90 The Economist December 4th 2021
Obituary Stephen Sondheim
In a townhouseincentralManhattan,ina roomwitha grand pi
ano, lights would often burn all night. The man who sat there
had an air of intense and nervous preoccupation. He would throw
himself back in his chair, twist his neck to interrogate the ceiling,
lean dangerously sideways, arch his arm over his head, as he
strove to link his words to music and his music to words.
To do both things, write lyrics and compose, was rare and
tricky. Music was fun, abstract and inside him; lyrics were a sweat,
though he thought of himself as a playwright first. Combining
them required not inspiration, like some girl twittering on his
shoulder, but patient craft. He had to let the lyrics sit lightly on the
melodic line, bubble and rise, while ensuring that the music made
them shine and sometimes explode. As he worked he was painful
ly aware of his mistake in “West Side Story” (in 1957, when he was
starting out, and the music was Lenny Bernstein’s, not his), of put
ting the indefinite article on the highest note of a phrase in “Some
where”, or failing to notice how long a purple line might embar
rass him afterwards. (For ever, in fact.) Less is more, keep it simple,
he kept reminding himself. Clever rhymes and puns were his
forte, but why were “love” and “life” so nearimpossible to rhyme
with anything? For Stephen Sondheim, working with the English
language he adored was very, very hard.
Nor was it his nature. He was instinctively a mathematician,
sidetracked while still at school by the great lyricist Oscar Ham
merstein, the father of his best friend, who taught him almost all
he knew. Maths was kept for the puzzles and cryptic crosswords he
invented where slowly, link by link, the solution gleamed into
view. By contrast, the 15 musicals he wrote for the American stage,
works that propelled him into the company of Irving Berlin, Cole
Porter and Noël Coward, were studies in disconnection. Though
he might place his characters in ostensibly jovial parties or re
unions, deep emotional fissures soon appeared again.In both “Company” (his breakthrough work, in 1970) and “Fol
lies” (1971), marriages were foundering, but new commitments
were too difficult. “Into the Woods”, a revisiting of classic fairy
tales, delved into the lovehate relationship between parents and
children, one he had vividly known himself. “Sunday in the Park
with George” (1984) explored the competing claims, on the painter
Georges Seurat and George, his strugglingartist greatgrandson,
of the human love each wanted and the art they had to do.
These conflicts meant that the twin Sondheim roles, lyricist
and composer, often sparked against each other. Despair could be
hidden under banter, and malice under gentleness. In “Follies” he
wrote the bitterly witty “Could I leave you?” (“Could I bury my rage/
with a boy half your age/in the grass?/Bet your arse!”) as a grand
waltz; in his cartoonish semiopera “Sweeney Todd” (1979), the de
mon barber crooned the soft, blithe “Pretty Women” as he pre
pared to cut a customer’s throat. Often, too, a Sondheim musical
would fracture time itself, punctuating the action with flashbacks,
as in “Company”, or reversing chronology entirely (“Merrily We
Roll Along”, a disaster). The linear musicals American audiences
had come to expect, ending with a grand chorus number and guy
and girl dazzlingly together, became in his hands messy slices of
life in which nothing had been resolved, nor ever could be.
Audiences therefore tended to leave the theatre baffled. Plenty
walked out. They found him too intellectual, the subjects uncom
fortable and nothing hummable in the flowing, conversational
scores. With the exception of “A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum” (1962), his first foray into Broadway in both
hats, his runs were short. His name could be twisted into the
pleasing anagram, “He penned demon hits”. But his only one (big
though it was) was “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Mu
sic”, a song written mostly as simple questions and again about
disconnection. (“Isn’t it rich?/ Are we a pair? Me here at last on the
ground/You in midair?”) He treated the 32bar torch songs, again
really hard to write, as commentaries or little oneact plays to
move the plot along. If there was a plot.
Lack of popularity did not bother him. He had never set out to
be corporate or commercial; he loathed all that. His only desire
was to experiment, to make himself nervous in new territory and
not do the same thing twice. Among the subjects he threw himself
into were the emergence of Japan (in “Pacific Overtures”, done as a
piece of kabukitheatre) and the killing or attempted killing of
America’s presidents in “Assassins”, staged in a fairground. Vaude
ville and pastiche were strewn around, spiking his work with iro
ny, and he wrote in unfriendly sharp keys just to challenge him
self. “Maverick” was a word he feasted on.
He also saw himself as an outsider: an only child who got the
best marks at school, Jewish, gay, shy. His first experience of mu
sicals was Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” at 15, when the
sight of the villainoutcast Jigger ostracised by the townsfolk re
duced him to tears. He loved collaborating on musicals, notably
with the producer Hal Prince and the writer James Lapine, because
he had found such family feeling nowhere else. Until he was 61, he
lived alone. The work was allconsuming to the end, and his prime
concern was that it should go on being done, in schools, commu
nities, anywhere. Done and done and done.
His only attempt at memoir was a twovolume analysis of all
his musicals. People therefore wondered which of them con
tained the key to him. “Company”, perhaps, where the outsider
Bobby moodily observes his friends’ marriages in an effort to find
happiness himself? Or “Into the Woods”, with its strong echoes of
the analysts’ couches on which he had spent so many hours? Or
“Sunday in the Park with George”, where in the last act George is
counselled in the night park by his greatgrandmother’s ghost:Stop worrying where you’re going/Move on
If you can know where you’re going/You’ve gone
Just keep moving on...nKeep moving onStephen Sondheim, revolutioniser of musical theatre,
died on November 26th, aged 91