Obituary: Stephen Sondheim

The songwriter expressed solitude and the essence of our times

Writer Stephen Sondheim died at his home in New England this week. He was 91 years old. The Broadway lyricist for West Side Story was also the composer for Into the Woods and he’s best known for a frequently covered song, “Send in the Clowns”, from his musical A Little Night Music. Sondheim wrote many other works of musical theater, including Company, Assassins and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Stephen Sondheim took topical, lyrical and musical risks throughout his career. He ended up working with some of the greatest artists of his time, including his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, who was his childhood neighbor. His themes were dark, bloody and pained and they were rarely light, cheerful and gay. But it’s wrong to say (as many do) that he changed musical theater in some fundamental way. I think he added to it.

Today’s dominant intellectuals lie. They act as though musical theater was frivolous and unserious before Sondheim. It wasn’t. Much of what they created, and especially works by Rodgers and Hammerstein, was deep, serious and profound. As an artist—and I’m neither exactly an admirer of Sondheim’s nor a scholar of his enduring career—I think Sondheim wrote about truth. I think truth is integral to what Sondheim was trying to achieve. That he famously failed, succeeded and won awards, including the Oscar and the Pulitzer Prize, is like icing on cake.

Sondheim sought to enrich, enliven and internalize as far as I know. As Mark Kennedy’s obituary for the Associated Press notes with a quote from playwright David Ives, with whom Sondheim had been working for a new musical: “Not only are his musicals brilliant, but I can’t think of another theater person who has so chronicled a whole age so eloquently. He is the spirit of the age in a certain way.”

This, I think, is true. More than any other major musical theater artist that comes to mind, Sondheim’s work urges and prompts one to pause, contemplate and introspect about the madness in the irrationalism of our time. He was born in 1930 to Helen and Herbert Sondheim and, following their divorce when he was a boy, raised by an abusive mother—she later wrote to him that she regretted that he’d been born—in Bucks County, where he was mentored by Hammerstein. Eventually, after he turned 60, he disclosed that he grew to know true love and that he’d loved two men. In a world in which one is unceasingly pushed to join, help, serve and subjugate oneself to others, Stephen Sondheim wrote and created with clarity, composure and serenity about being alone. He’s left a lifetime of words and music about what life means to him—particularly during his 90 years—as the one who feels totally left alone.