How Sondheim Found His Sound

Introduction

— — — — — Introduction As he and Mark Eden Horowitz wound up their discussion on the musical Assassins, Stephen Sondheim offered a description of himself and of his working method. I’ve discovered over a period of years that essentially I’m a playwright who writes with song, and that playwrights are actors. And what I do is I act. So what I’ll do [later today] is: I’ll go upstairs, and I’ll get back into the character of Wilson Mizner, and I’ll start singing to myself. It’ll take me a while to make that transition, because it’s been a couple of days since I’ve been Wilson, but I’ll get upstairs, and I’ll be Wilson.1 Upstairs, of course, refers to the brownstone in Turtle Bay, not far from the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. When Sondheim moved in, Katharine Hepburn, who lived next door, complained about the duration and volume of his piano playing. Sondheim began his creative life as a pianist. Of his own volition, he composed; he wrote lyrics out of necessity . And acting for him, in a traditional sense, was more or less limited to college. Acting for Sondheim also included a fair amount of vicarious projection , given his well-documented love of ‹lm. “I think cinematically when I’m writing songs, and I stage them . . . in my head. And I realize that I stage them like a movie.”2 Not only does Sondheim act when he composes, but he also directs the action. Sondheim’s comments to Horowitz about Passion, the character of Fosca, and the actress who played her further expand what Sondheim meant about being a playwright, composer, and director. When Donna Murphy auditioned for us, we gave her [“Fosca’s Entrance”]. Her audition performance could have gone on stage that night. She’s intelligent. There’s something in her that identi‹ed with the character right away, and I write careful scenes. I say this with no modesty at all: When I’m writing dramatic stuff, I’m a playwright. This is a worked-out scene, and I can instruct the actress how to play this scene, and the music is part of the dialogue. I can tell her why the music gets quick here, why it gets slow here, why there’s a ritard there, why there’s a so-called key change here, why it suddenly goes up and down—all of that—because I have reasons. Now the actress may choose to ignore them, but Donna, who was just auditioning, did not have a chance to ask me, but she understood it. And this piece is psychologically very well laid out, and all it takes is a good actress to understand it exactly. It’s one of the reasons why actors like to sing my stuff, because I’m essentially a playwright in song, and I’m not asking them to sing songs, I’m asking them to play scenes. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in 32 bars or 33 bars or 109 bars or six minutes. One of the reasons it convinces you is because psychologically it’s true.3 Marni Nixon, the voice behind so many sopranos in Hollywood musicals , made a similar observation about the psychological truth in a Sondheim song. After comparing his music to modern art, where context helps to determine meaning, she spoke of how “his melodies and his lyrics are so wed together. It’s almost like they have to be done the way they’re set up on the page. That doesn’t mean that you have to do them personality-less or anything. But you ‹nd the essence of the song like Mozart: what is musically correct becomes dramatically correct. You ‹nd the character through the song.”4 Such a discovery of character through song is possible because Sondheim has set himself the task of “do[ing] things musically to . . . make the character.”5 So what does Sondheim draw upon when he goes upstairs to make a character? His training as a pianist, theorist, and composer; his knowledge of classical music and of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood song; his life in the theater, onstage, backstage, and in the pit; his love of ‹lm, which gave him two of the happiest moments of his creative career:6 all of these in›uences factor into his creation of a character through song. And all of these in›uences can be seen in Sondheim...