The Genius of Stephen Sondheim: Forever at the Library

—This is a guest post by Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist in the Music Division. It also appears in the September-October issue of the LIbrary of Congress Magazine. 

When Stephen Sondheim first visited the Library of Congress in May 1993, the Music Division arranged for a private show of its treasures with the intention to knock his socks off. The subtext, of course, was to convince him that the Library would be the ideal home for his manuscripts.

At that time, Sondheim already was considered one of the most important figures in the history of musical theater. He was the lyricist behind “West Side Story”; the creator of “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd”; the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and multiple Grammys and Tonys; the man who, in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom years later, would be credited with reinventing the American musical.

So we covered a small room with music manuscripts and other material from our collections: papers from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, and collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodgers; manuscripts by his private composition teacher, Milton Babbitt; works by composers and songwriters he admired, like Bartók, Berlin, Kern, Porter, Rachmaninov, Ravel.

We knew we’d succeeded when, looking at George Gershwin’s manuscript for “Porgy and Bess,” Sondheim began to cry. In a thank you letter, he wrote: “I’ve not stopped talking about what I saw at the Library since.”

Not long after, he agreed to leave his manuscripts to the Library in his will. Then, in February 1995, tragedy struck: a fire in Sondheim’s home in Manhattan. Though much was lost or damaged, the manuscripts miraculously were spared. Singe marks outlined where they sat in cardboard boxes on shelves — literally seconds from going up in flames.A collection of Sondheim music. Music Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The fire prompted Sondheim to make his first donation to the Library. That June, the Library received his vast record collection, approximately 15,000 LPs. Sondheim was an omnivorous collector of both classical and serious contemporary music recordings, many of them obscure, a surprising number of Scandinavian and South American composers. The collection was accompanied by his meticulously maintained (though also singed) hand-typed card catalog.

Over the years, Sondheim maintained connections to the Library.

He and collaborator John Weidman conducted research here, watching original films of vaudeville performers as they were writing their musical “Bounce.” He sat for a series of interviews — 6.5 hours’ worth are available on the Library’s website. He helped persuade friends and colleagues like Arthur Laurents and Hal Prince to also give their papers to the Library. In 2000, the Library celebrated Sondheim’s 70th birthday in the Coolidge Auditorium with a memorable concert that featured Broadway stars Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie, Debra Monk and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Now, more than 30 years after that first visit and four years after his death, the Sondheim collection has arrived at the Library and is accessible to researchers. It’s extraordinarily rich, with 5,000-plus items like music and lyric sketches and manuscripts in Sondheim’s clear, careful hand.

For the song “Putting It Together” from “Sunday in the Park with George” alone, there are five annotated script pages, 61 pages of lyric sketches, 18 pages of music sketches and an 80-page “fair copy” of the completed number — 164 pages for one song.

The Library’s Sondheim collection has much of his handwritten work, showing his creative process. Photo: Shawn Miller. Music Division.

The collection includes songs that were never used or were cut from shows or were written for shows that never materialized, such as a proposed film musical, “Singing Out Loud,” and “Muscle,” a one-act musical that originally would have been paired with “Passion.” There are three boxes of non-show songs, much of it specialty material such as birthday songs he wrote for friends like Bernstein and Prince.

Most thrilling, perhaps, is what Sondheim’s manuscripts reveal about the craft of composition, both music and lyrics. For Sondheim’s most famous song, “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music,” the first step appears to have been a one-page interior monologue discussing the character Desirée’s thoughts and feelings — her subtext.

It reads in part:

“We’re having a parallel experience — & I can’t convince you … I didn’t want to marry you. I’m getting what I deserve, but I didn’t kill anybody. Who did I hurt? Me. I want to right it all before it’s too late. Serves me right. I thought I wanted to rescue you — & myself. But how can you rescue someone who doesn’t want to be rescued? … How do you make somebody want something?”

It is dense and emotional stuff.

Stephen Sondheim at work in 1993. Photo: Nancy Lee Katz. Prints and Photographs Division.

There is “Not a Day Goes By” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” where it’s sung in two versions — as a torch song and a love song. As the lyric begins to coalesce in the sketches, we get to these lines where Sondheim has a partial lyric but also considers alternate possibilities (in the sketches, the words shown here in brackets are penciled above the words they follow):

“That I just can’t keep

Thinking + sweating and burning [shaking raging] + crying

And thinking [hurting] + reaching [hoping] and waking + dying.”

In addition to the above lines, in the left margin of this single page he lists more than a dozen alternate words to consider for the release: “trembling,” “circling,” “fiercer,” “rougher,” “viler.” Though verbs and adjectives are comingled here, one discovers in the final versions of the song that the torch song uses only verbs, the love song just adjectives.

The sense it leaves is that, in Sondheim’s mind at least, we humans like to think about and grade the quality of our love but that suffering is physical.

As researchers begin to delve into the evidence of Sondheim’s creative genius, other realizations and discoveries wait to be mined from the treasures of the Stephen Sondheim Collection. These anticipated discoveries will lead to new productions of Sondheim’s classic and lesser-known shows, inspire future generations of performers, teach Sondheim’s craft to aspiring songwriters and demonstrate how Sondheim’s songs are timeless.

Sondheim remains front and center in the American cultural consciousness, and it is fitting that his legacy finds a home at the nation’s library in time for America’s semiquincentennial.

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