Now there is no hat. Where there was a hat. And life is not the same.
My reaction to the death of Stephen Sondheim was not exactly rational, even as emotional things go. It was easy to find connections with him in my life, but hard to say why any of them would have brought me close to tears. The most obvious ones I came up with are too indirect to have much emotional impact, so I kept exploring.
One is that he studied composition with Milton Babbitt. An odd fact for someone who is generally considered one of the greatest geniuses of the Broadway musical; Babbitt was a strictly atonal composer, one whose stringent formalism was a model for composers when I was a composition student at Northwestern. I studied there with David Noon, who was a student of Mario Davidovsky, who also studied with Babbitt. So there you go, only four degrees of separation: Alterman - Noon - Davidovsky - Babbitt - Sondheim.
Another has to do with Sondheim's musical Saturday Night. Written in 1954, it was to be his first musical, lyrics and score. But it was cancelled due to the death of a producer. In 1997, more than 40 years later, Saturday Night was finally produced by the Bridewell Theatre Company in London. The story has to do with young men growing up in Brooklyn, and for the promotional artwork the designers chose a photograph of three boys sitting on a pier with the Manhattan Bridge in the background. That photograph, Boys on Pier, Manhattan Bridge, was taken by my uncle, Harold Roth, in 1948. I now own the rights to Roth's work and the prints he left behind when he died in 2001.
Here is one of the original prints next to the sheet music booklet for Saturday Night:
The same cover design was used for the original cast CD, fliers and posters.
None of this really gets at why Sondheim's death seems so personal to me. Nor does the following, though it is a bit closer: My mother died early this year, age 91; she was found on the floor of her home in Delray Beach, Florida, where she lived alone. Sondheim, age 91, was found on the floor of his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he lived alone. The cause of my mother's death is unknown, but it came as she appeared to be getting over a bout of COVID. The cause of Sondheim's death has not been announced, but he died just as news of the new Omicron variant of COVID was reaching the public. It occurrs to me that if someone has devoted his life to musical theater, then at age 89 watched Broadway shut down and revivals of his work get postponed for 2 years due to COVID, hung in through all that, and just as everything was opening up again, news of a variant that could send us back to square one reached him, he might not survive the emotional shock of that. I don't know if this was true or if he even heard the news, but he was said to have been in good health before his death.
I suppose this focus on morbidity is not what anyone wants to hear, but with the emotions regarding my mother's death still raw it was hard to keep my brain quiet when I heard the news, particularly right after a Thanksgiving that would be the first one she missed and the last one Sondheim enjoyed.
Sondheim grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where my parents moved (from Brooklyn) when I was ten years old. We lived in a tenement on West 83rd Street; he lived in the San Remo, one of the most famous buildings in a neighborhood full of famous buildings (the Belnord, the Apthorp, and of course the Dakota) where an arm's length list of famous actors and musicians have resided. To me and my friends, the San Remo was just the most distinctive piece of skyline you could see from Central Park. Too bad he did not have a happy childhood there; I suppose mine was a bit better, if poorer.
But let me finally say what I think is going on with my Sondheim connections. Of all his musicals I have only ever seen Gypsy and a film version of West Side Story, to both of which he only wrote the lyrics. I narrowly missed seeing a production of Into the Woods before the pandemic, but I own the soundtracks to a A Little Night Music and Sunday in the Park With George. None of that explains how I felt at hearing of his death.
No, it can only be one thing: Judy Collins' recording of his most famous song, "Send in the Clowns". Why? Because I loved the song from the first time I heard it? There are lots of songs I love, and lots of people love that one but may not feel it in quite the same way, even if they are songwriters like me. I think it represented for me a kind of paradigm of how to be a songwriter, a model that I could mentally turn around and examine to remind myself how it's done.
Strangely enough, in interviews Sondheim said that he kind of tossed off the song. He said he needed to find something with short phrases for Glynis Johns (the original Desirée in A Little Night Music) because she couldn't sustain notes; that he had the idea that questions would make naturally short phrases, and to use the stage metaphor because, fictionally, she was an actress. And then bing bang boom it all came together in two days. Including the fact that it would have to be in two different meters (9/8 and 12/8).
