Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim was the greatest composer-lyricist in the history of musical theatre — a claim that is as close to unanimous critical consensus as any judgment in the performing arts. Over a career spanning six decades, he transformed the Broadway musical from a form of popular entertainment into a medium capable of genuine artistic achievement, creating works whose structural daring, psychological depth, and lyrical brilliance have no precedent and no real successor. His musicals — Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, Passion — are the supreme achievements of the American musical stage, and his lyrics, with their intricate internal rhymes, their emotional precision, and their intellectual range, constitute one of the great bodies of verse in the English language.

The Apprenticeship

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born in New York City in 1930. His parents’ marriage was unhappy, and after their divorce when he was ten, his mother became emotionally abusive — a wound that Sondheim acknowledged shaped the persistent themes of emotional isolation and the difficulty of human connection that run through his work.

The transformative event of his life was his friendship, beginning at fifteen, with Oscar Hammerstein II, who became a surrogate father and mentor. Hammerstein taught Sondheim the craft of musical theatre systematically — assigning him exercises in writing a musical based on a good play, a flawed play, a non-dramatic source, and an original — and this rigorous apprenticeship gave Sondheim’s work its technical foundation.

He attended Williams College, where he studied music with Robert Barrow, and won a fellowship to study with Milton Babbitt, the serialist composer, whose rigorous, mathematical approach to composition left a permanent mark on Sondheim’s musical language.

West Side Story and Gypsy

Sondheim’s Broadway career began with two masterpieces by other people. He wrote the lyrics for West Side Story (1957, music by Leonard Bernstein, book by Arthur Laurents) and Gypsy (1959, music by Jule Styne, book by Laurents). Both were landmarks of the American musical, and Sondheim’s lyrics for them — particularly “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Some People” — were already among the best ever written for the stage. But Sondheim wanted to write his own music, and the second phase of his career began with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), his first show as composer-lyricist.

The Hal Prince Musicals

The collaboration with director Harold Prince produced the series of musicals that redefined the form. Company (1970) was a plotless, thematically organised exploration of marriage and urban loneliness. Follies (1971) was a memory play set in a crumbling theatre, interweaving present-day disillusionment with the ghosts of youthful idealism. A Little Night Music (1973) — the score written entirely in waltz time — was an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night that produced “Send in the Clowns,” Sondheim’s only popular hit. Pacific Overtures (1976) retold the opening of Japan to the West using Kabuki theatrical conventions. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) was a grand guignol operatic thriller that many consider Sondheim’s greatest score.

The Later Masterpieces

Sunday in the Park with George (1984) was a meditation on art and creation, inspired by Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The first act depicted Seurat creating the painting; the second jumped to the present day and examined the compromises and doubts of artistic life. The show won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Into the Woods (1987) interleaved several Grimm fairy tales — Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel — into a narrative about the consequences of getting what you wish for. Assassins (1990) examined the figures who have attempted to assassinate American presidents, treating them as a dark chorus of American aspiration and grievance. Passion (1994), based on an Italian film, was a chamber musical about obsessive love.

The Books

Finishing the Hat (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat (2011) were Sondheim’s collected lyrics with extensive annotations — two volumes that constitute the most detailed, most honest, and most instructive account of the lyricist’s craft ever published. The annotations are candid, self-critical, opinionated, and frequently brilliant, and the books are indispensable for anyone interested in musical theatre or the art of writing for the stage.

Collecting Sondheim

Finishing the Hat (Knopf, 2010) and Look, I Made a Hat (Knopf, 2011) are the primary book-collecting targets. Published librettos — particularly Sweeney Todd (Dodd, Mead, 1979), Sunday in the Park with George (Dodd, Mead, 1986), and Into the Woods (Theatre Communications Group, 1989) — are collected. Original cast recordings on vinyl are a separate and active collecting area. Signed Sondheim material — programmes, librettos, scores — is highly sought.