Stephen Sondheim is dead — and with it his art
(Alamy)
The death of a great figure can empty the soul of a country. Yeats died to empty “Ireland of its poetry” — and the death of Stephen Sondheim on Friday has emptied America of some of its music. Here was a composer who not only changed the status of twentieth-century musicals but redefined a genre for himself: a figure rare enough in cultural life, able to satisfy the most easily pleased theatregoer and musical snob in equal measure.
Sondheim has long been the favourite of the intelligentsia, the high-brow West End crowd, the smarter version of Andrew Loyd Webber and bastion against the tweeness and pop-infused paroxysms of Les Mis and Phantom of the Opera. There’s a reason for it; his music is smarter, the lyrics deeper, the tunes more elusive and the setting often much darker.
Listen to the opening of Into the Woods and it’s clear we’re out of the standard-issue Broadway hit, straight into the irrepressible dissonance, the edginess, the mystery and yet candour of Sondheim’s world. Here was the successor to Oscar Hammerstein, the man who wrote the lyrics to West Side Story , who developed the high-point of American music of the last century and mixed the concert halls of Leonard Bernstein with the theatre of Richard Rodgers.
Perhaps the best way to show his influence is through his most popular creation: there is no agreement as to whether Sweeney Todd is a musical or an opera. Not only the darkness of the plot but the majesty of the music combines the best of both: the complexity of the opera house and the energy and catharsis of the musical. Sondheim will never be difficult listening nor as stupidly juvenile as Cats or as dull as Wicked. In the world of the mass musical, the search for the next greatest smash, the biggest hit song, the latest crowd-pleasing romp, Sondheim was the most well-renowned antidote.
His death marks the passing of that generation, that crowd of male-dominated New Yorkers who have crafted the millions of nights out that have been stuck inexorably in the public consciousness over the last eighty years. Ultimately, it will be their work, not the fortune Lloyd Webber has made out of Phantom that will be talked of a hundred years from now. It will be the genius of the Sweeney score taught in classrooms not the tawdriness of his more financially successful contemporaries.
What was that musical genius? It’s all too easy to hear a score that sounds uneasy and healthily dissonant and proclaim it as the greatest thing since Schoenberg got bored with it all in Vienna about a hundred and thirty years ago. Sondheim’s skill, as well as his popularity, lay in his use of motifs and his innate sense of the musical impulse. The Wagnerian leitmotif, where a character is introduced by a musical idea, has John Williams as its most famous exponent today; everyone knows Darth Vader’s coming when only two chords follow each other. Sondheim does the same, but weaves them into each other — see the tapestry-like ending of Sweeney when the madness of all the characters comes out in an incessant stream of musical drama, the murderous barber’s end told through the synthesis of the motifs into a shattering finale.
Sondheim ’s edginess came from an equally ingrained sense of harmonic inventiveness: the dissonance and clashes which pervade even his most melodic numbers. Hardly ever are they given a full resolution, a simple major chord, and very few of his most popular songs are complete without their unnerving accompaniment. Take the opening of Sweeney Todd , perhaps Sondheim ’s most recognisable number, based around a pulsating oscillation in the band, and the melody fixed around the plainsong Dies Irae chant, a theme which is weaved into the themes of all the characters who face the day of wrath at the mercy of the eponymous barber.
His musicals were never show-stopping hits. Their runs on the West End were relatively short; critical but not always commercial successes. Much of the revenue and fame has come out of the screen, not the stage; whether in the Disney version of Into the Woods or Tim Burton’s 2007 version of Sweeney, Sondheim relied to an extent on the support of others to get his music out, on the trust of theatre managers w ho t ook a gamble on his feats and tricks being able to fill the seats with a crowd just hungry for a decent Saturday night out.
He may have been the last able to straddle that choice. For too many modern composers, the decision between commercial success and artistic integrity seems like a straight, irreversible one, especially in a market like London still unwilling to embrace the latest real talent over another rehash of the same old show. A musical climate that has been showing Phantom for thirty-four years could do with more of Sondheim’s type, the composer able to shed both intellectual snobbery and the conservatism of his audiences.
When Sweeney Todd was written, Sondheim ’s closest friends compared the main character to the writer: there was something of the dark, brooding nihilism of Sweeney that seeped out of the man into the music. Like the best tales, it ends on a questioning note rather than a conclusion: even though “to seek revenge may lead to hell”, the amoral Mrs. Lovett knows that “everyone does it, if seldom as well as Sweeney”.
Sondheim was not one of his characters, but he still had something of the same intensity, even insanity, which let him write the music he did. It will be that urge, more than anything else, which means that his music will last beyond the reams of Lloyd Webber or Mamma Mia that we are treated to. As a great American composer, though, Sondheim is a unique man, a transitional figure revered by those who understood him and tolerated by the mass market that mainly didn’t. For posterity, it’s usually a healthy sign.
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