Farewell to Stephen Sondheim

His legacy is one that will be debated and argued over as long as people care about musical theatre.

No artist since George Balanchine has so entirely dominated an art form as Sondheim has his.

Photograph from Hulton Archive / Corbis / Getty

Stephen Sondheim made his last public appearance at the first preview of the revival of “Company,” his 1970 classic, last Monday night, the fifteenth of November. Ninety-one, and a little slowed but not visibly ailing, Sondheim was greeted by the Broadway audience, as he took his seat, in the left orchestra, with an emotional intensity that was tidal in its ferocity and duration. The emotion was doubled, perhaps tripled, by the relief at Broadway’s returning to life at all—it was, without exception, the most overwhelming tribute that I have ever experienced in the theatre. Now that moment is sealed as history, since Sondheim would die less than two weeks later, on Friday the twenty-sixth, at his house in Connecticut.

No artist since George Balanchine had so entirely dominated an art form as Sondheim had his. It was a truth of which he was ruefully aware, writing, in a song called, caustically, “God,” “Still you have to have something to believe in / Some things you appropriate / Emulate / Overrate / Might as well be Stephen.” A generation of musical-theatre artists were defined by their relationship to him—some to a point almost self-destructive, measuring themselves against the Druid of Turtle Bay in ways that he didn’t exactly welcome but couldn’t exactly prevent. Adam Guettel, the brilliant composer of “The Light in the Piazza”—and, as Richard Rodgers’s grandson, hardly innocent of dominant theatrical figures—recalls having Sondheim come to see an early performance of the show in 2007, and how everyone’s eyes fixated on the back of Sondheim’s head, just to try to discern, by its movements, the oracular verdict. (It was, Guettel recalls, a happy and nimble neck, until a second-act violation of the fourth wall offended Sondheim’s sense of story decorum, and all hell broke loose around the collar.)

Yet his was a late-arriving legend, hard won from a resistant Broadway commercial culture; unlike Balanchine’s art form, Sondheim’s counted box-office, and labelled hits and flops irrevocably. Sondheim was perhaps more aware of the commercial uncertainties of his own work than his worshippers quite knew or wanted. (Once, in conversation, he asserted to me the truth that a musical’s destiny is determined by its first ten minutes, which lay out the evening’s rules for the audience. Well, I asked impertinently, what about “Follies,” whose first ten minutes are notably knotty? “Yes,” he snapped back, not entirely good-naturedly. “And ‘Follies’ has never made a penny back to any of its investors.”)

The lineaments of Sondheim’s ascent are part of musical-theatre legend: how he was rescued from a troubled childhood—his mother once wrote him a cheerily confidential letter saying that she regretted ever having given birth to him—by the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a near neighbor in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who taught him the professional rudiments of musical-theatre construction and the human possibilities of a warmer heart. Relegated by his obvious dexterity to be a mere lyricist, Sondheim had to fight to be taken seriously as a composer. It was a hard climb, assisted, as all such are, by perseverance, and the occasional orneriness of those who refuse to be nice at the expense of their own talent.

When this writer first encountered Sondheim’s work at length—outside the inevitable collision with the lyrics to “West Side Story,” at which he usually winced (“I feel pretty and witty and bright,” sung by a Puerto Rican teen-ager?)—it was in the 1977 London revue “Side by Side by Sondheim.” Sondheim was a cult taste, brought forward by English discernment against the run of American favor. Before “Sweeney Todd” or “Into the Woods,” Sondheim’s fame rested on the equivocal success of “Company,” the art-house shine of “Follies,” and the perfect romantic roundelay of “A Little Night Music.”

Yet the revue was one of the great revelations of a lifetime—and not for the “sophistication” alone, the dazzling casual linguistic virtuosity, exemplified by throwaways, such as the bridge of “Uptown Downtown,” about a woman divided between her two identities: “She sits at the Ritz with her splits of Mumm’s / And starts to pine for a stein with her village chums, / But with a Schlitz in her mitts down at Fitzroy’s Bar, / She thinks of the Ritz, oh it’s so schizo.” No, even that virtuosity could not obscure the more important side of Sondheim, the depth and wonder and empathy of his articulate passions. Though he wrote few mating calls of the sort that dominate pop songwriting, no songwriter—not Rodgers, not Schubert—has ever written so many great songs of longing and wanting, from “Too Many Mornings,” in “Follies,” the song of a man rediscovering a decades-lost love, to “Loving You,” from “Passion,” the anthem of a psycho stalker made humanly plausible. Sondheim was accused by some critics of being merely “sour,” and nothing dates so fast as sourness—if that had been what Sondheim counted on, he would have passed into history along with other cynics. Wits who remain famed for wit, from Oscar Wilde to Dorothy Parker, are rarely cynical; just the opposite, they come to us shining with faith and hope, but are too smart to pretend that it’s been rewarded. Sondheim, similarly, was never really sour. He was, instead, consistently bittersweet, like the best, and darkest, dark chocolate.

