Stephen Sondheim, the dextrous composer and lyricist of musicals including Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Sweeney Todd, died Friday at the age of 91, the New York Times reports. His death was confirmed by F. Richard Pappas, Sondheim’s lawyer and friend, who said that Sondheim died suddenly.
Sondheim was the elder statesman of American theater, but he always stood outside of its trends. An iconoclast whose vital music tested preconceived notions about what belonged on stage, he created songs for a murderous barber, a neurotic neo-Impressionist, and a vengeful witch. His work always teemed with moral ambiguity, never providing the easy answers some looked for in musicals.
But as much as Sondheim came to carve an unprecedented path, he owed his career to the greats that came before him—one in particular. He was born in 1930 in New York to a designer and a dress manufacturer. Sondheim’s parents divorced when he was 10, and his artistic life truly began when he became acquainted with Oscar Hammerstein, who lived nearby in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sondheim soon became a satellite member of the Hammerstein family, with its patriarch, the lyricist of shows like like Oklahoma! and South Pacific, acting as a “surrogate father” to him, in Sondheim’s own words.
In interviews, Sondheim often relayed the story of when he asked Hammerstein for feedback on a musical he had written for school when he was 15. Sondheim asked his mentor to treat him as he would anyone else—and Hammerstein’s assessment was brutal. “He started right from the first stage direction—and I’ve often said, at the risk of hyperbole, that I probably learned more about writing songs that afternoon than I learned the rest of my life,” Sondheim told The Paris Review in 1997.
Sondheim initially had designs to be a mathematician, but he instead studied music at Williams College, graduating in 1950. One of his early jobs was in television, writing for the ghost comedy Topper. Though he yearned to write musicals, when the opportunity to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story came along, Sondheim was initially reluctant; Bernstein was writing the lyric, and Sondheim didn’t want to be saddled with the label of lyricist. It was Hammerstein who convinced him not to pass up the gig.
Sondheim was similarly disappointed when his West Side triumph was followed by another team-up, this time with composer Jule Styne for Gypsy, the story of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her overbearing mother. (Star Ethel Merman was worried about an untested writer leading her into a flop.) While working on the show, he and Styne previewed some of its work-in-progress songs for Cole Porter. The Broadway legend was depressed at the time; Merman, a close friend of Porter’s, believed the new material might cheer him up. It did.
In his book Finishing The Hat, Sondheim recalled a moment of triumph: while performing “Together, Wherever We Go,” he heard a “gasp of delight” from Porter. What had done it? The quadruple rhyme in the phrase, “No fits no fights no feuds and no egos—Amigos! Together.” That’s how shar Sondheim was: he could impress even the man who wrote, “do do that voodoo that you do so well.”
It wasn’t until 1962 that Sondheim was credited for writing both music and lyrics in a major musical—for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a Zero Mostel vehicle that draws from Plautus to tell the story of the slave Pseudolus. As Sondheim later told The Telegraph, though, he would not really “hear [his] own voice loud and clear” in his work until 1970’s Company. The groundbreaking show, with a book by George Furth, bucked storytelling conventions to present the anxieties of Bobby, an unmarried thirtysomething living in New York, as a revue-like series of of interactions with his coupled-up friends. By Sondheim’s own telling, Company ”was the first Broadway musical whose defining quality was neither satire nor sentiment, but irony.”
Though nearly all of Sondheim’s shows are now considered classics, he was not always a hitmaker or a critical favorite. 1964’s Anyone Can Whistle, a political fable, and 1981’s Merrily We Roll Along, told in reverse with a cast of youngsters, both closed quickly. By the time of Merrily, though, Sondheim had arguably reached his creative peak: the decade surrounding it saw three of his most enduring works premiere on the Broadway stage, beginning in 1979 with Sweeney Todd.
Sweeney Todd was a gory production on an operatic scale that rang with morbid humor. “I thought it would be fun to see if you could scare a contemporary audience the way movies can scare you,” Sondheim recalled in PBS’s documentary Broadway: The American Musical. Len Cariou first played the titular character, a wrongly convicted man who returns to London to find his daughter and seek revenge on his enemies. He meets up with Angela Lansbury’s Mrs. Lovett, the lovesick baker who endears herself to the barber by transforming his victims into meat pies. Writing for the New York Timesupon its debut, Richard Eder applauded Sondheim for his “endlessly inventive, highly expressive score that works indivisibly from his brilliant and abrasive lyrics.”
As much as Sondheim’s work was the main draw for any of his shows, he thrived on working with others. “I’m a collaborative animal,” he told Lin-Manuel Miranda in a 2017 interview. He credited the likes of Harold Prince, John Weidmann, and James Lapine, all frequent Sondheim partners, for coming up with initial ideas for some of his most memorable productions and eliciting the best in his own abilities.
In the documentary Six By Sondheim, directed by Lapine, Sondheim insists the only autobiographical song he has ever written is “Opening Doors” from Merrily. His friend, the writer Frank Rich, disputed this notion in an article for New York magazine, and indeed it’s hard not to see more than a bit of him in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George, which debuted in 1984. By musicalizing the agonies of both George Seurat and the painter’s fictional great grandson, Sondheim created what is perhaps the ultimate treatise on the stresses of pursuing a career in the arts. The piece hold such significance to Sondheim that he titled his two volumes of lyrics—Finishing The Hat and Look, I Made A Hat—after the central metaphor in one of its songs.
He and Lapine then turned to the inner lives of fairytale characters in Into The Woods, which wrestled with topics including infertility and infidelity. As Sondheim grew older, he moved even further into experimental territory. He gave voices to the disturbed men and women who attempted to take the lives of American presidents in Assassins, and in the 2010s, he worked on transporting two of the films of surrealist Luis Buñuel onto the stage.
Though some of his theatrical works were adapted into films—including Disney’s take on Into the Woods and Tim Burton’s Sweeney—Sondheim only dabbled in crossing over to Hollywood. He twice joined forces with Warren Beatty, winning a best original song Oscar for one of his contributions to Dick Tracy and composing the score for Reds. In addition to that Academy Award and his Pulitzer, Sondheim received most of the highest honors available to someone in his line of work—including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, seven Grammys, and seven Tony awards, as well as a special lifetime achievement prize from the American Theatre Wing. He has also appeared onscreen—playing himself in the 2003 indie film Camp, and as a character in the 2021 musical tick… tick… Boom!, played by Bradley Whitford.
As a public figure, Sondheim didn’t exist much outside of his songs. He was gay, but rarely spoke about his sexuality or explicitly referenced queer themes in his work. (He resisted any insinuation that Company’s Bobby was gay himself until he signed up to work on a revised version of the show in 2013.) Rich wrote that Sondheim was someone “who can explain every note and word in every song he wrote with meticulous authority, and yet whose own feelings were so successfully barricaded that by his own account he didn’t give himself up to a serious romantic relationship until he turned 60.”
But even if he was reticent to share anything about his own life, Sondheim constantly examined the nuances and complications of being human in his work. He proved that breaking out into song didn’t need to be trite or simplistic, but could contain frustration and confusion. Just think of this lyric from Into the Woods’ ”Moments in the Woods,” in which the Baker’s Wife, having just had an affair with a handsome prince, considers her options. She asks: “Must it all be either less or more?/ Either plain or grand?/ Is it always or?/ Is it never and?” Sondheim’s existence may have seemed grand, but he asked his audiences to consider the in betweens.
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