SONDHEIM - A COMPOSER FOR ALL FEELINGS
By Armen Pandola
In 1961, I was ten when my older sister came home, very excited. She saw a movie that was the best movie she had ever seen. I asked what it was. She said she didn’t think I would like it because it was a love story, a great love story about two people from different worlds. What is it called? West Side Story.
Of course, I went to see it - and have seen it more times than I can count. And I fell in love with Natalie Wood. The next year, another movie came out starring Natalie Wood and so I went to see it. It, also, was a musical, but very unlike West Side Story. Not about a romance, but instead about ambition, a soul-pounding, relentless ambition to become somebody. It was called Gypsy.
These two musicals had more in common than Natalie Wood. Each of these musicals had lyrics by Stephan Sondheim - lyrics like no other lyrics you ever heard.
Here is end of the love duet from WSS:
Today the world was just an address
A place for me to live in
No better than alright
But here you are
And what was just a world is a star
And this is the lyric sung by the blindly ambitious mother in Gypsy:
Some people can thrive and bloom
Living life in the living room.
That's perfect for some people
Of one hundred and five.
That mother had two daughters who wanted her to marry a nice guy so they could live a normal life and this is how they put it - or how Sondheim did:
Momma, we'll buy you the rice
If only this once
You wouldn't think twice
It could be so nice
If Momma got married to stay
Nobody wrote lyrics like that - conversational and yet packed with nuance and subtlety.
Sondheim went on to write 16 more musicals, but this time writing both the words and music, as only a very few, like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, have done. Time and again, he tackled the tough subjects and his lyrics seem to say so much more than the individual words do:
Marriage:
It's the little things you share together
Swear together
Wear together
That make perfect relationships.
The concerts you enjoy together
Neighbors you annoy together
Children you destroy together
That keep marriage intact.
Ladies of a certain age and income:
So here's to the girls on the go
Everybody tries
Look into their eyes and you'll see what they know
Everybody dies.
A toast to that invincible bunch
The dinosaurs surviving the crunch
Let's hear it for the ladies who lunch
Everybody rise!
That last lyric must have come from that pain in Sondheim he spoke of often - his hatred for his mother and her’s for him. Yes, this incredible musical genius had a very sad personal life from which he was rescued by another genius of the American Musical - Oscar Hammerstein, the lyricist part of that duo that created the modern musical, Rodgers & Hammerstein.
After writing the lyrics for one of the most romantic musicals ever written - WSS - he wrote this about romance a decade later:
I've got those
"God-why-don't-you-love-me-oh-you-do-I'll-see-ya-later" blues
That "Long-as-you-ignore-me-you're-the-only-thing-that-matters" feeling
That "If-I'm-good-enough-for-you-you're-not-good-enough,"
And "Thank-you-for-the-present-but-what's-wrong-with-it" stuff
That "Don't-come-any-closer-cause-you-know-how-much-I-love-you" feeling
Those "Tell-me-that-you-love-me-oh-you-did-I-gotta-run-now" blues.
And then he wrote this about love:
Loving you
Is not a choice
It's who I am.
Loving you is not a choice
And not much reason to rejoice
But it gives me purpose
Gives me voice to say to the world:
This is why I live
You are why I live
I don’t know a simpler, more complete statement of what it feels like to be in love - and it’s feeling that Sondheim was a master of. Whether he was telling the story of an actress who has seen better days:
I've gotten through, "Hey, lady, aren't you whoozis?
Wow, what a looker you were"
Or better yet, "Sorry, I thought you were whoozis
Whatever happened to her?"
Or an artist who has lost his way:
I want to move on
I want to explore the light
I want to know how to get through,
Through to something new,
Something of my own-
And the response of his Muse:
Move on, move on
Stop worrying it your vision
Is new
Let others make that decision-
They usually do
You keep moving on
And through seven decades that is what Sondheim did - he moved on, writing musicals about slaves in ancient Rome, showgirls thirty years later, mad killer barbers, Japanese emperors, Presidential assassins, Viennese lovers, 49ers searching for gold - it’s a list of over twenty musicals that he has worked on and that are as varied as any output by any other composer of the 20th century.
Sondheim’s most successful musicals will be produced in regular revivals and his less successful works will keep on being re-discovered. His songs are not as well known as those written when songs from musicals became major pop hits. And there is another reason - he wrote songs for very defined characters in a particular situation. Not many songs like that are sung apart from the musical they are in. His most famous song, according to Sondheim, became that only because Frank Sinatra recorded it, twice in fact.
Don't you love a farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you'd want what I want
Sorry my dear
But where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns
Don't bother
They're here