The
Genius of
Sondheim

At that time, Sondheim already was considered one of the most important figures in the history of musical theater. He was the lyricist behind “West Side Story”; the creator of “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd”; the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and multiple Grammys and Tonys; the man who, in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom years later, would be credited with reinventing the American musical.

So, aiming to impress, we covered a small room with music manuscripts and other material from our collections: papers from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers; manuscripts by his private composition teacher, Milton Babbitt; works by composers and songwriters he admired, like Bartók, Berlin, Kern, Porter, Rachmaninov, Ravel.

We knew we’d succeeded when, looking at George Gershwin’s manuscript for “Porgy and Bess,” Sondheim began to cry. In a thank you letter, he wrote: “I’ve not stopped talking about what I saw at the Library since.”

The collection includes songs that were never used or were cut from shows or were written for shows that never materialized, such as a proposed film musical, “Singing Out Loud,” and “Muscle,” a one-act musical that originally would have been paired with “Passion.” There are three boxes of non-show songs, much of it specialty material such as birthday songs he wrote for friends like Bernstein and Prince.

Most thrilling, perhaps, is what Sondheim’s manuscripts reveal about the craft of composition, both music and lyrics. For Sondheim’s most famous song, “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music,” the first step appears to have been a one-page interior monologue discussing the character Desirée’s thoughts and feelings — her subtext.

“We’re having a parallel experience — & I can’t convince you … I didn’t want to marry you. I’m getting what I deserve, but I didn’t kill anybody. Who did I hurt? Me. I want to right it all before it’s too late. Serves me right. I thought I wanted to rescue you — & myself. But how can you rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued? … How do you make somebody want something?”

It is dense and emotional stuff (see page 19 for more on “Send in the Clowns”).

There is “Not a Day Goes By” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” where it’s sung in two versions — as a torch song and a love song. As the lyric begins to coalesce in the sketches, we get to these lines where Sondheim has a partial lyric but also considers alternate possibilities (in the sketches, the words shown here in brackets are penciled above the words they follow):

“That I just can’t keep

Thinking + sweating and burning [shaking raging] + crying

And thinking [hurting] + reaching [hoping] and waking + dying.”

In addition to the above lines, in the left margin of this single page he lists more than a dozen alternate words to consider for the release: “trembling,” “circling,” “fiercer,” “rougher,” “viler.” Though verbs and adjectives are comingled here, one discovers in the final versions of the song that the torch song uses only verbs, the love song just adjectives.

As researchers begin to delve into the evidence of Sondheim’s creative genius, other realizations and discoveries wait to be mined from the treasures of the Stephen Sondheim Collection. These anticipated discoveries will lead to new productions of Sondheim’s classic and lesser-known shows, inspire future generations of performers, teach Sondheim’s craft to aspiring songwriters and demonstrate how Sondheim’s songs are timeless.

Sondheim remains front and center in the American cultural consciousness, and it is fitting that his legacy finds a home at the nation’s library in time for America’s semiquincentennial.