Obituary: Stephen Sondheim

But above all, with great musicals like West Side Story and Gypsy, A Little Night Music, Company and Sweeney Todd, he revolutionised the Broadway musical.He introduced unexpected new subjects and a new tone, with music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication. Angela Lansbury, who played the female lead, Mrs Lovett, in Sweeney Todd, said –“We sensed that Steve was breaking new ground that nobody’d ever scratched”. Reviewing Sunday in the Park with George in The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote,“Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine demand that an audience radically change its whole way of looking at the Broadway musical”. Jack Kroll, writing in Newsweek, agreed. “Sondheim’s score is original, even for him. To say that this show breaks new ground is not enough; it also breaks new sky, new water, new flesh and new spirit”.

Leonard Bernstein, who collaborated with Sondheim on his breakthrough musical, West Side Story, praised his “qualities of allusion, of reference to the past or to others, of indirection through irony, through humour, and through the play of words and notes.” Sondheim, he said, offered Broadway audiences something new. Instead of “the phony vitality of musicals”, he helped the musical grow up and find a new voice, a new way of singing about love and relationships. 

Stephen Sondheim was born into an upper middle-class Jewish family in New York in 1930. He once said: “I have lived my whole life in what amounts to twenty square blocks” of midtown Manhattan. He was an only child, the son of Etta Janet née Fox (1897-1992) and Herbert Sondheim (1895–1966). His father manufactured dresses designed by his mother. Sondheim detested her. When she died in 1992 Sondheim did not attend her funeral. He had already been estranged from her for nearly 20 years. 

Sondheim grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, after his parents divorced, in rural Pennsylvania, near the famous songwriter Oscar Hammerstein, who became his surrogate father, influencing him profoundly and developing his love of musical theatre. When as a schoolboy he wrote his first musical, he asked Hammerstein’s opinion. He said it was the worst thing he had ever seen: “But if you want to know why it’s terrible, I’ll tell you”.  They spent the rest of the day going over the musical, and Sondheim later said: “In that afternoon I learned more about song-writing and the musical theatre than most people learn in a lifetime”.

Sondheim was still in his 20s when he wrote the lyrics for his first two musicals, West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959), starring Ethel Merman. The first musical for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), starring Zero Mostel. 

From 1970 he started working with the legendary Broadway producer Hal Prince. Their collaboration over 12 years led to one of the great moments in the history of Broadway, with shows including Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973) and Sweeney Todd (1979). 

In the 1980s and 90s he started working with a new collaborator, James Lapine. Lapine brought a taste for the avant-garde and for a more visually-oriented theatre.Their first collaboration was Sunday in the Park with George (1984), with Sondheim’s music evoking Georges Seurat’s pointillism. In 1987 they wrote Into the Woods, bringing together characters from various Grimm fairy tales. Both shows received ten Tony nominations. Their last collaboration was Passion (1994).  

The 1970s and 80s were hugely creative years for Sondheim. The acclaim and awards poured in. He also received enormous recognition in London where Side by Side by Sondheim (1976) ran for three years. Like Arthur Miller, he had more admirers in Britain than in America. 

I met him when I produced a programme about Sondheim for BBC2 in the 1990s. He was warm, kind and formidably intelligent —“Isaiah Berlin divided the world into Foxes and Hedgehogs and I am a fox, exploring many, many, many, many things”.   

In America, critics and audiences remained divided. Many found his musicals too cerebral and too highbrow. “Over the years my work has been considered cold”, Sondheim acknowledged. “I find that people sometimes mistake sentimentality for sentiment. I believe in sentiment, but not sentimentality”.

Others admired the rhymes and alliteration (“I feel fizzy and funny and fine”), the humour and the staccato phrases (“No ties, small lies. So much, too much”, from Company). Then there were the clever film references. “There’s a chord I kept using throughout, which is sort of a personal joke”, he said of Sweeney Todd, “because it’s a chord that occurred in every Bernard Herrmann score”.  

“It is a body of work that has depth, range and consistency far beyond that of any previous lyric writer for the Broadway theatre”, wrote John S. Wilson, the music critic for The New York Times.

Stephen Sondheim was one of the Jewish songwriters who reinvented the American musical. He brought a darker, more complex tone, very different from the sunny optimism of shows like Oklahoma! Talking about Company, he remarked, “Chekhov once said: “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry”. Most succinct. In the deepest sense, that’s what Company is about”. Sondheim’s musicals are a long way from Annie Get Your Gun. Above all, he was a great songwriter. He will always be remembered for songs like Maria, America, Everything’s Coming Up Roses, Being Alive and Send in the Clowns.

Stephen Sondheim: born March 22, 1930. Died November 26, 2021