Why Does He Endure?
/Last Sunday evening was the 90th Birthday Celebration Concert for Stephen Sondheim - put together and produced by Raul Esparza, and starring a jaw-dropping list of Broadway celebrities and personalities.
Despite the technical glitches - which had Twitter abuzz with some excellent Sondheim-related humor - the evening was beautiful.
The performers had recorded their songs ahead of time from their quarantined homes and still, somehow, the music and performances were just as emotional, raw, delightful, and revealing as they might have been with more theatrical conditions.
Why?
The music, the lyrics, and the marriage of the two.
Stephen Sondheim has to be one of the most polarizing musical theatre writers, having been lauded as the most important to live and also berated for being too high-brow and difficult to perform or understand. And yet, he is known as “the master.” Not a master - and we do have many - but the master.
Why? What is this legacy? Why does Stephen Sondheim endure?
Content Dictates Form
Now, I could write an entire life-long dissertation on Stephen Sondheim and the brilliance of his work (and some of my friends and family would probably say I’ve been doing it verbally for years), but I want to boil this argument down to its basics.
In his lyric anthology Finishing The Hat, Sondheim writes of the three writing principle truisms:
“In no particular order, and to be written in stone:
Content Dictates Form
Less Is More
God Is in the Details
all in the service of
Clarity
without which nothing else matters.”
Let’s begin with “Content Dictates Form.”
What does that mean?
One of the reasons that Sondheim’s music endures - and specifically within the context of the shows for which it was written - is because of this first principle.
You cannot easily remove one of his songs to be performed outside of its show for an audience that is unaware of its context. Sure, they may enjoy the music or find the piece entertaining, but the song would not have its full impact outside of the show. And this is something that used to be common with theatre music, but (with the exception of “Send In The Clowns”) not with Sondheim’s music.
Why is this?
The content of Sondheim’s writing - the time, the setting, the plot, the storyline placement, the characters and their individual personalities, the opinions, and the messages of the piece - define the formation of the songs. Every piece of music he writes is entirely wrapped up within the world of the play, and taking it out of its context can therefore be quite difficult.
You can absolutely, out of context, have:
A group perform “Sunday” from Sunday In The Park With George
Two people duet on “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd
A devastating rendition of “Send In The Clowns” from A Little Night Music
You can do these things out of context and have them be appreciated for their craft and beauty. But something will be missed.
There are layers of enrichment that come from knowing:
“Sunday” is a musical representation of the pure beauty and tranquility that George Seurat finally feels in blocking out the chaos to finish his masterpiece painting.
“A Little Priest” is the unadulterated and insane giddiness of two brilliant, yet disturbed, people figuring out how to bring their goals into alignment - aka murder barber customers for practice and bake them into pies for money.
“Send In The Clowns” is a moment of stillness and deep self-reflection for a character who has never faced what she has always known, which is after we’ve watched her flail around her desires for two hours.
Sondheim takes these moments in the stories and crafts them into music perfectly appropriate for the situations and characters:
“Sunday” is a brief group vocal number based mostly upon quiet unison, which blossoms briefly into exuberant dissonance before returning to a quieted and major harmony in the end.
“A Little Priest” is a seven minute comedy number based in grotesque wit and delightful one-up-man-ship.
“Send In The Clowns” is a conversational, lilting, and dynamic solo ballad, which purposefully does not develop in either melody or harmonic structure.
Extraordinarily different pieces. All very Sondheim, but all utterly specific to their content.
Less Is More
I already hear some of you at home saying:
“But Michael, he’s known for his complexity and wordiness! How can Sondheim believe in Less Is More?”
Well, believing in and succeeding at are two entirely different things. And Sondheim acknowledges all over the place that he strives for these principles, knowing that he often falls short (as do we all).
But if you were to look at the songs of his that most endure - the ones that really cut to our emotional and intellectual centers - these are often the ones that follow this mantra the most.
Every Sondheim show is filled to the brim (if not overflowing) with music and lyrics, and many of these are immediately forgotten upon leaving the theater or skipped when listening to the albums. But the ones that cut through universally for performers and audiences alike tend to be wrapped up in the simplest of ideas:
Finishing The Hat
No One Is Alone
A Weekend In The Country
By The Sea
Anyone Can Whistle
Being Alive
Everybody’s Got The Right
I’m Still Here
And this is but a tiny fraction.
If you know any of these songs, their titles alone will evoke a sense of time, character, emotional state, and a wonderfully tuneful hook. And everything else about each of these songs is built specifically around these simple and effective ideas.
Do the lyrics often spin off into ambitious wordplay, complexity, and depth? Yes. But all of it centered around these simplistic and easy-to-follow ideas - he never strays.
God Is in the Details
Details come in all shapes and sizes, so it would be difficult to discuss the full breadth of the kinds of details Sondheim has mastered. There are too many.
So I will leave you with a few.
1. Correct Stress
One of the reasons performers love to sing Sondheim music - and audiences are able to take in as much information from his wordiness as they can - is because Sondheim takes great care to place words on his melodies so they are stressed precisely as we would say them.
There are many songs out there in the world that people say are difficult to sing - “it’s almost like it’s impossible to sing it well!” Usually, this is because of mis-stressed words. They’re tricky to spit out.
But when the stress is correct, you can speed through an insanely wordy line and still be entirely understandable (see “Getting Married Today” from Company).
2. Musical Development
I wrote a 10 page paper in college about the first half of one song in Sweeney Todd, dissecting the musical development and how it related to the characters and tone of the piece. And I had much more to say.
Sondheim takes great care to build a musical world, build a tune off a singular idea, and then to break his own rules only when the story calls for further movement or development. And every time he does it, it’s wildly effective.
For just a minuscule example, in Into The Woods, Little Red sings a song called “I Know Things Now,” which is the story of her encounter with the Wolf. The main melody is almost garishly major, since Red is both a kid and dreadfully annoying.
But when she gets to the part of the story where she starts feeling fear, Sondheim alters two notes in her now-familiar melody to make them minor. Just two. And then we understand her state of mind clearly.
Details.
3. Wit
A lot of people are witty. But few people are as appropriately witty as Sondheim.
It’s one thing to write your face off and be clever at any and all times - this is a great showcase of the writer and their talents. But it’s an entirely different thing to be witty in a way that’s 100% appropriate to the character, their language, and their situation.
My favorite example of this is in Sweeney Todd during “A Little Priest.”
Mrs. Lovett is a cooky delight of a character who is clever, insane, and good at wordplay and word association. However, all of this gets kicked up a huge notch during “A Little Priest” when Sweeney starts playing the word games as well. Suddenly, she has to up her game.
Prior to “A Little Priest,” in which they wittily discuss how they could cook different people into pies to sell, Mrs. Lovett would likely not have gotten to the point of being able to put together:
“Or we’ve got some Shepherd’s Pie peppered with actual shepherd on top”
A brilliantly witty line, but also perfect to Lovett in this one moment in the show.
Clarity
So why does Sondheim endure?
Whether you love him or hate him, or are somewhere in between, Sondheim’s mastery of the craft of musical theatre writing is both capturing and stirring.
His craftsmanship is the rock on which his talent sits, and it has made for some of the most exciting and interesting musical storytelling for performers and audiences alike.
Sondheim is who inspired me to do what I do. His principles guide me in everything I write. And all I can hope is that, at the end of the day, I have achieved a level of excitement and clarity that Mr. Sondheim could be proud of.
Stay safe, stay healthy, stay home. Cheers everyone!
