‘A privilege and a great pleasure': inside the 5,000-item Stephen Sondheim collection

The Guardian

6 days ago

Mark Horowitz had done his homework before Stephen Sondheim came to visit. He filled the room with scores by Bartók, Brahms, Copland and Rachmaninoff; manuscripts in the hand of Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. 'The last thing I brought him out was the manuscript for Gershwin's Porgy and Bess,' Horowitz recalls. 'That's when he started to cry.'
The 'show and tell' of Sondheim's favourite composers, mentors and collaborators at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1993 planted a seed. It convinced him, Horowitz believes, that his papers would be in good company at the world's biggest library. 'Shortly after that he said he was going to be changing his will and he in fact did. He sent me a printout of the paragraph in his will that left his manuscripts and things to the library.'
Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of 91 and his bequest is now fulfilled. The library has acquired about 5,000 items including manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks, and scrapbooks that provide an unrivalled window to the mind of the man some called the Shakespeare of musical theatre.
Among them are hundreds of music and lyric sketches of Sondheim's well-known works as well as drafts of songs that were cut from shows or never made it to a production's first rehearsal. Dozens of scrapbooks hold theatre programmes, clippings and opening night telegrams.
On a Tuesday afternoon, the Guardian is ushered into the library's inner sanctum for another Horowitz 'show and tell'. The senior music specialist has laid several cardboard boxes on a table, opening them to reveal sheet music and other papers graced by Sondheim's pencil.
'I love his hand, which I think is just gorgeous,' observes Horowitz, a longtime admirer and acquaintance of the winner of eight Tony awards, including a special Tony for lifetime achievement. 'This intimacy with the process is a privilege and a great pleasure.'
Sitting prominently are weathered spiral notebooks documenting some of Sondheim's musical efforts while a student at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are music exercises, tunes and early compositions like the sheet music from his college musical, Phinney's Rainbow, along with a programme from his high school musical, By George, written when he was 15.
The crown jewels are manuscripts for some of Sondheim's most celebrated shows including Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, as well as lesser-known works such as his plays and screenplays.
Horowitz flicks through a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for A Little Priest, a duet where Sweeney, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett gleefully plan to dispose of his murder victims by baking their flesh into pies to sell at Mrs Lovett's failing pie shop. It uses clever wordplay and puns about professions and social classes, imagining how 31 different flavours would suit various pies.
Here is a master wordsmith at work. 'One of the things he writes in the margins is lists of people who might be baked into the pies: cook, butler, page, sailor, tailor, actor, barber, driver, crier, gigolo. I went through the pages and counted them and I came up with 158 different professions that he considered as types of people.'
Horowitz points to an abandoned idea: 'Somewhere on this page is rabbi and the thing I get a kick out of is that then, a few pages later, he actually turns it into a couplet: 'Everybody shaves except rabbis and riff-raff'.'
Horowitz reaches into a box and produces lyric sketches for Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, along with a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the character Desirée when she sings it. The most popular song that Sondheim ever wrote was also one of the quickest to turn around.
Horowitz explains: 'Basically in 24 hours he wrote his hit song whereas for most of his songs it took about two weeks, certainly for the longer numbers. There are 40 pages of sketches for Priest; I think there are nine pages here for Send in the Clowns.
'One of the reasons was they'd already been in rehearsal so he knew almost everything about the show and particularly about Glynis Johns and her voice. He always described it as a light, silvery voice, which was very pleasant but she couldn't sustain notes.
'He wrote it specifically for her voice. It's very short phrases, which is why they're questions. 'Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?' They cut off quickly. It was written for this character, for this place in the show, for this actress, for this voice, and knowing all that made it much easier than it would be otherwise.'
The volume of work for each show seemed to increase, from three sheet music boxes for Company to nine for Sunday in the Park with George and 12 for Into the Woods. 'I don't know if it was because things got harder for him or he was more hard on himself,' Horowitz observes.
'There's no question that he was literally a genius but seeing the vast amount of perspiration in addition to the inspiration – it's one thing to be witty and clever but to see how much went into refining and making everything as perfect and specific as possible is sort of staggering.'
The collection also contains materials related to Sondheim's plays and screenplays, such as draft scripts for The Last of Sheila, and a commercial he wrote for The Simpsons when he was a guest on the show. Three boxes of specialty songs include birthday songs he wrote for friends Leonard Bernstein, Hal Prince and others.
There are drafts of variations on the lyrics to I'm Still Here from Follies that Sondheim wrote for the singer and actor Barbra Streisand at her request. Horowitz rummages through a folder to find a 1993 fax from Streisand listing personal traits she wanted included such as 'my name – shorten it', 'nails – too long', 'perfectionist', 'opinionated – big mouth', 'feminist', 'liberal', 'don't want to perform live'. He comments: 'She's being fairly candid here about the things that people criticise her for and suggesting he include them in what he writes.'
Sondheim primarily worked with pencil and paper for his music and lyric writing, even though he was 'very computer proficient' and at one point considered writing video games. He made his first donation to the library in 1995: a vast record collection of about 13,000 albums accompanied by a hand-typed card catalogue. He also sat for a series of interviews with Horowitz in 1997.
To Horowitz, who produced a 70th birthday celebration concert for Sondheim in 2000, he was the artist who made him believe that musical theatre was 'something important and something worthy of a life's study and a life's pursuit'. He was always intimidated by Sondheim in person but found him to be unfailingly kind and generous.
He has fond memories of working on a production of Merrily We Roll Along at Arena Stage in Washington DC in 1990. Sondheim borrowed Horowitz's rhyming dictionary as he was writing new lyrics for some of the songs. 'When he handed it back to me, he said, 'Just so you know, I put in some missing words,' which he had in fact done.'
Recalling another incident from that production, he says: 'They had just done a run through with the orchestra and he was talking in the house to the producer, who was a very intimidating fellow I did not particularly like, and one of the musicians came up and was standing by the side, waiting very patiently, but this producer whipped around and said: 'Yes, what do you want?'
'The guy said: 'I'm sorry, I was just wondering if there's going to be another run through without the orchestra so I can sit and see the show?' The producer was very dismissive and said: 'I don't know, we'll see.' Sondheim whipped around and said, 'How dare you? Do you know how lucky you are that you have a musician who cares and wants to see the show?' This guy withered a bit and it was very gratifying to me.'
Horowitz credits Sondheim with changing the perception of musical theatre in academia. Previously 'looked down upon by music departments and theatre departments', Sondheim's work has led to 'an explosion of scholarship in musical theatre' because it 'is that important and that good and that serious'.
The Library of Congress aims to be a one-stop shop for researchers. The Sondheim collection joins existing archives of collaborators and mentors such as Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers. Sondheim encouraged Hal Prince and Arthur Laurents to donate their collections to the library. The Jonathan Larson collection includes notes from Sondheim's feedback.
Yet the precious Sondheim collection was nearly lost. In 1995, there was a fire in his home office at 246 East 49th Street in New York, where the manuscripts were kept in cardboard boxes on wooden shelves.
Horowitz recalls: 'When I went back afterwards, if you lifted the manuscripts out of the boxes, there were singe marks outlining where the paper sat in the boxes. Even now, as we're going through the collection, we're finding smoke damage on the edges of manuscript. Why they didn't go up in flames, I don't know. It truly is the closest I've ever seen in my life to a miracle.'