Biography Of Stephen Sondheim Essay, Research Paper

Stephen Sondheim – Biography

Stephen Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, the son of a wealthy New

York dress manufacturer. But, when his parents divorced, his mother

moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania and young Stephen found himself

in the right place at the right time. A neighbour of his mother’s,

Oscar Hammerstein II, was working on a new musical called Oklahoma!

and it didn’t take long for the adolescent boy to realise that he,

too, was intrigued by musical theatre. Although he subsequently

studied composition with Milton Babbitt, he chose to apply what he

learned in the all-or-nothing commercial hothouse of Broadway. Like

Hammerstein, he has written the occasional pop song (with Jule Styne

for Tony Bennett) and dabbled in films (Stavisky, Reds, Dick Tracy),

but, like Hammerstein, he has always come back to the theatre.

His initial success came as a somewhat reluctant lyricist to

Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story (1957) and Jule Styne on Gypsy

(1959). Exciting and adventurous as those shows were in their day,

and for all their enduring popularity, Sondheim’s philosophy since

is encapsulated in one of his song titles: “I Never Do Anything

Twice”. His first score as composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing

Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962) – a show so funny few people

spotted how experimental it was: it’s still the only successful

musical farce. In the following three decades, critics detected a

Sondheim style – a fondness for the harmonic language of Ravel and

Debussy; a reliance on vamps and skewed harmonies to destabilise the

melody; a tendency to densely literate lyrics. But, all that said,

it’s the versatility that still impresses: you couldn’t swap a song

from the exuberantly explosive pit-band score of Anyone Can Whistle

(1964) with one of the Orientally influenced musical scenes in

Pacific Overtures (1976); you couldn’t mistake the neurotic pop

score of Company (1970) for the elegantly ever-waltzing A Little

Night Music (1973).

Sondheim hit his stride in the Seventies, forming a unique

partnership of hyphenates with Hal Prince: a composer-lyricist and a

producer-director working together to re-invent the musical. Some

were plotless (Company), some characterless (Pacific Overtures), one

went backwards (Merrily We Roll Along). But, as his onetime

choreographer Michael Bennett put it, before you can break the

rules, you have to know what they are – and Sondheim knows America’s

cultural heritage better then anybody. Follies (1971) is an

affectionate and precise pastiche of Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Dorothy

Fields, Yip Harburg … Even as he seemed to be turning his back on

that great tradition, he was also a glorious summation of it.

With Sweeney Todd (1979), the Prince/Sondheim collaboration reached

its apogee, blurring the distinctions between lyrics and dialogue,

songs and underscoring, and combining a complex plot with operatic

emotions to create a unique musical thriller. But their next show,

Merrily We Roll Along (1981), flopped, and the two men went their

separate ways. Sondheim turned to the author and director James

Lapine for Sunday In The Park With George (1984), a work that seemed

at times an autobiographical reflection on the problems of making

art in a commercial environment. His most recent shows illustrate

one of his greatest strengths, his ability to write against audience

expectations of the subject: for Into The Woods (1987), he gave such

familiar nursery figures as Cinderella and Red Riding Hood complex

extended numbers; for the eponymous anti-heroes of Assassins (1990),

he wrote some of his most affecting, straightforward music, reaching

back beyond Berlin to barbershop and Stephen Foster, and almost to

our own time with an ironic parody of the Carpenters. Not everyone

feels comfortable watching Lee Harvey Oswald singing along with John

Wilkes Booth, but, in stretching the possibilities of the musical,

Sondheim is seeking to prove that the form has just as wide a range

as the straight play. And for that we should all be grateful.