Who was Stephen Sondheim?(Stephen Sondheim, Legend of Musical Theater on Broadway, Dead at 91) Wiki, Bio, Age,Death,Family,Facebook,Spouse,Net Worth, Instagram, Twitter & Quick Facts

Stephen Sondheim Wiki

Stephen Sondheim Biography

Who was Stephen Sondheim ?

Stephen Sondheim, legendary composer, lyricist and theatrical composer, has died. He was 91 years old.

Stephen Sondheim, one of the songwriting titans of Broadway history, whose music and lyrics raised and restored the artistic standard of the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was 91 years old.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. One of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, Sondheim was praised for having “reinvented the American musical” with … Wikipedia

How old was Stephen Sondheim ?

March 22, 1930, New York, New York, United States

Career

Early in his incomparable career, Sondheim wrote the lyrics for the classic musicals West Side Story, which premiered in 1957, and Gypsy two years later.

Sondheim would go on to compose the music and lyrics for such enduring works as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum from 1962, along with Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in the 1962s. 1970..

The following decade saw Sondheim remain more than relevant on the Gran Vía Blanca, with entries including Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods.

In the 1990s, Sondheim continued to excel in his field, creating two of the boldest and most innovative musicals of his career: Assassins in 1990 and Passion in 1994.

Death

November 26, 2021 .

News of Sondheim’s death was announced Friday, the same day he passed away at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, by his attorney and friend F. Richard Pappas, according to the New York Times. The day before, Pappas said that Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends in Roxbury.

Sondheim, who was briefly incapacitated in early 2020 when he tore a ligament in a fall at his Connecticut home, died suddenly, the Texas attorney, Rick Pappas, told the New York Times.

His lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, announced the death. He said he did not know the cause, but added that Mr. Sondheim was not known to be ill and that the death was sudden.

Alone with mother

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930 in Manhattan and first lived on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, owned a clothing company; her mother, the former Etta Janet Fox, known as Foxy, worked for her husband as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10 years old. He was sent for a time to military school and then to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 years old, Stephen, his only son, lived mainly with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life. life. (His father remarried his and had two more children).

In the years following her parents’ separation, Sondheim recalled for her biography, her mother treated him exactly as she had treated her husband: she sexually flirting with him on the one hand, belittling him for the other. As an adult, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; However, in the 1970s, the night before his heart was operated, he wrote a letter to her son and delivered it to her personally. She said, in part, “The only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you.”

Yet her mother was responsible for the most formative relationship in her son’s life. She was friends with Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; their son Jamie befriended young Steve, and when the Hammersteins moved to a Pennsylvania farm, Stephen, who had started playing the piano at age 7, visited and stayed for the summer.

Later, his mother bought a house nearby, and Stephen was so often at the Hammersteins’ that he considered himself a member of the family. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor: “It was because of my adolescent admiration for him that I became a composer,” wrote Sondheim in “Finishing the Hat,” though he later evaluated Hammerstein as a lyricist of great ability, but often faulty work. Hammerstein viciously criticized the boy’s first musical, written at the George School, as “the worst thing I’ve ever read,” adding: “I didn’t say I wasn’t talented, I said it was terrible. And if you want to know why it’s terrible, you I will tell “.

Tony Awards

He received eight Tony Awards, including a Special Lifetime Tony Award, and in 2010 the Henry Miller Theater was renamed the Stephen Sondheim Theater on West 43rd Street in New York City in his honor.

In 1985, he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Sunday in the Park with George, an accolade he shared with the musical’s writer, director, and frequent contributor, James Lapine.

Sondheim was born in 1930 in New York and became an obedient piano student from the age of 7 or 8. “It was the kind of thing a good Jewish kid did, and my parents used to take me out and show me off.” he told the theater legend to PEOPLE in a 1976 feature film.