Sondheim could be ferociously ornery with performers, and God knows with critics. He once wrote a memorable no-thank-you note about a singer who was too unsubtle for his songs: “She screws up the lyrics royally, she even sings the wrong tune. . . . You call it sprightly for her not to change her tune. I call it lazy and selfish. . . . I told you I’d be candid. Actually I’m being kind.” He noted in an e-mail that another singer “was so off-pitch that in order to keep my cool in public I had to pretend to myself that I was at some peaceful blue Fiji lagoon, the sun setting and squads of flamingos gracefully flapping around.” (John Mulaney captured that Sondheimian face in a hilarious impersonation in a “Documentary Now!” parody.) In a world gone vanilla-bland, there was something bracing about his orneriness, and it was meaningfully varied by the care and attentiveness—hundreds of e-mails, countless notes, hard and soft—to performers he thought worthy of his work, or just worthy in their own. Toward the end of his life, particularly, he seemed to have beaten down his demons, and his exchanges with younger performers and composers, or even, occasionally, with those horrible critics, were appreciative and funny, with ornery a mere bracing savory flavor among the sweets.

His legacy is one that will be debated and argued over as long as people care about musical theatre. John Lahr, for years the theatre critic of this magazine, was one of the few to offer heresy about the Church of Sondheim: “Sondheim spoke to the disenchantment of the times,” he wrote, “and his approach turned him not so much into a celebrity as a theology.” It is possible to worship Sondheim just shy of idolatry and not tip over. There is a half-silenced school of thought that almost wishes Sondheim had been adopted by Larry Hart rather than Oscar Hammerstein—he never quite outgrew the older man’s taste for greeting-card uplift and fortifying sentiments. Songs like “Children Will Listen” and “No One Is Alone,” however moving when well sung, may come to be seen as the “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” of our time. (That is not meant as praise.) The first act of “Sunday in the Park with George,” achieved with James Lapine, may be the single best thing in American musical theatre; the second act, despite strenuous efforts, is almost unsalvageable. And, like Balanchine’s edicts of abstraction, Sondheim’s “No!”s—no off rhymes, no songs for their own sake, no mere lists, no self-conscious wit of the Porter-Hart kind—were both empowering and limiting. Empowering because they gave shape and high seriousness to an art form too often patronized; limiting because they reshaped musical theatre to a narrowly specific rule and may have squeezed some of the joy and juice out of it in doing so.

But these are the petty cavils of petty minds—or the posterior hesitations of critics afraid to be as fearless in feeling as an artist must be. If Sondheim was, perhaps, a throwback, or the last in the line of the Rodgerses and Frank Loessers, those songwriters who crossed all lines to make both art and entertainment into a kind of commanding middlebrow form, in other ways he was very much an artist of his own time. I once made the case for him—or, rather, at him—at what was doubtless unwelcome length, that there was a real kinship between what he had accomplished and what Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan had pursued around the same time. He was genuinely bewildered, or even exasperated, by the argument, unable to see any real connection between their meandering, often anti-dramatic soliloquies and his tightly organized, character- and scene-driven theatricality.

And yet a kind of Devil’s Theory case may be made, that it was Sondheim who was the most personal, the most truly confessional, of all the great American songwriters. For all that Sondheim spoke only of character and scene and story, when we listen to his music what we hear is not characters, not scenes, but a long, unwinding, timeless soliloquy, charting a psyche at once unimaginably large-souled and thwarted, with sensitivity and guardedness combined—a wounded talent reaching out beyond itself for love and meaning and, above all, for connection.

Though in conversation Sondheim denied the confessional aspect of his work with a strenuousness that suggests at least its partial truth, there is, really, one great obsessive Sondheim song, varied and repeated. Sometimes that song is called “Being Alive” or “Finishing the Hat,” sometimes “Anyone Can Whistle” or, even, his one hit—“Send in the Clowns.” All are songs of isolated artists of unlimited sensitivity and ambivalent purpose reaching out—too late, too often—for company, for connection, for love outside the window, while ruefully knowing that only the work of hats matters. When, on this first sad Saturday morning after his passing, we listen again (and again) to Sondheim’s music, we do not hear his craft or his characters. We hear Steve Sondheim, and we sing, and mourn, the missing man. From American poet-singers, Walt Whitman insisted, we want a song that belongs to the poet and to no one else. Sondheim’s is and does and always will.


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