The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 2GN 5
NEWS
one score Prince got completely wrong.
The wonderful revival directed by Maria
Friedman in London in 2012 proved that
the score was one of Sondheim’s best.
Who can forget the plaintive Not a Day
Goes By.
The first musical for which Sondheim
wrote both music and lyrics was A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
in 1962. It was the only one he wrote that
did not break boundaries, but opened
with what became one of his best known
songs, Comedy Tonight.
After that he only wrote lyrics for
another composer once more: Do I Hear
a Waltz? by Richard Rodgers. Sondheim
didn’t click with the titan Rodgers. He
said of Rodgers and Hammerstein that
Oscar Hammerstein was a man of limited
talent but infinite soul; with Rodgers it
was the other way round.Sondheim recently wrote that every
musical he wrote had to challenge him to
the point of self-doubt in his ability. We
see this in his choice of subjects, culmi-
nating in perhaps his most daring, Assas-
sins, which was written from the per-
spective of the men and women who
assassinated American presidents — or at
least tried to.
However, the challenge he set himself
that I, as a composer, find most musically
extraordinary is A Little Night Music. It is
famously written entirely in 3/4 time.
That he succeeded in composing a work
that carries away an audience despite the
musical puzzle he set himself is one of the
most remarkable achievements in musi-
cal theatre history.
Not only that, it introduced his best
known song, Send in the Clowns, which
won song of the year at the Grammys in- For me, Follies, A Little Night Music
and Pacific Overtures on Broadway were
that rare thing that emerges when the
production and the score are as one.
I’ll never forget the haunting ghostly
showgirls in Follies or the seamlessly
moving trees that transported audiences
to the Swedish birch woods of Night
Music. Sometimes the trees seemed to
waltz as one with the score.
These Sondheim/Prince collabora-
tions produced some of the finest work
Broadway has seen but it is Sondheim’s
scores that endure. He was one of the
very few truly great composer/lyricists. I
can think of only four others: Cole Porter,
Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Noël
Coward.
I met Sondheim many times but I
didn’t know him well. I got vaguely close
to collaborating with him. In the summer
ANDREW
LLOYD WEBBER
Stephen Sondheim was a genius. Since
the golden era of Rodgers and Hammer-
stein nobody has come near what he
achieved in American musical theatre.
Because he wrote at the start of his
career the lyrics for two classic musicals,
Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story —
arguably the greatest musical of all time —
and Jule Styne’s Gipsy, some think of the
Broadway giant, who died last week at his
home in Connecticut at the age of 91, as
primarily a lyricist.
Although his lyrics are peerless,
Sondheim regarded himself first and
foremost as a composer. His scores for
Company, Follies, A Little Night Music
and Sweeney Todd alone cement his
name in Broadway history, even if he
hadn’t written the lyrics.
What these shows have in common is
that they were originally directed by Hal
Prince. Sondheim’s professional rela-
tionship with him goes back to West Side
Story, which Prince produced.
The show was so controversial in 1958
that it won only two Tony awards for
choreography and scenic design. Hal told
me something that seems extraordinary:
every night a big percentage of the audi-
ence walked out.
Although today we rightly regard West
Side Story as a masterpiece, the fact that it
was so far ahead of its time says a lot
about the Sondheim/Prince collabora-
tion, which was to lead to six musicals:
Company, Follies, A Little Night Music,
Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd and Mer-
rily We Roll Along, all groundbreaking in
different ways.
Merrily, which told the story back-
wards and was based on the 1934 play by
George Kaufman and Moss Hart, was theEER
West Side Story, left, was Stephen Sondheim’s first foray on Broadway and became one of his best-loved musicals alongside Sweeney Todd, which starred Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel in LondonSILVER SCREEN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; ALASTAIR MUIR/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKof 1979 we had lunch, where I talked
about a one-act musical about the rivalry
between the Italian composers Giacomo
Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, who
raced each other to bring La bohème to
the operatic stage. Sondheim thought a
show about rival composers might be
very intriguing. But that lunch was as far
as it went.
Sondheim was a stickler for lyrics sit-
ting in the right way on a melody. He
would quote against himself that the first
line in Somewhere (There’s a Place for Us)
was a bad line because the word “a” sat
on the highest musical note of the
phrase.
All I can say is that I would have been
ecstatic with that lyric.
Farewell Steve. There will be a place
for you for as long as there is musical
theatre.Good night to a musical genius
who carried us away on stage
Stephen Sondheim’s legacy of songs and shows will live on — even if our collaboration never quite took off
GRAHAM MORRIS/EVENING STANDARD/GETTY IMAGES; RON SACHS/CNP/SPLASH NEWSStephen Sondheim reshaped musical history, recording with Elizabeth Taylor, left, in 1976 and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack ObamaFIVE GREAT
LONG SONGS
Kraftwerk
Autobahn (1975) 22:
The Germans’ biggest US
hit — once it was edited
down to 3:28.
The Velvet Underground
Sister Ray (1968) 17:
A song that apparently
bored the engineer so
much he fled the studio.
David Bowie Station to
Station (1976) 10:
Bowie spread himself on
this track but fans
hugely enjoyed the ride.
The Stone Roses
Fools Gold (1989) 9:
Fans consider the 12in
version of this classic far
superior to the 7in edit.
Queen Bohemian
Rhapsody (1975) 5:
Relatively modest in
length, but nonetheless
considered absurdly
overblown at the time.Swift says
bye-bye to
American
Pie’s long
record
In almost 50 years, American
Pie’s status as the longest
song to reach No 1 on the
US singles chart had rarely
looked more unassailable.
Everything about the
eight-minute, 42-second epic
by Don McLean evoked the
past: from its subject, the 1959
plane crash that killed Buddy
Holly on “the day the music
died”, to the antiquated
technology that meant it had
to be split in two to fit on both
sides of a 7in vinyl single on its
release in 1971.
Then, last week, in an era
of supposedly dwindling
attention spans when
streaming is incentivising
shorter recordings, an even
longer song by Taylor Swift
made its debut at the top of
the Billboard Hot 100 and
snatched the record away.Dave FawbertAll Too Well (Taylor’s
Version) is an extended ten-
minute, 13-second recording
of a five-minute track from
Swift’s 2012 album Red. It
wasn’t even picked as a single
first time round but slowly
gained cult status among her
followers before finally
getting its moment in the sun
nine years later, as part of the
singer’s campaign to rerecord
her earlier works to regain
control of her back catalogue.
The track was streamed
54.5 million times by US
listeners in the week after its
release on November 12. As
well as outlasting American
Pie by over a minute, All Too
Well eclipses the longest song
to have hit the summit of the
UK singles’ chart: Oasis’s 1998
single All Around the World,
clocking in at nine minutes
and 38 seconds. Adam Faith’s
1959 single What Do You
Want? remains the shortest
song to top the UK charts, at
1 minute and 35 seconds. You
could listen to it six and a half
times in the duration of one
spin of Swift’s opus.Swift has dedicated fans