Greater than 5,000 objects from composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, together with lyric and music sketches and unpublished scripts, at the moment are housed within the Library of Congress.
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
When Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist on the Library of Congress, created a show-and-tell of the Library’s music assortment for Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim again in Could of 1993, he wasn’t anticipating to immediate tears.
He’d stuffed a room with a few of the Library’s thousands and thousands of music-related objects — ones he thought would possibly ring a bell with the composer-lyricist broadly credited with bringing sophistication and artistry to the American musical. They included manuscripts from Sondheim’s mentor and fellow lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and his music instructor and fellow composer Milton Babbitt; scores by composers Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Johannes Brahms; objects from West Facet Story and different reveals on which Sondheim had collaborated.
Every was a jewel of the Library’s collections, however there was one crown jewel.
“Once I introduced out Gershwin’s manuscript for Porgy and Bess, he cried,” remembers Horowitz.
Inside weeks, Sondheim let Horowitz know he was bequeathing his papers to the Library of Congress. And the significance of defending them got here into sharp aid when a fireplace broke out in Sondheim’s dwelling lower than two years later. It began in Sondheim’s dwelling workplace, the place the papers have been saved in cardboard packing containers on wood cabinets.
“It is the closest in my life I’ve ever come to seeing an precise miracle,” says Horowitz. “There is no purpose why these manuscripts shouldn’t have gone up in flames — paper in cardboard on wooden, ft from a hearth that melted CDs. It really is miraculous.”
Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim in 1976.
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Now that the papers — greater than 5,000 objects together with lyric and music sketches, scores, unpublished scripts, and all types of miscellany — are secure within the Library’s assortment, Horowitz says he is eternally being shocked by them, although he is aware of Sondheim’s work nicely. He taped hours of interviews with the Broadway composer, which grew to become a ebook referred to as Sondheim on Music: Minor Particulars and Main Choices. That subtitle is a riff on a lyric in a music from Sunday within the Park with George. Horowitz says that sifting by the gathering has reminded him that Sondheim actually meant one other lyric in that music: “Artwork is not simple.”
“I am appreciating in a manner I by no means had earlier than how a lot effort he put into the whole lot,” he says. “Simply web page after web page after web page …”
He pulls out a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for a single music — “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd — his present a couple of barber who slits his prospects’ throats and a baker who has the brilliant thought of baking them into meat pies.
It is a music rife with rhyme and 31 variously tasty victims, however Horowitz factors out that there are numerous, many extra within the lyric sketches (scribe, cook dinner, web page, farmer, baker, driver, gigolo, mason, pupil) that did not make it into the music. “I added them up, and there have been 158 that he’d thought-about.”
He thumbs by the sketches, scribbled in longhand utilizing Blackwing pencils on 8 ½ x 14” lined, yellow authorized pads, for one explicit deserted couplet — “all people shaves besides rabbis and riff-raff.”
“I simply love the truth that he got here up with that.”
The Library of Congress’ new Stephen Sondheim assortment consists of many pages of lyric sketches for the music “A Little Priest” from the musical Sweeney Todd. In his notes, Sondheim brainstormed dozens of probably tasty victims for the demon barber of fleet avenue, most of whom by no means made it into the music.
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
Subsequent, Horowitz pulls out sheet music the place these lyric sketches are written extra formally as precise lyrics. However that is nonetheless an interim step, earlier than a remaining piano rating of the music, adopted by web page after web page of typescripts of lyrics.
“In principle, the music is finished, however he is nonetheless engaged on it,” marvels Horowitz, “and modifying it and altering a single phrase or a phrase. It is the perspiration behind the inspiration.”
“I imply right here,” he says, pointing to a line handwritten on a typed lyric sheet, “he is written in ‘we now have some shepherd’s pie peppered with precise shepherd‘ — one of many nice strains, however he is inserting it. He by no means allow them to go till the present opened, or typically even after they opened. At all times attempting to excellent issues.”
That is a behavior his papers recommend Sondheim developed at the beginning. There are tantalizing hints of his thought processes going all the way in which again to his highschool musical, By George, which he wrote whereas attending George College, a Quaker boarding college in Bucks County, Pa., in 1946.
This system lists 21 songs, together with “Meet You on the Donut,” “Pet Love” and “Wallflower’s Waltz.”
The papers additionally embrace a piano sonata he wrote in school, a music he despatched unsolicited to Judy Garland, a private birthday tune he penned as a premium for a PBS fundraiser, a remedy for Breakdown, a play, or possibly a TV present that he wrote with Larry Gelbart, his A Humorous Factor Occurred on the Option to the Discussion board collaborator, and many different miscellany together with a “buzzing music.”
All of this may probably be grist for a lot of a doctoral dissertation. As will a exceptional inside monologue — by no means spoken or sung — that he penned for Glynis Johns, the main woman in A Little Evening Music. It is for the scene the place she sings the preferred music Sondheim ever wrote: “Ship within the Clowns” — two pages of stream of consciousness for the actress about what her character is considering and feeling. One web page is what she’s attempting to speak within the scene to her unhappily married longtime lover. The opposite is what she’s considering to herself.
This is a little bit of what she needs her lover to comprehend: “I am going to let you know why you are right here: You’ve got an ungainly feeling as a result of you do not know you are trapped. You assume you have made your mattress and it’s a must to lie in it. The toughest human factor to do is sever a relationship. I can not fireplace my accountant. Additionally, you prefer to undergo which all of us have a capability to do.”
And that is what she’s considering to herself: “It was good that we did not get married again then. I used to be too busy on different issues, and also you was once a powerful and willful man. Recklessness has its time and so has seriousness. You’ve got lastly been suffering from tremors of feeling above the navel!”
“Why did not he write that line within the music?” I ponder aloud. “Does not sing nicely,” Horowitz laughs.
The primary web page of Stephen Sondheim’s manuscript for the hit music “Ship within the Clowns” from A Little Evening Music (1973).
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
And the gathering is not simply wealthy in lyric sketches. “I do not assume I’ve ever seen a composer, even a classical composer, who does as a lot music sketching as he does,” Horowitz says as he walks to a piano to play a number of examples. Those he picks all have notes that come out of a music’s key signature in ways in which must sound odd, however that as an alternative make the lyrics that sit atop them sound conversational.
Horowitz finds it comforting that Sondheim’s musings and music will now reside on Library of Congress cabinets, the place they are often in a form of symbiotic dialog with the close by collections of George Gershwin, who impressed him, and Oscar Hammerstein, who mentored him. Additionally with the collections of composers Sondheim impressed and mentored — say, Hire‘s creator, Jonathan Larson, who saved “notes about conversations he had with Sondheim after Sondheim noticed issues he’d achieved.”
“I prefer to think about them whispering to one another at night time,” smiles Horowitz.
Whispering, little doubt, in regards to the artwork of placing artwork collectively, little by little.
