Greater than 5,000 objects from composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim, together with lyric and music sketches and unpublished scripts, are actually housed within the Library of Congress.
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
When Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist on the Library of Congress, created a show-and-tell of the Library’s music assortment for Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim again in Might of 1993, he wasn’t anticipating to immediate tears.
He’d crammed a room with a number of the Library’s tens of millions of music-related objects – ones he thought would possibly ring a bell with the composer-lyricist extensively credited with bringing sophistication and artistry to the American musical. They included manuscripts from Sondheim’s mentor and fellow lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and his music instructor and fellow composer Milton Babbitt; scores by composers Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Johannes Brahms; objects from West Facet Story and different reveals on which Sondheim had collaborated.
Every was a jewel of the Library’s collections, however there was one crown jewel.
“Once I introduced out Gershwin’s manuscript for Porgy and Bess, he cried,” remembers Horowitz.
Inside weeks, Sondheim let Horowitz know he was bequeathing his papers to the Library of Congress. And the significance of defending them got here into sharp reduction when a fireplace broke out in Sondheim’s residence lower than two years later. It began in Sondheim’s residence workplace, the place the papers have been saved in cardboard bins on wood cabinets.
“It is the closest in my life I’ve ever come to seeing an precise miracle,” says Horowitz. “There is not any purpose why these manuscripts mustn’t have gone up in flames — paper in cardboard on wooden, toes from a fireplace that melted CDs. It really is miraculous.”
Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim in 1976.
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Now that the papers — greater than 5,000 objects together with lyric and music sketches, scores, unpublished scripts, and all types of miscellany — are secure within the Library’s assortment, Horowitz says he is endlessly being shocked by them though he is aware of Sondheim’s work nicely. He taped hours of interviews with the Broadway composer, which grew to become a e-book referred to as Sondheim on Music: Minor Particulars and Main Selections. That subtitle is a riff on a lyric in a track from Sunday within the Park with George. Horowitz says that sifting via the gathering has reminded him that Sondheim actually meant one other lyric in that track: “Artwork is not straightforward.”
“I am appreciating in a means I by no means had earlier than how a lot effort he put into all the things,” he says. “Simply web page after web page after web page …”
He pulls out a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for a single track — “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd — his present a few barber who slits his clients’ throats and a baker who has the brilliant thought of baking them into meat pies.
It is a track rife with rhyme and 31 variously tasty victims, however Horowitz factors out that there are a lot of, many extra within the lyric sketches (scribe, cook dinner, web page, farmer, baker, driver, gigolo, mason, scholar) that did not make it into the track. “I added them up, and there have been 158 that he’d thought of.”
He thumbs via the sketches, scribbled in longhand utilizing Blackwing pencils on 8 ½ x 14” lined, yellow authorized pads, for one specific deserted couplet – “everyone shaves besides rabbis and riff-raff.”
“I simply love the truth that he got here up with that.”
The Library of Congress’ new Stephen Sondheim assortment contains many pages of lyric sketches for the track “A Little Priest” from the musical Sweeney Todd. In his notes, Sondheim brainstormed dozens of doubtless tasty victims for the demon barber of fleet road, most of whom by no means made it into the track.
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
Subsequent, Horowitz pulls out sheet music the place these lyric sketches are written extra formally as precise lyrics. However that is nonetheless an interim step, earlier than a ultimate piano rating of the track, adopted by web page after web page of typescripts of lyrics.
“In concept the track is finished, however he is nonetheless engaged on it,” marvels Horowitz, “and modifying it and altering a single phrase or a phrase. It is the perspiration behind the inspiration.”
“I imply right here,” he says, pointing to a line handwritten on a typed lyric sheet, “he is written in ‘we now have some shepherd’s pie peppered with precise shepherd‘ — one of many nice traces, however he is inserting it. He by no means allow them to go till the present opened, or typically even after they opened. At all times making an attempt to excellent issues.”
That is a behavior his papers counsel Sondheim developed in the beginning. There are tantalizing hints of his thought processes going all the best way again to his highschool musical, By George, which he wrote whereas attending George College, a Quaker boarding college in Bucks County, Pa., in 1946.
This system lists 21 songs, together with “Meet You on the Donut,” “Pet Love,” and “Wallflower’s Waltz.”
The papers additionally embody a piano sonata he wrote in faculty, a track he despatched unsolicited to Judy Garland, a private birthday tune he penned as a premium for a PBS fundraiser, a remedy for Breakdown, a play, or possibly a TV present that he wrote with Larry Gelbart, his A Humorous Factor Occurred on the Method to the Discussion board collaborator, and many different miscellany together with a “buzzing track.”
All of this can likely be grist for a lot of a doctoral dissertation. As will a exceptional inner monologue — by no means spoken or sung — that he penned for Glynis Johns, the main girl in A Little Evening Music. It is for the scene the place she sings the preferred track Sondheim ever wrote: “Ship within the Clowns” — two pages of stream of consciousness for the actress about what her character is considering and feeling. One web page is what she’s making an attempt to speak within the scene to her unhappily married longtime lover. The opposite is what she’s considering to herself.
This is a little bit of what she needs her lover to appreciate: “I will inform you why you are right here: You’ve got an ungainly feeling as a result of you do not know you are trapped. You suppose you’ve got made your mattress and it’s important to lie in it. The toughest human factor to do is sever a relationship. I can not fireplace my accountant. Additionally, you prefer to undergo which all of us have a capability to do.”
And that is what she’s considering to herself: “It was good that we did not get married again then. I used to be too busy on different issues, and also you was a robust and willful man. Recklessness has its time and so has seriousness. You’ve got lastly been laid low with tremors of feeling above the navel!”
“Why did not he write that line within the track?” I’m wondering aloud. “Would not sing nicely,” Horowitz laughs.
The primary web page of Stephen Sondheim’s manuscript for the hit track “Ship within the Clowns” from A Little Evening Music (1973).
Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
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Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, Stephen Sondheim Assortment, Music Division
And the gathering is not simply wealthy in lyric sketches. “I do not suppose I’ve ever seen a composer, even a classical composer, who does as a lot music sketching as he does,” Horowitz says as he walks to a piano to play a number of examples. Those he picks all have notes that come out of a track’s key signature in ways in which must sound odd, however that as a substitute make the lyrics that sit atop them sound conversational.
Horowitz finds it comforting that Sondheim’s musings and music will now reside on Library of Congress cabinets the place they are often in a type of symbiotic dialog with the close by collections of George Gershwin, who impressed him, and Oscar Hammerstein who mentored him. Additionally with the collections of composers Sondheim impressed and mentored — say, Lease‘s creator Jonathan Larson, who stored “notes about conversations he had with Sondheim after Sondheim noticed issues he’d completed.”
“I prefer to think about them whispering to one another at evening,” smiles Horowitz.
Whispering, little doubt, in regards to the artwork of placing artwork collectively, little by little.
