The genius of Sondheim

The life and work of Stephen Sondheim could make a good Sondheim musical. A brilliant boy, abandoned by his father to grow up alone with his emotionally abusive mother, finds a mentor in one of Broadway’s greatest lyricists. But then his own career reveals a hollowness in the older man’s work.

It would be a musical tinged with shadow, rich with ambiguity, highly intellectual, deeply concerned with art and love and loss. Audiences would leave a bit smarter, perhaps unsettled, but probably not humming a tune. In short, a Sondheim musical.

The most admired composer-lyricist of late-20th-century musical theater — though far from the most commercially successful — died Nov. 26, having received virtually every honor the stage and the nation could bestow. His end was as unexpected as anyone’s can be at 91; according to the New York Times, he attended revivals of two of his works shortly before Thanksgiving and spent the holiday with friends.

“There is very little that could be mistaken for Mr. Sondheim in the present-day commercial musical theater,” observes the impeccable music critic Tim Page in The Post. Yet, while Sondheim’s mature style was inimitable, he transformed the ambitions of lyricists.

To see how, we must start with Sondheim’s schoolboy beginnings as a family friend of the Hammerstein clan, whose patriarch, Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote the lyrics for such Broadway treasures as “Show Boat,” “Oklahoma!” “The King and I” and “The Sound of Music.” Sondheim would say that a single afternoon in which Oscar Hammerstein critiqued his adolescent writing taught him “more about songwriting and the musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime.”

Yet Sondheim was dissatisfied with Broadway’s priorities in the Hammerstein era. Plots were thin (boy meets girl, complications ensue, love wins). Two things were valued: dance extravaganzas and hummable tunes. As for lyrics — lyrics amused, and sometimes delighted, but they never challenged. They rarely had much content at all.

Here’s a Hammerstein heroine explaining her devotion to one man: “When he goes away / That’s a rainy day / And when he comes back / That day is fine / The sun will shine.”

Here’s a hero introducing himself in Act I: “Oh, what a beautiful morning / Oh, what a beautiful day / I’ve got a beautiful feeling / Everything’s going my way.”

Here’s a mentor explaining the importance of persistence: “Climb every mountain / Search high and low / Follow every byway / Every path you know.”

These are among the greatest hits in Broadway history, wonderful in context. But they do nothing to explain the characters who sing them or to add nuance to their stories.

Sondheim’s ambitions vastly outstripped his mentor’s. By the time an actor finished a song in a mature Sondheim musical, the audience was going to know that character better and understand the drama more profoundly. His goal was not hit songs. His goal was a greater play.

In this pursuit, he was a relentless self-critic. His 2010 volume, “Finishing the Hat,” intersperses his lyrics with his reflections. He recalls his early work putting words to Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent score for “West Side Story.” The combination produced several hits, among them the waltz “I Feel Pretty.”

Yet part of the song came to mortify him, he allowed.

“I had this uneducated Puerto Rican girl singing ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel,’” he wrote — as if the teenager Maria, brand-new to New York, were a figure in a Noel Coward play.

It is difficult to imagine any lyricist before Sondheim (with the possible, occasional exception of Ira Gershwin) regretting such an outwardly splendid achievement in 1-2-3, 1-2-3 waltzing rhyme.

Sondheim’s mature work, by contrast, was so psychologically rich and profound that it can’t easily be quoted in snippets. “Isn’t it rich? / Are we a pair? / Me here at last on the ground / You in mid-air.” The song that produced his book title, from “Sunday in the Park With George,” traces the necessary — yet tragic — emotional distance between the French impressionist Georges Seurat and the world he observes, and the way that distance has doomed his hope for love.

Songwriters after Sondheim often craft work more toe-tapping than the master’s compositions. But the best of their lyrics bear his unmistakable influence. Every song of “A Chorus Line” belongs to his lyrical school, developing characters and deepening the drama — and hundreds of shows since then bear the same imprint. Favorites currently on Broadway or on film are unimaginable pre-Sondheim: “Breathe,” from “In the Heights”; “Waving Through A Window,” from “Dear Evan Hansen”; “She Used to Be Mine,” from “Waitress”; even the comic anthem “I Believe,” from “The Book of Mormon.” The list is longer every year.

Talent does an old thing well. Genius makes an old thing new. Rest in peace, Stephen Sondheim, genius.