After her mother Etta Janet Fox divorced Herbert Sondheim, a prominent New York dress maker, and settled on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Sondheim began to fall in love with music, mainly because her neighbors were the Hammersteins. “[Academy Award-winning lyricist] Oscar [Hammerstein II] was one of the most remarkable men I have ever met: generous, witty and sharp-tongued, and it was he who encouraged my interest in music and theater.” He said. he said he.

Of his own work, Sondheim said at the time: “My main goal is to tell a story, and if I tell it well, I tell it with resonance, the inferences made will resolve themselves.”

Sondheim’s rich and prolific work has served as the basis for several praised films and theatrical revivals, including Tim Burton’s Oscar-winning film adaptation of Sweeney Todd with Johnny Depp, 2014’s Into the Woods starring Meryl Streep, and the Broadway revival. Sunday in 2017. The park with George with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Sondheim is survived by his partner Jeff Romley

Currently, a new version of his musical Company is opening on Broadway, and a new film adaptation of West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg, will premiere on December 10.

Earlier this month, Sondheim was present at Company’s first preview after the theater hiatus due to COVID-19. He received a dedication from star Patti LuPone along with a standing ovation from the audience.

Bradley Whitford also stars as Sondheim in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s recently released film Tick, Tick … Boom !, about the life of the late Rent creator and composer Jonathan Larson.

Sondheim is credited with being a highly influential figure in the life of Larson, whose song “Sunday” takes a riff from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George.

Box office fights

For all these reasons, the haughty ambition, the seriousness of the subject, the melodic experimentation, the emotional discord, Sondheim’s shows, while mostly receiving critical acclaim, were almost never popular hits. He suffered from the reputation that he did not write humble tunes and that his outlook was austere, if not grim. For some of the same reasons, not all artists adapted to his shows, although over the years several well-known singers became his staunch performers, including Elaine Stritch, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Cook, and Bernadette Peters.

Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the effervescent and enjoyable musical experience or happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to expect. Nor did it provide them with the opulent spectacle, hymn score, or melodramatic storytelling that became the dominant musical theater style of the 1980s and 1990s with the arrival from Britain of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mega hits “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera”. , ”And“ Les Misérables ”and“ Miss Saigon ”by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, followed by Disney’s corporate productions.

Rhymes and rhythms

His 2010 artistic memoir, “Finishing the Hat” (the name was taken from the title of a song on “Sunday in the Park”; a continuation, “Look, I Made a Hat”, was published in 2011), was published in many forms an introduction to the craft of lyrical writing. In it, she berated herself for numerous sins, including things like adding unnecessary adjectives to rhythmically complete lines and paying insufficient attention to a melodic line. In the song “Somewhere” from “West Side Story”, for example, the highest note of the opening phrase is in the second beat, which means that in the well-known lyrics, “There is a place for us”, the emphasis is in the word “a”.

“The least important word on the opening line is the one that gets the most important grade,” he wrote.

In another example from “West Side Story,” he complained about a stanza from “America,” which was sung by a choir of young Puerto Rican women.

“The words must sit in the music so that they are clear to the audience,” he told his biographer Meryle Secrest for his 1998 book, “Stephen Sondheim: A Life.” “You don’t get a chance to hear the lyrics twice, and if it doesn’t sit and bounce when the music bounces and go up when the music goes up, the audience is confused.”

In “America,” he added, “he had this wonderful quatrain that said, ‘I like being in America / Good for me in America / All for free in America / For a small fee in America.’ The little ‘for a little fee’ was my zinger, except that the ‘for’ is accented and ‘small fee’ is impossible to say so quickly, which is why it was ‘For a smafee in America.’ No one knew what! meant! ”

However, what most distinguished Sondheim’s lyrics was that they were generally character-driven, often exploring a psyche that expressed deeply felt emotional ambivalence, anguish, or conflict. In “Send In the Clowns,” for example, he famously voiced the complaint about romantic opportunities largely lost in the language of the theater, because the character who sings it is an aging actress: