\n<\/p>\n
Mark Horowitz had done his homework before Stephen Sondheim came to visit. He filled the room with scores by Bart\u00f3k, Brahms, Copland and Rachmaninoff; manuscripts in the hand of Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. \u201cThe last thing I brought him out was the manuscript for Gershwin\u2019s Porgy and Bess,\u201d Horowitz recalls. \u201cThat\u2019s when he started to cry.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cshow and tell\u201d of Sondheim\u2019s favourite composers, mentors and collaborators at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1993 planted a seed. It convinced him, Horowitz believes, that his papers would be in good company at the world\u2019s biggest library. \u201cShortly after that he said he was going to be changing his will and he in fact did. He sent me a printout of the paragraph in his will that left his manuscripts and things to the library.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of 91 and his bequest is now fulfilled. The library has acquired about 5,000 items including manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks, and scrapbooks that provide an unrivalled window to the mind of the man some called the Shakespeare of musical theatre.<\/p>\n
Among them are hundreds of music and lyric sketches of Sondheim\u2019s well-known works as well as drafts of songs that were cut from shows or never made it to a production\u2019s first rehearsal. Dozens of scrapbooks hold theatre programmes, clippings and opening night telegrams.<\/p>\n
On a Tuesday afternoon, the Guardian is ushered into the library\u2019s inner sanctum for another Horowitz \u201cshow and tell\u201d. The senior music specialist has laid several cardboard boxes on a table, opening them to reveal sheet music and other papers graced by Sondheim\u2019s pencil.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Stephen Sondheim in 2015.<\/span> Photograph: Nicholas Kamm\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cI love his hand, which I think is just gorgeous,\u201d observes Horowitz, a longtime admirer and acquaintance of the winner of eight Tony awards, including a special Tony for lifetime achievement. \u201cThis intimacy with the process is a privilege and a great pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n Sitting prominently are weathered spiral notebooks documenting some of Sondheim\u2019s musical efforts while a student at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are music exercises, tunes and early compositions like the sheet music from his college musical, Phinney\u2019s Rainbow, along with a programme from his high school musical, By George, written when he was 15.<\/p>\n The crown jewels are manuscripts for some of Sondheim\u2019s most celebrated shows including Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, as well as lesser-known works such as his plays and screenplays.<\/p>\n Horowitz flicks through a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for A Little Priest, a duet where Sweeney, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett gleefully plan to dispose of his murder victims by baking their flesh into pies to sell at Mrs Lovett\u2019s failing pie shop. It uses clever wordplay and puns about professions and social classes, imagining how 31 different flavours would suit various pies.<\/p>\n Here is a master wordsmith at work. \u201cOne of the things he writes in the margins is lists of people who might be baked into the pies: cook, butler, page, sailor, tailor, actor, barber, driver, crier, gigolo. I went through the pages and counted them and I came up with 158 different professions that he considered as types of people.\u201d<\/p>\n Horowitz points to an abandoned idea: \u201cSomewhere on this page is rabbi and the thing I get a kick out of is that then, a few pages later, he actually turns it into a couplet: \u2018Everybody shaves except rabbis and riff-raff\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Horowitz reaches into a box and produces lyric sketches for Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, along with a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the character Desir\u00e9e when she sings it. The most popular song that Sondheim ever wrote was also one of the quickest to turn around.<\/p>\n Horowitz explains: \u201cBasically in 24 hours he wrote his hit song whereas for most of his songs it took about two weeks, certainly for the longer numbers. There are 40 pages of sketches for Priest; I think there are nine pages here for Send in the Clowns.<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: Shawn Miller \/ Library of Congress<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons was they\u2019d already been in rehearsal so he knew almost everything about the show and particularly about Glynis Johns and her voice. He always described it as a light, silvery voice, which was very pleasant but she couldn\u2019t sustain notes.<\/p>\n \u201cHe wrote it specifically for her voice. It\u2019s very short phrases, which is why they\u2019re questions. \u2018Isn\u2019t it rich? Are we a pair?\u2019 They cut off quickly. It was written for this character, for this place in the show, for this actress, for this voice, and knowing all that made it much easier than it would be otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n The volume of work for each show seemed to increase, from three sheet music boxes for Company to nine for Sunday in the Park with George and 12 for Into the Woods. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it was because things got harder for him or he was more hard on himself,\u201d Horowitz observes.