That's great - when you're a genius it all seems simple. And even when you're not, songs do sometimes seem to pull themselves out of thin air and you have little to do but take notes. But it's more than the fact that the song is inspired, which goes without saying. The first thing that struck me about it was the line, "Sure of my lines" - you have a sad song in a major key, then it sort of tumbles into minor in the bridge, which heightens the tension, and then, as the bitterness of the situation becomes clear, descends almost chromatically through the line "Making my entrance again with my usual flair". Finally, dropping the sarcasm that guards the rawness of her emotions and letting herself admit the self-doubt that underlies the whole scene, she sings "Sure of my lines", and the tonality descends into near chaos as the singer traverses a diminished fourth, an awkward melodic interval that emphasizes the interiority of the emotion, and the troubled backward glance at that false sense of security.
If you are not a musician you surely have no idea what I just said, but the point is that a seemingly insignificant musical touch just nails the emotional content, creating a mystical moment in which the singer suddenly lays it all bare and you share her sense of despair. That is the stuff of genius.
Then there is the way the lyrics seem to alternate between a controlling theatrical metaphor, which is brilliantly deployed again and again, and a second metaphor about clowns, until they somehow magically seem to come together at the end of the third verse: "Don't bother, they're here". Now, in fact, as Sondheim explained, it is all one metaphor, the clowns being sent in to cover when a performance is not going well. The star is reviewing her mistakes, or failures, and asking for the clowns to be sent in to distract the audience from them. But I think the clowns work on another level, which I realized when Sondheim said it could have been "send in the fools" instead - that is, the "clowns" metaphor captures the growing feeling of foolishness, particularly about the actress's illusion that with her well-honed skills she could bend reality and undo the error she made when she rejected her lover so many years ago.
Now let's look at the melody itself. It seems to have just three basic elements, which makes their contributions easy to isolate, and to see how they relate to the meaning of the song. One is the jump from the 3rd to the 4h note of the first two lines of each verse: isn't--->it rich, are we--->a pair. This motion is completed by a fall of an octave at the end of the verse: you in<----midair. (Note that there are a number of ways in which Fredrik, the previously rejected suitor, could be thought of as being "in midair" - between two women, two stages of his life, his sexual and emotional desires, etc.) The leap ending in a fall perfectly captures both the spirit of the drama and the literal meaning of the first verse, "me here at last on the ground, you in midair".
That line, though, has more of an implication of a dance performance than drama, as does "one who keeps tearing around, one who can't move", while "losing my timing this late in my career" could indicate a performance of almost any sort. So the setting of those lines actually provides the third element, a rolling melody that is somewhat reminiscent of circus or carousel music, but is also very close to a waltz, a dance which literally employs lilting, up-and-down and sweeping motions. So what the whole thing amounts to is a leap into the air, a giddy ride followed by a fall: exactly what the fictional actress is experiencing as she confidently ventures a proposal to her ex-lover, sure that it will be warmly received ("I thought that you'd want what I want") and then suddenly finds herself falling without a parachute when he rejects her offer.
This is my perhaps over-analyzed take on the common observation that Sondheim was able to use songs to move his dramas forward. Before him, songs in musicals were often a pause in the dramatic action, a kind of break for the audience. He made them part of the drama, a way of deepening the personalities of the characters. In fact, "Send in the Clowns" is partially re-worked as the show's closer, now conveying a completely different feeling in which the characters have been reconciled to their own foolishness and accept one another and themselves.
I could probably go on a bit longer, but it comes down to this: Sondheim put everything you need to know about songwriting into a 4-minute song. Almost everything: the line "Don't you love farce" is awkward, forcing singers to breathe between the last two words or risk the suggestion that she is professing an affection for derrieres. (Barbara Streisand seems to pause for a drink between them.) All this shows is that an errant brushstroke in a Rembrandt is worth talking about more than the same mistake in a million other works of art.
I don't know if I've really said what I wanted to say about Sondheim and how his death affected me, or why. Perhaps, ultimately, it comes down to respect: the idea that someone could take a form of entertainment that sometimes seems one step from kitsch, and make it into something that seems one step beyond opera. Some modern operas have serious subject matter and the highest level of musical creativity, but no one saw that coming in the Broadway musical until Sondheim did it.
I think I've run out of words - highly unusual for me. Fortunately, Sondheim saves the day:
Somebody crowd me with love.
Somebody force me to care.
Somebody let me come through,
I'll always be there,
As frightened as you,
To help us survive,
Being alive.
Being alive.
Being alive!It does sound like he wrote them this year. They're from Company, 1970
- and 2021. Maybe now I will finally get to see one of his musicals.
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