How Sondheim Found His Sound

1 Sondheim the Classicist

1 — — — — — Sondheim the Classicist The American musical theater is ‹lled 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 ‹lled 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 a‹cionado 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 ‹ve—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,”1 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.2 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 for- ward, well before Hammerstein would take him on as a dramatic apprentice. Early on in our acquaintance . . . [Hammerstein] confessed to being baf›ed 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 Proko‹ev and into the thickets of Stravinsky.3 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 ‹ve-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.”4 The Library of Congress received most of this collection , which was estimated to be between eleven thousand and thirteen thousand records.5 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 ‹re that damaged Sondheim’s of‹ce. 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...