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no question that he was literally a genius but seeing the vast amount of perspiration in addition to the inspiration \u2013 it\u2019s one thing to be witty and clever but to see how much went into refining and making everything as perfect and specific as possible is sort of staggering.\u201d<\/p>\n The collection also contains materials related to Sondheim\u2019s plays and screenplays, such as draft scripts for The Last of Sheila, and a commercial he wrote for The Simpsons when he was a guest on the show. Three boxes of specialty songs include birthday songs he wrote for friends Leonard Bernstein, Hal Prince and others.<\/p>\n There are drafts of variations on the lyrics to I\u2019m Still Here from Follies that Sondheim wrote for the singer and actor Barbra Streisand at her request. Horowitz rummages through a folder to find a 1993 fax from Streisand listing personal traits she wanted included such as \u201cmy name \u2013 shorten it\u201d, \u201cnails \u2013 too long\u201d, \u201cperfectionist\u201d, \u201copinionated \u2013 big mouth\u201d, \u201cfeminist\u201d, \u201cliberal\u201d, \u201cdon\u2019t want to perform live\u201d. He comments: \u201cShe\u2019s being fairly candid here about the things that people criticise her for and suggesting he include them in what he writes.\u201d<\/p>\n Sondheim primarily worked with pencil and paper for his music and lyric writing, even though he was \u201cvery computer proficient\u201d and at one point considered writing video games. He made his first donation to the library in 1995: a vast record collection of about 13,000 albums accompanied by a hand-typed card catalogue. He also sat for a series of interviews with Horowitz in 1997.<\/p>\n <\/span>I\u2019m Still Here collage (for Streisand)<\/span> Photograph: Elaina Finkelstein\/Elaina Finkelstein \/ Library of Congress<\/p>\n To Horowitz, who produced a 70th birthday celebration concert for Sondheim in 2000, he was the artist who made him believe that musical theatre was \u201csomething important and something worthy of a life\u2019s study and a life\u2019s pursuit\u201d. He was always intimidated by Sondheim in person but found him to be unfailingly kind and generous.<\/p>\n He has fond memories of working on a production of Merrily We Roll Along at Arena Stage in Washington DC in 1990. Sondheim borrowed Horowitz\u2019s rhyming dictionary as he was writing new lyrics for some of the songs. \u201cWhen he handed it back to me, he said, \u2018Just so you know, I put in some missing words,\u2019 which he had in fact done.\u201d<\/p>\n Recalling another incident from that production, he says: \u201cThey had just done a run through with the orchestra and he was talking in the house to the producer, who was a very intimidating fellow I did not particularly like, and one of the musicians came up and was standing by the side, waiting very patiently, but this producer whipped around and said: \u2018Yes, what do you want?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThe guy said: \u2018I\u2019m sorry, I was just wondering if there\u2019s going to be another run through without the orchestra so I can sit and see the show?\u2019 The producer was very dismissive and said: \u2018I don\u2019t know, we\u2019ll see.\u2019 Sondheim whipped around and said, \u2018How dare you? Do you know how lucky you are that you have a musician who cares and wants to see the show?\u2019 This guy withered a bit and it was very gratifying to me.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Horowitz credits Sondheim with changing the perception of musical theatre in academia. Previously \u201clooked down upon by music departments and theatre departments\u201d, Sondheim\u2019s work has led to \u201can explosion of scholarship in musical theatre\u201d because it \u201cis that important and that good and that serious\u201d.<\/p>\n The Library of Congress aims to be a one-stop shop for researchers. The Sondheim collection joins existing archives of collaborators and mentors such as Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers. Sondheim encouraged Hal Prince and Arthur Laurents to donate their collections to the library. The Jonathan Larson collection includes notes from Sondheim\u2019s feedback.<\/p>\n Yet the precious Sondheim collection was nearly lost. In 1995, there was a fire in his home office at 246 East 49th Street in New York, where the manuscripts were kept in cardboard boxes on wooden shelves.<\/p>\n Horowitz recalls: \u201cWhen I went back afterwards, if you lifted the manuscripts out of the boxes, there were singe marks outlining where the paper sat in the boxes. Even now, as we\u2019re going through the collection, we\u2019re finding smoke damage on the edges of manuscript. Why they didn\u2019t go up in flames, I don\u2019t know. It truly is the closest I\u2019ve ever seen in my life to a miracle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mark Horowitz had done his homework before Stephen Sondheim came to visit. He filled the room with scores by Bart\u00f3k, Brahms, Copland and Rachmaninoff; manuscripts in the hand of Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. \u201cThe last thing I brought him out was the manuscript for Gershwin\u2019s Porgy and Bess,\u201d Horowitz recalls. \u201cThat\u2019s when he started<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11725,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[5201,5203,118,5200,5199,5202,2039],"class_list":{"0":"post-11724","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-5000item","9":"tag-collection","10":"tag-great","11":"tag-pleasure","12":"tag-privilege","13":"tag-sondheim","14":"tag-stephen"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}