Dana Gioia on Stephen Sondheim

An extract from his new book

A few days ago, I shared a section from my brother’s new book: Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry.

This was well received by readers.

Ah, because of my special clout as sibling, I’ve gotten Dana’s permission to share another extract from his book. Below is the opening of his chapter on one of my favorite composers and songwriters, Stephen Sondheim.

Enjoy!

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Dana Gioia on Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim’s work represents the culmination of the quest to create a new American opera from popular musical theater. More than Bernstein or even Gershwin, two of his formative influences, Sondheim developed a mode of musical and poetical composition that gave his later shows a unified style and continuous momentum without losing the power of their individual numbers. His fusion of popular energy and classical cohesion endowed his best work, especially Sweeney Todd, with a dynamic lyricality and broad appeal that no classical American opera composer of his generation could match.

In American musical theater, Sondheim is a figure as singular as Wagner was to Romantic opera. Conventional assumptions don’t account for his career. Blessed with a rare combination of musical and literary talent, which had been trained since childhood, Sondheim controlled the course of his own artistic development. He found the creative and financial support for his innovative ventures, despite many failures. By forty, he had become the most influential creative artist in American musical theater, a position he held for another half century. Like Wagner, he spawned many imitators, all inferior to the original. Sondheim can only be understood on his own terms. He was the exception who disproved the rules.

Stephen Sondheim publicity photo, circa 1980

Sondheim embodied the most sophisticated traditions of American musical theater. He was both to the manner and the manor born. At the age of ten, the privileged, lonely boy fell under the tutorship of his next-door neighbor, Oscar Hammerstein II. The lyricist became an informal foster-father and guided the young songwriter for two decades until his death. “I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein,” Sondheim recalled, “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.” In his early twenties, Sondheim worked as the lyricist for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Jule Styne’s Gypsy, two landmark musicals. In 1962, Sondheim mounted his first show as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Modeled on the Latin comedies of Plautus, the musical had an innocent and irresistible silliness Sondheim would never recapture. It won six Tonys (including the top prize for Best Musical). Ironically, it also had the longest Broadway run of any Sondheim show over his long career. That must have rankled in his later years. But, as Goethe observed, to be lucky at the start is everything for an artist.

A Funny Thing was an inspired but conventional musical. In his subsequent work, Sondheim reinvented, show by show, the style and structure of the American musical. He not only changed the form of theatrical lyrics but also their themes. Working in collaboration with a changing cast of dramatists who wrote his books, he played Modernist games with narrative. In Company (1970), he replaced the plotline with a series of loosely connected vignettes. In Follies (1971), former showgirls gather in a theater scheduled for demolition where they are joined by the ghosts of their younger selves to relive their disappointments and dance routines. In Merrily We Roll Along (1981), the story is told backwards. These narrative tricks had the effect of removing the typical emotional arc of a Broadway show. Instead, they created a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a distancing effect, that prevents the audience from easily identifying with the characters (who are usually busy observing themselves). Needless to say, clinical detachment was not the feeling commercial musicals are supposed to deliver.

Sondheim’s formal experimentation continued in idiosyncratic works such as Pacific Overtures (1976), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Assassins (1990), which had plots and themes that had nothing in common with traditional musicals. Each was inspired, original, but ultimately unsatisfactory, though Sondheim’s misses were generally more interesting than the successes of his Broadway contemporaries. Meanwhile as a composer, he devised ingenious ways to connect his songs and dialogue with nearly continuous orchestral accompaniment. In Sweeney Todd (1979) and Into the Woods (1987), he pushed the boundaries of the musical until it seemed to merge into opera.

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Significantly, Sondheim’s innovation was done within the constraints of commercial theater. (One can’t say “for-profit theater” without irony since so many of his shows lost money.) Sondheim never wanted to be anywhere except in the marketplace. He accepted its limitations as the necessary price to obtain its resources of talent, expertise, and money. Broadway was the only place he could work at the level of his ambition. Sondheim took pride in his hits and accepted his flops with stoic detachment. Failure stung, but he respected the authority of the audience; these people had allowed him to be a serious artist in a commercial category. Sondheim rejected the supposed polarity between high and low culture. He dismissed classical composer Ned Rorem’s condescending remarks about popular song. “You make a mistake,” Sondheim declared, “when you divide things into serious and pop.” His artistic achievement rested on his refusal to make the division everyone else took for granted.

There is no need to argue for Sondheim’s creative eminence. He was the major American theatrical composer of the last half century. Without including West Side Story or Gypsy, at least six of his shows remain actively in the repertory—A Funny Thing, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods. That is about the same number as the Rodgers and Hammerstein works still performed (though Sondheim’s shows had shorter runs, fewer movies, and almost no major hit songs). He won eight Tonys, eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. Sondheim’s long-standing preeminence leads people to forget how often he failed. Half of his shows flopped, including Anyone Can Whistle, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Assassins, and Road Show. Other projects were abandoned. Some shows, such as Follies, Passion, and Pacific Overtures enjoyed only modest success and lost money for their investors. Even his hits never matched the box office appeal of down-market fare such as Chicago, The Producers, or Wicked. A list of the 124 longest running Broadway shows does not include a single Sondheim score. Yet he wasn’t a coterie composer. One might say he captured half the audience, not a bad percentage for an artist. His shows, he observed, provoked “polarized reactions of fervent admiration or ferocious rejection.” But his admirers included the serious theatrical crowd—led by critics who knew from the first that he was a major figure.

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Dana Gioia’s Weep, Shudder, Die is now available for purchase. You can learn more at this link.