{"id":15021,"date":"2022-05-03T14:39:47","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T12:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/?p=166226"},"modified":"2022-05-03T14:54:11","modified_gmt":"2022-05-03T12:54:11","slug":"stephen-sondheim-master-of-reinvention","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/stephen-sondheim-master-of-reinvention\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Sondheim: Master of Reinvention"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Charlotte Smith\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 03 May 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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It is five months since Stephen Sondheim<\/a><\/strong> died at the unshocking age of 91. Yet the profound sense of shock, of a gaping hole that nothing but his own work can fill, still permeates the entwining worlds of music and theatre. \u2018I equate him to my hero, Gustav Mahler<\/a><\/strong>,\u2019 says conductor Andrew Litton. \u2018I\u2019ve worked with many brilliant living composers, but none of those has had the same kind of impact on the world as Sondheim.\u2019 Others, including Bernadette Peters \u2013 who unforgettably took on leading roles in his Sunday in the Park with George<\/i> and Into the Woods<\/i> \u2013 still sound stunned. \u2018It\u2019s so hard to understand that he\u2019s not on the planet anymore; it\u2019s just\u2026strange,\u2019 she says.<\/p>\n

Truly great creative artists inevitably alter their art forms. A rare few do so several times over, and a still smaller number do it in more than one discipline. Sondheim was a master composer, a master lyricist and a master show-creator. While linked, those three crafts are not the same and he changed all three of them. In his hands, musicals became shifting \u2013 sometimes abstractly so \u2013 pieces of complex drama, to be sifted and fitted together in the audience\u2019s minds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t come from nowhere. As a youngster he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II, who himself\u00a0 <\/span>had changed the course of musical theatre twice (with Show Boat<\/i> and Oklahoma!<\/i>). Hammerstein demanded that the wannabe composer first learn the mechanics of lyric-writing: the results were West Side Story<\/i><\/a><\/strong> with Leonard Bernstein<\/a><\/strong>, and Jule Styne\u2019s Gypsy<\/i> \u2013 not a bad start. Nor was his first songs-plus-lyrics show, the 1962 farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum<\/i>, which ran for 964 performances, won six Tony Awards and\u00a0became a film.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was after Forum<\/i> that Sondheim started to produce true masterpieces but, ironically, he never recaptured that hit-out-of-the-gate smash. Experimental, reinventing himself almost by the show, his musicals moved through contemporary dating drama Company<\/i> (1970), nostalgic theatrical tragedy Follies<\/i> (1971), poised waltz-time comedy A Little Night Music<\/i> (1973), Japan-set Pacific Overtures<\/i> (1976), Grand Guignol comedy-horror Sweeney Todd <\/i>(1979), a tale of decaying friendship told backwards in Merrily We Roll Along<\/i> (1981), an examination of the life and work of pointillist artist Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George <\/i>(1984), fairy-tale mash-up Into the Woods<\/i> (1986), a showcase of American presidential murderers in Assassins<\/i> (1990), and twisted classical romance Passion<\/i> (1994). And those are just the major ones. Some did moderate box-office. Others flopped \u2013 Merrily<\/i> closed after a paltry 16 performances on Broadway. Yet the pattern, by and large, was the same. Show comes out, show does OK (usually), show closes, show is later hailed as a masterpiece, constantly revived and revered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018So much of his stuff was ahead of its time,\u2019 says Litton, who conducted famous concert performances of Sweeney Todd<\/i> with the New York Philharmonic in 2000 (happily, preserved on record). \u2018Audiences weren\u2019t ready for it when it first came out. Once they experienced it, it opened the doors to everyone else trying to be like him. Sondheim wasn\u2019t afraid to use multiple genres within a work: Sweeney Todd<\/i> has everything from opera to waltzes to almost a Schubert<\/a><\/strong> lied, and much more. And with Sondheim, you wouldn\u2019t come out humming the songs; instead, you came out with this whole experience in your brain, and your head exploding because there was so much information, so many different emotions.\u2019<\/p>\n

For many, it is that barrage of gifts that is so irresistible \u2013 fusillades of brilliantly clever lyrics, plots so gloriously conceived that they sometimes aren\u2019t even plots (looking at you, Company<\/i>), and the way everything flows into a sea of endless compassion: for the characters and, through them, for actors and the audience. Maria Friedman, who created the role of Fosca in Passion<\/i> and has performed in and directed many of Sondheim\u2019s works, explains how these qualities can be found in the most minute of moments. \u2018In Follies<\/i>, in the song \u201cLosing My Mind\u201d, you get the line \u201cThe thought of you stays bright\u201d,\u2019 she says. \u2018The word \u201cbright\u201d goes right down to a low note. The character is feeling low, and that \u201cbright\u201d has darkness to it. What she\u2019s feeling is not brightness, it\u2019s despair. The word \u201cbright\u201d also means piercing. Sondheim loves those contradictions, the contradictions of being alive. With everything he writes, his characters say one thing and also mean another \u2013 \u201cI love you, I can\u2019t love you, I wish I could\u201d. For most of us, what we say is not actually what we feel. What is more important is what you feel underneath \u2013 and Steve leaves room for the actor, for the humanity. The person who interprets it has space to bring their own life to it. Sondheim doesn\u2019t dictate or decide. He asks questions, and there are rarely definite answers.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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