Latest news with #manuscripts
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A privilege and a great pleasure': inside the 5,000-item Stephen Sondheim collection
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.'
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A privilege and a great pleasure': inside the 5,000-item Stephen Sondheim collection
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.'
Fox News
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Museum unveils 1,300-year-old monk doodles revealing surprising complaints about hangovers and weather
Newly displayed 1,300-year-old doodles suggest that medieval monastic life wasn't all about solemn chants and holy scripture. Now on view at the National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, the scribbles are part of the "Words on the Wave: Ireland and St. Gallen in Early Medieval Europe" exhibit until October 24. In a release shared with Fox News Digital, the museum confirmed that the medieval-focused exhibition features over 100 objects and free admission for visitors. Seventeen ancient manuscripts, on loan from Switzerland's seventh-century Abbey Library of St. Gall, will be on view for visitors. One of the exhibit's most curious books is called Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae, which contains "thousands of scribbles in the margins by monks in the Old Irish language," according to the museum. Though the book was written in the sixth century, the doodles were penned most likely by northern Irish monks in the 850s. "[They] offer us a rare and very real glimpse into the daily lives and personalities of early medieval Irish monks." "It was probably written in the monasteries of Nendrum or Bangor in the North of Ireland but was on the Continent within a decade of being written," the press release noted. The museum also said the books feature "witty banter" – but you'd need to understand Old Irish to get the jokes. Curator Matthew Seaver shared some of the highlights of the doodles with The Guardian. One monk wrote that he was "ale-killed" — or having a hangover. Other friars scribbled complaints about cold weather and poor-quality materials. "New parchment, bad ink. O I say nothing more," one humorous scribbling reveals. In another entry, a monk worried about a Viking raid. The writing reads, "Bitter is the wind tonight, it tosses the ocean's white hair: I fear not the coursing of a clear sea by the fierce heroes from Lothlend." Seaver noted that the scribbles are "full of human voices, humor, frustration and resilience." "[They] offer us a rare and very real glimpse into the daily lives and personalities of early medieval Irish monks," the historian said. Also on display is an 8th-century brooch, a Viking sword and Ireland's oldest and largest container of sacred books, called the Lough Kinale Book Shrine. In a statement, NMI chair Cathal O'Donoghue said he was "honored to be entrusted with such a significant loan." "This is the most significant exhibition at the National Museum, Kildare Street in decades," O'Donoghue said. "The exhibition of the manuscripts provides a unique context for the display of artifacts from our own collection, many of which have recently been conserved and are on public display for the first time."
SBS Australia
19-07-2025
- Science
- SBS Australia
Libraries usually like bookworms - but not these ones
The Benedictine Archabbey has stood for the last 1,000 years, perched on top of a hill overlooking the town of Pannonhalma in Hungary. Its library houses the country's oldest collection of books as well as many of its earliest and most important written records, including a complete Bible from the 13th century. It also houses several hundred manuscripts from before the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, and tens of thousands of books from the 16th century. The current director is Ilona Ásványi. "Every day, I experience being the guardian and caretaker, and custodian of this very valuable collection of books." The Abbey library is said to have survived centuries of conflicts, including the Ottoman invasion of the 16th century. But now it's facing a new problem: drugstore beetles have infested about a quarter of the Archabbey's 400,000 precious works. The Benedictine abbey is governed by a set of rules that have been in use for nearly 15 centuries - a code that obliges the library to do everything it can to save its vast book collection. Accordingly, Zsófia Edit Hajdu has been brought in as the chief restorer. "We have been working mostly on mould damage in both depositories and in open collections for 30 years, but we've never encountered such a degree of infestation before. Usually, we see problems of mould in warehouses and in other collections. But due to global warming, it is expected that more and more insect infestations will appear." The drugstore beetle, also known as the bread beetle, is often found among foodstuffs like grains, flour, spices, and other dried products. But they are also attracted to the gelatine and starch-based adhesives found in old books. Ms Hajdu believes the effects of climate change have