Songwriter was titan of American stage musical
Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history’s songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91.
His lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, announced the death, which he described as sudden. The day before, Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury, Pappas said.
An intellectually rigorous artist who perpetually sought new creative paths, Sondheim was the theater’s most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, if not its most popular.
His work melded words and music in a way that enhanced them both. From his earliest successes in the late 1950s, when he wrote the lyrics for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” through the 1990s, when he wrote the music and lyrics for two audacious musicals, — “Assassins,” giving voice to the men and women who killed or tried to kill American presidents, and “Passion,” an operatic probe into the nature of true love — he was a relentlessly innovative theatrical force.
The first Broadway show for which Sondheim wrote both the words and music, the farcical 1962 comedy “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” won a Tony Award for best musical and went on to run for more than two years.
In the 1970s and ’80s, his most productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, including “Company” (1970), “Follies” (1971), “A Little Night Music” (1973), “Pacific Overtures” (1976), “Sweeney Todd” (1979), “Merrily We Roll Along” (1981), “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984) and “Into the Woods” (1987).
Although Sondheim spent long hours in solitary labor, usually late at night, when he was composing or writing, he often spoke lovingly of the collaborative nature of the theater. After the first decade of his career, he was never again a writer for hire, and his contribution to a show was always integral to its conception and execution. He chose collaborators — notably producer and director Hal Prince, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and later writer and director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form beyond the bounds of only entertainment.
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets. He exploited time signatures and forms; for “Night Music,” he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — nearly an entire score written in permutations of triple time.
Overall, he wrote both the music and the lyrics for a dozen Broadway shows — not including compendium revues like “Side by Side by Sondheim,” “Putting It Together” and the autobiographical “Sondheim on Sondheim.” Five of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and six won for best original score. A show that won neither of those, “Sunday in the Park With George,” took the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Of the many revivals of his shows, three won Tonys, including “Assassins” in 2004, even though it had not previously been on Broadway. (It was presented off-Broadway in 1990.)
In 1993, Sondheim received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. In 2008, he was given a Tony Award for lifetime achievement, and in 2010, in perhaps the ultimate show business accolade, a Broadway house on West 43rd Street, Henry Miller’s Theater, was renamed in his honor.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of “Company” was planned, with a woman (played by Katrina Lenk) in the central role of Bobby, but it was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Sondheim, who also maintained a home in New York, a townhouse on East 49th Street, had been spending most of his time in Roxbury during the pandemic.
But he returned to New York this month to attend revivals of two of his musicals: on Nov. 14, for the opening night of “Assassins,” at the Classic Stage Company in lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed first preview, since Broadway
reopened, of “Company,” also starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Sondheim was “extremely” pleased by both productions, said Pappas, his lawyer.
Sondheim liked to think of himself less as a songwriter than as a playwright, albeit one who wrote very short plays and set them to music. His lyrics, scrupulously literate and resonant with complex ideas or emotional ambivalence, were often impossibly clever but rarely only clever; his language was sometimes erudite but seldom purple.
He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but within them — one of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in “Sweeney Todd” was “shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd” — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.
What most distinguished Sondheim’s lyrics, however, was that they were by and large characterdriven, often probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish or deeply felt conflict.
For all these reasons — the high-minded ambition, the seriousness of subject matter, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord — Sondheim’s shows, although mostly received with critical accolades, were almost never popular hits.
“I have always conscientiously tried not to do the same thing twice,” Sondheim said, reflecting on his career in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2000, when he turned 70. “If you’re broken-field running, they can’t hit you with so many tomatoes. I certainly feel out of the mainstream because what’s happened in musicals is corporate and cookie-cutter stuff. And if I’m out of fashion, I’m out of fashion. Being a maverick isn’t just about being different. It’s about having your vision of the way a show might be.”
Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, in New York. He is survived by his husband, Jeffrey Romley, and a half brother, Walter Sondheim.