Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Swayne is Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.

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How Sondheim Found His Sound

University of Michigan Press

Contents

A Chronology of Sondheim's Creative Career.....................xiiiIntroduction...................................................11 Sondheim the Classicist.....................................52 Sondheim the Tunesmith......................................473 Pulling It Apart............................................974 Sondheim the Dramaphile.....................................1255 Sondheim the Cinaste.......................................1596 Putting It Together.........................................197Appendix: The Concept Musical and Sondheim.....................257Notes..........................................................261Bibliography...................................................289Credits........................................................299Index..........................................................303

Chapter One

The American musical theater is filled with composers who wrote, performed, knew, and loved classical music. Herbert, Romberg, Friml, Weill, Blitzstein, Loewe, Bernstein, Coleman, Kander: Sondheim is hardly unique. Each of these composers would favor different composers, sounds, and techniques from the classical realm and would combine them in unique ways. Add to this Sondheim's early inclination toward drama-perhaps abetted by a childhood filled with drama-and we begin to understand how his sound differs from those of his predecessors and peers, as he crafted a distinctive musical amalgam wed to character and situation in a way that few other composers would rival.

Sondheim's emergence as an aficionado of classical music was in no way assured. His love of music certainly goes back to his early years-at least to the age of five-and was driven from the start by his love of innovation and technology. The adult collector of games is foreshadowed in the child's fascination with his parents' Capehart phonograph player, with its arm that could turn discs over automatically. He soon became fascinated by the music the phonograph played, mostly "pop records and whatever show tunes there were," in keeping with the music that was made in the Sondheim household. His dressmaker father Herbert was a self-taught pianist who regaled guests and clients alike with his renditions of Broadway favorites. Herbert's oldest son began classical piano lessons at age seven, though he stopped two years later. After 1940, Sondheim no longer had his father around to play piano; his parents divorced in that year. And Herbert's technique was not developed enough to play classical music anyway. Even so, at the New York Military Academy, the eleven-year-old Sondheim entertained himself by playing MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose" and other classical chestnuts on the chapel's pipe organ.

His musical development after military school is less clear, but some of his tastes were soon established. According to his own recollection, he served as Hammerstein's musical mentor from his teenage years forward, well before Hammerstein would take him on as a dramatic apprentice.

Early on in our acquaintance ... [Hammerstein] confessed to being baffled by "modern" music that wasn't tuneful in the traditional sense. Because he was curious, I gave him for his birthday a recording of the Ravel trio (I wanted to start him off as tunefully as possible), and I followed it each year with slightly more contemporary-sounding pieces. I never got him quite as far as Wozzeck, but by the time he died seventeen years later, I'd led him through the marshes of Prokofiev and into the thickets of Stravinsky.

One does the math and comes up with July 1943 as the month and year of that gift of the Ravel. Given that Sondheim would date his penchant for collecting records to his later teen years, perhaps 1943 is a bit early. Whatever the precise date was, how did he move from Broadway show tunes to American parlor music to European art music in such a short period of time, let alone to something as arcane as the Ravel trio? By the same means through which the five-year-old was exposed to music: the phonograph.

Sondheim the classical collector

Sondheim was an inveterate record collector, with a zest for expanding his collection. In 1987, he said: "I have a very large record collection, 25-30,000 records, which consist mostly of instrumental music of the nineteenth and twentieth century. I have been collecting since I was seventeen years old." The Library of Congress received most of this collection, which was estimated to be between eleven thousand and thirteen thousand records. Whichever number is correct, it was a considerable private collection.

The Library of Congress also received the record catalog, a typed inventory of four-by-six index cards that show signs of having survived the February 1995 fire that damaged Sondheim's office. Nearly all of the cards are singed at the top and slightly damaged by water; the information on a few has been partially destroyed. And the catalog is not complete. Some cards are missing, and Sondheim remarked that some recordings were not cataloged.

But a picture emerges of his collection. Every composer represented is given a separate card, on which several works are listed. The cards are arranged in alphabetical order by last name. In many cases, a composer's works take up more than one card. (See figures 1a and b.) Rarely is there any mention of performers, and explicit references to labels or other identifying features of individual records are nonexistent. Instead, the cards list the works that appear on the recordings. Multiple copies of a work (which occur usually among the multiple-card composers) are sometimes indicated with a number in parentheses; more often the repeated work is listed later in the inventory. And as Sondheim remarked in 1987, the recordings are mostly of instrumental-that is, classical-music, and mostly from 1850 to 1950 or so. For example, there are more cards for Kodly (twelve) than there are for Beethoven (ten) or Mozart (eleven). Thus the record collection does offer a way of confirming Sondheim's musical tastes and classical influences. In an interview with David Savran, Sondheim provided a window into how records added to his musical education. He pulled no punches about his general dislike of opera, a dislike highlighted by most commentators. But these remarks also reveal how Sondheim became acquainted with opera and, presumably, with a wider classical repertory.

I've never liked opera and I've never understood it. Most opera doesn't make theatrical sense to me. Things go on forever. I'm not a huge fan of the human voice. I like song, dramatic song. I like music and lyrics together, telling a story.... When I studied with Milton Babbitt he said I had to get into opera. Knowing that I was a Strauss fan, he first sent me to Rosenkavalier and I left after one act. I thought it was endlessly boring. I'd heard a lot of opera on record and I liked some of Puccini's music, so I then went to the Met to see Bohme.

Sondheim's comment about "hear[ing] a lot of opera on record" finds support in a photograph taken in 1986 with the composer seated in what appears to be his study. On the wall behind him stands a sizable record collection, consisting mostly of boxed sets, some commercially packaged, others repackaged in special boxes that Sondheim acquired in...