![]() This process turned into the unofficial yet fundamental course on which Sondheim learned to write musicals, adapting various plays, working on non-dramatic narrative and creating an original story.Īt 18, Sondheim witnessed the staging of his first student work, All That Glitters – with his own book, music and lyrics. ![]() He wrote a musical called By George, and showed it to Hammerstein, who said it was terrible but talented, and showed him where he had gone wrong. He did not win, though he was highly commended.) At Williams college, Massachusetts, he planned at 16 to major in maths, but a freshman music course inspired him to study that subject instead. (Later he subscribed to the Observer and entered its fiendish Ximenes puzzle contests. In 1990 Sondheim told an audience at the National Theatre: “Most popular music and most show music owes its origins to Ravel.”įrom an early age, he showed his skill at mind games and crosswords, submitting a puzzle to the New York Times at the age of 14. Ravel was one of his early musical discoveries, which he eagerly shared with Hammerstein, giving him a recording of the Piano Trio as a birthday present. Sondheim had started playing the piano by ear from the age of four, before studying the piano and organ sporadically at school. Rosalie Craig, centre, as Bobbie in Stephen Sondheim’s Company by Stephen Sondheim at the Gielgud theatre, London, 2018. During his adolescence, Sondheim would look to Hammerstein as a substitute father. They divorced when Stephen was 10, and he ended up disliking his mother so much that in 1992 he did not go her funeral.įoxy was friends with Hammerstein’s wife, Dorothy, and after the divorce she and Stephen moved to live near the Hammersteins, on a farm in Pennsylvania. His mother, Janet (nee Fox, and known as Foxy), a dress designer, and father, Herbert, a clothing manufacturer, were partners in a New York fashion business. However grownup his themes and coherent his dramas, Sondheim’s ambition to carry through the revolution that Hammerstein had achieved with Oklahoma!, the first musical where songs moved the plot forward and belonged to the character singing them, may have been unrealistic.īorn in New York, Stephen was the only child of a comfortably middle-class family. Who’s That Woman?, The Little Things You Do Together, Liaisons, Someone in a Tree, and Anyone Can Whistle were all good vehicles for singers.īut these numbers are better as out-takes than in their original dramatic contexts. Barbra Streisand took up I’m Still Here from Follies (1971), and The Ladies Who Lunch from Company. The most famous, recorded more than 500 times – notably by Frank Sinatra – was Send in the Clowns, from A Little Night Music (1973), a nostalgic almost-operetta developed from Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. Some commercial flops resulted, but Sondheim took after Cole Porter in supplying both text and tune for a number of adorable hit songs.īernadette Petters accompanied by Stephen Sondheim in Send in the Clowns Sondheim, on the other hand, wrote both music and lyrics himself. The old firms – Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Loewe – comprised fruitful collaborations between composers and wordsmiths. Nonetheless, new productions and film versions continued for the rest of his life and beyond, and his best work may well last longer than the more profitable musicals of his time. Yet, although the half-century following Hammerstein’s death in 1960 was a golden age full of long-running musicals in the West End and Broadway, and despite his considerable gifts with words and music, Sondheim never scored a true hit show. Many expected him to revive the floundering American musical, supplying new perceptiveness, relevance and verve. Sondheim saw himself as heir to Oscar Hammerstein II, who had written the lyrics for Oklahoma! (1943) and South Pacific (1949). ![]() He went on to establish a place for himself with intelligent, unconventional works such as Company (1970), Sweeney Todd (1979) and Into the Woods (1987), which brought him a following appreciative of the new departures he made, even if his chosen path was not obvious or easy. Stephen Sondheim, who has died aged 91, was a leading light of musical theatre over the course of more than six decades, from the moment in 1957 when he achieved renown as Leonard Bernstein’s lyricist for West Side Story. ![]()
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