Stephen Sondheim, songwriter and writer, 1930-2021

“The key is to find something on paper,” Stephen Sondheim told me at Lunch is FT interview in 2010. “‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.’ OK, it’s cliché, I’ll fix it tomorrow. You wake up in the morning and look. It’s the right thing to do.

The most famous of the modern theaters was a discussion of the writing style, which he found to be more complex than making music. Any desk struggle was not reflected in the results. Sondheim, who died Friday at the age of 91, was impressed by the maturity, intelligence, intelligence and emotional depth of events such as Company and Stupid. He took the vocals of Broadway music as a nonsense about hoofs and belts – and he fixed them well.

Sondheim was born in New York City in 1930. He grew up as the only child in a Jewish family, and he lived in a house opposite Central Park. Herbert’s father created high-quality women’s dresses that his mother Janet provided. It was a good childhood but not stressful. When Herbert approached another woman, his mother took him to Pennsylvania.

Janet, nicknamed Foxy, had a loveless life: she once told Sondheim that she regretted giving birth. He found another hot parent in the well-known Broadway musician Oscar Hammerstein II, a neighbor. Manufacturer with them Oklahoma! and South Pacific became his mentor when Sondheim became interested in music: he wrote his 15th birthday.

Hammerstein, and his fellow singer Richard Rodgers, brought new challenges to the music industry. Sondheim took the process slowly. His break came when he tried hard to become a Leonard Bernstein singer West Side Story, which opened on Broadway in 1957. His ballad “Maria” showed off his well-known ear for language music. It’s a love song that finds “all the beautiful sounds of the world in one word” – the title of the titular heroine.

He was the singer of another Broadway song, 1959’s Gypsy: A Singing Legend, by Jule Styne. Not wanting to be locked up as a vocalist, Sondheim also started making. His first song in both roles was bawdy comedy Humor Has Happened On The Way To The Court. Originally created in 1962, his vaudevillian excitement was replaced by a heated theme and a ton of tonals in later editions.

The first one was established in 1970. Company acted out the failure of a middle-aged man in New York to start a relationship. Stupid (1972) were about infidelity and divorce. Many of his stories are based on the Victorian melodrama (1979’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) to the Brothers Grimm legend (1986’s In the Woods) and US political history (1990s They don’t).

His courage in imitating modern music, surviving the harsh realities of real life, was first recognized: Company was praised by critics and received Tony’s award. But it proved to be a turning point for others. His work was incorrectly described as cooling off and deep in the brain. “Half the intelligence” was a constant criticism, an idea he found to be absurd.

In 1981 Merrily We’re Going closed after 16 theaters, one of the biggest flops in Broadway history; it was also reviewed as a major project. The innovator, Sondheim sometimes has to wait for the world to catch up.

His style was flexible and personal: he avoided the trap of pastiche. He can write shows like Company‘s “The Ladies Who Lunch”, which ends with her man singing the hand-stretched line “Everyone get up!”, which Sondheim admitted was a standing ovation. (The audience on the opening night did not insist; some later did.) But his use of music was far wiser than ordinary Broadway music. His songs create an ugly blend between the song and the lyrics.

A lover of distractions and deadly mysteries, Sondheim was fascinated by the genre of brinkmanship music; once caused Cole Porter to be shaken by a bravura quadruple rhyme plot. However, despite his eloquence, he hated showing off. The words and the music had to be true to the person.

He came out as gay in his 40s but loved to keep his life a secret; has left her husband Jeffrey Romley. He was generous, not selfish or overbearing. Although he was separated from his mother, or perhaps because of it, he wrote good roles for women. Although he did not hear the last words of the happy ending, his curiosity got the better of him. In the words “Our Time” from Merrily We’re Going“This is where we started, to be what we can be.”