Stephen Sondheim, Musical Theater Giant, Dies at 91 – Vanity Fair
Stephen Sondheim, the dextrous composer and lyricist of musicals including Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd, died Friday at the age of 91, the New York Times reports. His death was confirmed by F. Richard Pappas, Sondheim’s lawyer and friend, who said that Sondheim died suddenly.
Sondheim was the elder statesman of American theater, but he always stood outside of its trends. An iconoclast whose vital music tested preconceived notions about what belonged on stage, he created songs for a murderous barber, a neurotic neo-Impressionist, and a vengeful witch. His work always teemed with moral ambiguity, never providing the easy answers some looked for in musicals.
But as much as Sondheim came to carve an unprecedented path, he owed his career to the greats that came before him—one in particular. He was born in 1930 in New York to a designer and a dress manufacturer. Sondheim’s parents divorced when he was 10, and his artistic life truly began when he became acquainted with Oscar Hammerstein, who lived nearby in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sondheim soon became a satellite member of the Hammerstein family, with its patriarch, the lyricist of shows like like Oklahoma! and South Pacific, acting as a “surrogate father” to him, in Sondheim’s own words.
In interviews, Sondheim often relayed the story of when he asked Hammerstein for feedback on a musical he had written for school when he was 15. Sondheim asked his mentor to treat him as he would anyone else—and Hammerstein’s assessment was brutal. “He started right from the first stage direction—and I’ve often said, at the risk of hyperbole, that I probably learned more about writing songs that afternoon than I learned the rest of my life,” Sondheim told The Paris Review in 1997.
Sondheim initially had designs to be a mathematician, but he instead studied music at Williams College, graduating in 1950. One of his early jobs was in television, writing for the ghost comedy Topper. Though he yearned to write musicals, when the opportunity to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story came along, Sondheim was initially reluctant; Bernstein was writing the music, and Sondheim didn’t want to be saddled with the label of lyricist. It was Hammerstein who convinced him not to pass up the gig.
Sondheim was similarly disappointed when his West Side triumph was followed by another team-up, this time with composer Jule Styne for Gypsy, the story of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her overbearing mother. (Star Ethel Merman was worried about an untested writer leading her into a flop.) While working on the show, he and Styne previewed some of its work-in-progress songs for Cole Porter. The Broadway legend was depressed at the time; Merman, a close friend of Porter’s, believed the new material might cheer him up. It did.
In his book Finishing The Hat, Sondheim recalled a moment of triumph: while performing “Together, Wherever We Go,” he heard a “gasp of delight” from Porter. What had done it? The quadruple rhyme in the phrase, “No fits no fights no feuds and no egos—Amigos! Together.” That’s how shar Sondheim was: he could impress even the man who wrote, “do do that voodoo that you do so well.”
It wasn’t until 1962 that Sondheim was credited for writing both music and lyrics in a major musical—for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a Zero Mostel vehicle that draws from Plautus to tell the story of the slave Pseudolus. As Sondheim later told The Telegraph, though, he would not really “hear [his] own voice loud and clear” in his work until 1970’s Company. The groundbreaking show, with a book by George Furth, bucked storytelling conventions to present the anxieties of Bobby, an unmarried thirtysomething living in New York, as a revue-like series of of interactions with his coupled-up friends. By Sondheim’s own telling, Company ”was the first Broadway musical whose defining quality was neither satire nor sentiment, but irony.”