Sondheim on Music

Before Stephen Sondheim graced us with his two-volume lyric collection on 2010 and 2011, one must-have volume for Sondheimaniacs was Mark Eden Horowitz's Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, which first came out in 2003. I reviewed it for Back Stage West, then later had the honor of reviewing an updated edition in 2011 for The Sondheim Review. The complete text is below. (For reference, I also reviewed his lyrics collections; and if you want to take a deep dive into my writing about Sondheim over the years, check here and here.)

Stephen Sondheim has clearly reached iconic-adjective status: If “Sondheimesque” arguably lacks the wide currency of “Pinteresque” or “Shavian,” it nevertheless clearly denotes certain irreducible qualities—an unmistakeable aesthetic signature with wide influence over the theatrical landscape he helped to shape. It counts as a large compliment, then, that in the second edition of the indispensable Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions, Sondheim himself offhandedly coins a new adjective, “Horowitzean,” for the microscopic attention to detail shown by his interlocutor, Mark Eden Horowitz, the music scholar who has shepherded the songwriter’s score manuscripts, sketches, and notes into the Library of Congress.

As before, the bulk of the book is an extended Q&A with Sondheim, with those score manuscripts near at hand for easy reference; the new edition includes a chapter on Bounce (in its 2007 pre-Road Show iteration), and a lengthy new interview titled “Encore,” which helps to fill in some of the first edition’s gaps in the oeuvre. The result is that though both editions devote full chapters only to shows Sondheim has written since 1976 (not including 1981’s Merrily We Roll Along, which Horowitz confesses he may unconsciously have avoided to spare Sondheim’s feelings about that show’s painfully brief Broadway bow), one still comes away with a portrait of the artist in full, from his early obsession with French and Spanish composers, to his apprenticeship with Oscar Hammerstein II and studies with Milton Babbitt, from his work alongside giants of mid-20th-century musical theatre: Prince, Styne, Bernstein, Robbins, Laurents, etc., to his own current status as a storied veteran.

As before, the talk can be dauntingly technical at times—if your concept of “harmony” begins and ends with Simon and Garfunkel, you may be a little lost in the talk of counterpoint and chord spellings, ninths and suspensions. But, as before, the rewards for slogging through a discourse, say, on Italian bugling (for the score of Passion) are myriad stray insights and anecdotes: how the influence of Paul Bowles on Leonard Bernstein’s music is underappreciated; how yearning and striving pulses, wave-like, through Sondheim’s accompaniment figures (think of Sweeney’s opening six-note phrase, or the churning ostenato under “Being Alive”); how Seurat’s Grand Jatte painting still makes him cry just to think of it; about Richard Rodgers’ seemingly unconscious genius; about his love Brel and hatred of Weill.

What may be most crucial about Horowitz’s specialized focus is that it clearly excites a similar passion for minutiae in his wonky subject; the frankness and free play of Sondhiem’s answers might only be possible opposite an interviewer with whom he feels this kind of kindred spirit. Not that he doesn’t resist Horowitz’s occasional over-interpretation: “You’re reaching. You’re admiring me too much,” he says early in the new interview, when Horowitz suggests that the bossa nova beat behind “Ladies Who Lunch” might be a comment on Joanne’s attempt to seem “with it.”

It’s in a similar vein that Sondheim unleashes the playful appellation “Horowitzean.” When the scholar notes that at one point in Candide’s “Life Is Happiness Indeed,” the vocal arrangement has Candide singing “Hap” and Cunegonde and Paquette singing only a repeated “piness…piness,” Sondheim is comically mortified, quickly passing the buck for this apparent phallic joke to Bernstein or conductor Paul Gemignani. You can almost see the unshockable old fox blush.

Anecdotes and digressions aside, Sondheim on Music is a particularly valuable companion—I hesitate, though only slightly, to call it an “antidote”—to the new Sondheim-annotated lyric collection, Finishing the Hat. For if there remains a lurking danger that Sondheim will be remembered foremost as a brilliant lyricist, a book like Horowitz’s (which belongs on the shelf alongside Steve Swayne’s plodding but informative How Sondheim Found His Sound) reminds us that “musical” comes first in “musical theatre,” and that Sondheim’s enduring art stands or falls as much on his rich, Ravelian harmonies, restless rhythms, and searing, soaring melodies as on his perfectly cadenced lyrics. Indeed, these elements are inseparable from each other, as well as from the characters they embody so well—including, it now seems abundantly clear, Sondheim’s capacious, contradictory personality itself.