemia in his early forties. The production rights transferred to his widow, Shirley, and due to her inexperience the show did not continue as planned; it opened off-Broadway in 2000. Sondheim later said, "I don't have any emotional reaction to Saturday Night at all—except fondness. It's not bad stuff for a 23-year-old. There are some things that embarrass me so much in the lyrics—the missed accents, the obvious jokes. But I decided, leave it. It's my baby pictures. You don't touch up a baby picture—you're a baby!"