played a role in spurring the beetle infestation. "Higher temperatures are favourable for the life of insects. They are quite inactive below 20 degrees Celsius. Below that, their activity slows down; above that, they're more active. The persistently greater heat leads to more life cycles per year than in cooler periods. In warmer conditions, the reproduction cycle of the drugstore beetle can be up to four per year compared to only two in cooler weather.' The beetle invasion was first detected during a routine cleaning of the library, when employees noticed unusual layers of dust on the shelves and then saw that holes had been burrowed into some of the book spines. Upon opening the volumes, burrow holes could be seen in the paper where the beetles had chewed through. Ilona Ásványi says everyone is heartbroken at the prospect of losing books because of the infestation. "When I see a book chewed up by a beetle or infested in any other way, I feel that no matter how many copies are published and how replaceable the book is, a piece of culture has been lost.' But the Abbey's restoration workers are trying hard to avoid that possibility. They're removing roughly 100,000 hand-bound books from the shelves and carefully placing them in crates. Zsófia Hajdu says so many books are being taken down because the infestation has been detected in several parts of the library. "This is an advanced insect infestation which has been detected in several parts of the library, so the entire collection is classified as infected and must be treated all at the same time. We have to remove all the books from the shelves, put them into boxes, then into hermetically sealed plastic sacks. Inside them, an anoxic disinfection process takes place. Basically, we create an oxygen-free environment in which insects perish.' Once that process is done - and before being reshelved - each book will be individually inspected and vacuumed, and any book damaged by the pests will be set aside for later restoration work. The abbey hopes to reopen the library at the beginning of next year.
Khaleej Times
30-06-2025
- General
- Khaleej Times
Dubai: How specialists give stories from the past 'a new life'
In a dim corner of the Sharjah Archaeology Museum, a man works at fragmented pieces of paper. The tattered pages are at least hundreds of years old, obtained by the Juma Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage. The technician, who came to Sharjah for a visit as part of the Juma Majid team, masterfully and delicately works at the manuscript, preserving each fragment of paper and reuniting it with the page. The oldest manuscript inside the centre dates to the 4th century AH, signed by prominent Islamic scholar Imam Malik. 'Historical manuscripts and documents have a long history, which goes back hundreds of years, up to 1,000 or 1,200 years,' Bassam Daghestani, head of preservation, treatment and restoration department at the Juma Almajid Centre for Culture and Heritage, told Khaleej Times. 'During this long history, they are exposed to injuries and damages, biological injuries, and natural chemical injuries.' Located in Deira, the Juma Almajid Centre for Culture and Heritage primarily involves restoring historical manuscripts and documents back to their original form, in hopes of giving them 'a new life' for another 200 or 300 years, Daghestani said. How are manuscripts restored? Daghestani explained that documents, books, and other manuscripts undergo a thorough process for restoration. It begins with first sterilising the piece of document to get rid of bacteria, insects, or other remaining debris. Specialists use environmentally friendly materials that do not harm humans, plants, animals, or the manuscript itself. After sterilisation, the specialists both dry cleans and wet cleans the manuscript. Next comes the fun part — manually restoring the manuscript. Using natural material that is similar to the original document, the specialist carefully adjoins them together. Finally, after restoration, a process called casting is done, which makes the entire document cohesive, and helps it return to the same style that was used in the past. 'The sewing threads, the silk threads, the stitching, the leather, the fabric has to be natural. Everything is the same as it was used in the past; we use it now in the same style,' Daghestani said. He added, 'After the casting is done, I take it to the warehouse. Storage is the most important thing. The warehouse must have regular conditions, from preservation, temperature, humidity, lighting, cleanliness, using special shelves for storing paper supplies. Here all the work of preservation, processing, and storage is done.' The time it takes to restore them generally varies, depending on the state of the manuscript found. Daghestani said it could take up to six months if the condition of the manuscript is especially dire, whereas it could take 10 days to restore if not. To preserve old books in your home library, Daghestani advises that they be stored at a regular temperature that is not too hot and not too cold. 'The most important thing is to keep it away from the sun's rays.
