No one instilled words and music with more wit, wisdom and warmth than Stephen Sondheim.
The composer and lyricist died Friday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut at age 91, according to the Associated Press.
according to the New York Times and Washington Post. Sondheim's death was sudden, his lawyer and friend F. Richard Pappas told the New York Times. The day before, Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury.
Sondheim was one of the most imitated and inimitable musical theater artists of his generation, a one-man bridge between Broadway’s golden age and the best of what followed. With groundbreaking musicals such as "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," "Company," "Follies" and "Sunday in the Park with George," Sondheim redefined the American art form without ever losing sight of the fundamentals that made it great: Compelling stories driven by unforgettable songs.
In Sondheim’s case, those songs could be daunting for the musicians who played and sang them, marked as they were by winding chromatic paths and dissonant edges that reinforced the rich, often stark drama of his shows. But while it was a running joke that Sondheim didn't write a tune you could hum, his music was tonal and sumptuously melodic.
As a lyricist, Sondheim earned attention for his cleverness and erudition, but it was his emotional acuity that most astonished and lingered. A protégé of Oscar Hammerstein II, whom he described as a surrogate father, he never sacrificed feeling for cerebral flash and always let his characters dictate the manner and substance of expression.
Two of his most memorable ballads, "Not While I’m Around" from "Sweeney Todd" and "No One Is Alone" from 1987’s "Into the Woods," were sung to children in the shows; and his accounts of the most vexing adult dilemmas could be shatteringly plain and direct. “You said you loved me, or were you just being kind?” a character asks in "Losing My Mind," from "Follies". Has any lyric summed up romantic self-doubt more succinctly or witheringly?
