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Company - Stephen Sondheim
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Stephen Sondheim, born in New York in 1930, wrote his first musical at George School, Pennsylvania, in 1945.Two years later as a music major at William College he won a two-year fellowship to study under the composer Milton Babbitt. Sondheim discovered how to deconstruct classical pieces, acquired the skills of pastiche, and built upon the skills he had previously gained from his father, learning how to use songs to develop plot and character. In 1957 he wrote the lyrics for West Side Story (Leonard Bernstein) and in 1959 those for Gypsy (Jule Styne). Both composers taught the still largely inexperienced Sondheim the remainder of his craft. Then came a series of Broadway shows for which he wrote both music and lyrics. With a sincere passion for words - having devised hundreds of crosswords for The New York Times - Sondheim is a brilliant lyricist, understanding the
importance of rhyme and metre as a poet would. He does not however use words for their own sake; they converge with music and text to the point where they replace dialogue in developing character and story. Concerned with dramatic values, he uses music to indicate a wide range of emotions, to establish mood and to suggest changes in time and space. His songs are seldom successful when taken out of context: they are usually too firmly anchored in the story and lose a level of meaning when removed from the text. When Sondheim produced his first full Broadway score as a composer in 1962, it was considered to be one of the cleverest and funniest libretti written in years: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a farcical reflection of an Ancient Roman play. His learning curve continued throughout the sixties: Do I hear a Waltz? (1965 -lyrics only) and Anyone Can Whistle (1964), a tale of smalltown corruption.
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In the four years from 1970 to 1973 Sondheim wrote the songs - words and music - for no fewer than three new musicals and the results moved him from an established place as one of Broadway's top lyricists to a branch on the very top of the musical-theatre tree. The first two were both made up of scenes of songs, but both moved away from what had become the conventional musical format. Neither George Furth's text forCompany (1970) nor James Goldman's libretto for Follies (1971) - an exploration of the fragmentation of the American Dream - sported what might properly be called a plot. This kind of layout gave Sondheim the opportunity for plenty of stand-up and stand-out songs. It was A Little Night Music (1973) that brought Sondheim to use an even more stylised musical form.
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He continued writing: A musical cabaret, Side by Side by Sondheim (1975); Pacific Overtures (1976), with stylised characters in a masque about Japan's cultural collision with the West. Sweeny Todd (1979) is viewed as somewhat of a return to the more commercially accepted style of musical theatre, a broad British melodrama complete with huge characters and bloody effects that verged on the melodramatic. In Merrily We Roll Along (1981) Sondheim had begun to challenge the norms again: it runs backwards!
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By 1987, with Into the Woods, Sondheim had returned to his own methods of musical design: a black fairytale burlesque, which he followed by another revue focusing on political assassination,Assassins (1991), the up-till-now murders and attempted murders of America's presidents were paraded across the stage in song and sketch. In 1994 Sondheim wrote Passion, a one-act musical which examines the deepest yearnings and demands of the human heart and the redemptive power of love as its major theme.
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Sondheim is a perfectionist, methodical and tidy; he lives alone and works from home, a town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He visits numerous countries addressing University students and holding master classes for singers, actors and instrumentalists. His many awards include several Tony's, the Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar.
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Although his productions may not always enjoy commercial success, few could argue with the view that Sondheim's both distinguished and innovative in the realms of musical theatre.
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For more information why not visit Sondheim.com
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