Sondheim was refined as gold, a brooding lynx

This week, I watched pianist Stephen Hough coax Debussy himself from his piano with no trace of personal ego between composer and artist. I had just heard the news about Sondheim and I thought back to a rehearsal of Sweeney Todd in a BBC studio in Golders Green. When the actor/singer — because it was always best that way with Sondheim — sang the first three notes of ‘Joanna’, I felt my throat close and tears well up. His music cut through reason. It was simply channelling the art.

In a world full of screaming musical hype, where personal angst masquerades as true emotion, he was as refined as gold.

There is the actor’s actor — that would have been the great Paul Schofield — and the director’s director, probably David Lean. The actor/ director/ lyricist and composer’s composer would be Sondheim.

The phrase ‘ahead of his time’ could have been coined for him. Most of the obituaries have led with West Side Story, which Sondheim long ago dismissed as a young man’s folly. The film remake by Spielberg is about to be released.

It will be as jaw- dropping now as it was to a 12-year-old girl in Hull, leaping down the landing in peach candlewick to become Anita, who was “going to get her kicks tonight”. Gee Officer Krupke was as universal by the Humber as it was on the Upper West Side.

And when Mama Rose in Jule Styne/Sondheim’s Gypsy howled, “Everything’s coming up Rose — for Me! For Me, for Meee!” she sang for every thwarted ambition in my unlived life.

Sondheim had a reputation for being cynical. He had reason to be. He had more sourly critical reviews in his life, more snide media asides and more half-empty, out-of-town theatres than any living composer, yet every actor worth their salt would take the smallest role, or break their back to get into Sunday In The Park With George in a pub theatre or in Drury Lane, for the sheer theatricality, for the tunes which grew on you with every hearing, for the erudite wit of the lyrics. We wanted to do it for the ensemble feeling he wove into the story and for the sub-text. Oh, the sub-text! That which makes a layered performance possible, and which is missing from so much modern play-writing.

He could be demanding and difficult and thoughtless — he was a star for 70 of his 91 years. Compared to roaring lions like Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein, he was a brooding lynx.

He was born into a well-to-do Jewish family, the only son of a frustrated and distant mother who could not accept her son’s homosexuality. She once wrote him a letter saying she regretted nothing except giving birth to him.

Unsurprisingly, he found personal relationships problematic. He preferred puzzles to passion and wrote the cryptic ones for the New Yorker for years.

The popular musical Company, about a bachelor who never committed to a relationship, was often presumed to be autobiographical. But he always refuted claims that his work was based on his own life. His first real relationship happened in his 60th year, but his knowledge of love, personified in the musical Passion and his adaptation of Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night into A Little Night Music alone, showed how nuanced was his view of it.

His most-performed songs, ‘Here’s to the Ladies who Lunch’ and ‘Send in the Clowns’, were recorded by everyone who could find a microphone and some who shouldn’t have.

I once visited his bandbox house in Roxbury in the 1990s with his dear friend Julia McKenzie and marvelled at the red English phone box — I had one myself so we compared numbers — and the collection of complex ship’s furniture. A table unlocked into a chair, a cupboard into a desk. It struck me then that even his furniture had internal rhymes.

Ten years later, I played Madame Armfeldt in Trevor Nunn’s gorgeous revival of A Little Night Music and never quite got over my nightly fear of muddling the drily sophisticated lyrics of ‘Liasons’.

Don Black, our own fabled lyricist, told me that his greatest pleasure was to sit down with the latest Sondheim show and listen to every word of every song and marvel.

Millie Martin told me that she, Julia and David Kernan asked his permission to compile the best of his songs into a revue, ‘Side by Side By Sondheim’.

“I can’t think of anything more boring.”, he said.

He came for three days, stayed three weeks and was in the wings smiling on their last night.

He virtually wrote his own epitaph:

Thanks for everything we did,

Everything that’s past,

Everything that’s over

Too fast.

None of it will last:

Everything that’s here and now and us together!

It was marvellous to know you

And it’s never really through.

Crazy business this, this life we live in