Stephen Sondheim was a master of the Broadway musical and one of its greatest innovators. The breadth of his subjects is dazzling: the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat (Sunday in the Park with George), the opening of 1850s Japan to Western commerce (Pacific Overtures), the killers and would-be killers of American presidents (Assassins). Even his adaptations had distinguished source material: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is based on the works of the Roman playwright Plautus, and A Little Night Music is a reworking of the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night. (The title is a translation of Mozart’s string serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik.)
Sondheim (1930–2021) has the reputation as the most highbrow of Broadway composers. His music is psychologically subtle and astute, and notoriously challenging to perform. It’s not hard to understand why a 1994 New York magazine article had the title “Is Sondheim God?” But if we glance under the hood to see how the machinery works, what we find is comedy. And he knew it. When Sondheim was awarded the 2013 MacDowell Medal, his acceptance speech began: “I take genuine pride in being the first to represent the former runt of the arts: musical comedy. Yes, I mean musical comedy, not musical theater.”
Born to upper-middle-class New Yorkers, Sondheim was a child of divorce and found a surrogate father in a neighbor, the famed Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. He pushed the budding young composer toward musical theater and devised a program of study that paid lifelong dividends. Sondheim wrote his first musical at 15. By his mid-20s, he was collaborating with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story. (His story is well told in Daniel Okrent’s recent biography: Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy.)
