Broadway composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim, who helped develop American musical theater beyond pure entertainment and reach new artistic heights with works like “West Side Story,” “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd,” said Friday He died in the early hours at his home in Roxbury. , Connecticut, aged 91, the New York Times reported.
Sondheim, whose eight lifetime Tony Awards surpassed any other composer’s total, began learning the art of musical theater when he was just a teenager from “The Sound of Music” songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II.
“Hamilton” producer Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, has called him musical theater’s greatest songwriter.
Sondheim’s most successful musicals include “Into the Woods”, which opened on Broadway in 1987 and used children’s fairy tales to solve adult obsessions, and the 1979 thriller “Sweeney Todd” about a murderous barber in London. about whose victims are served as meat pies, and the 1962 “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” a vaudeville-style comedy set in Ancient Rome.
Sondheim said in a 2013 interview with National Public Radio, “I love theater as much as music, and the whole idea of reaching out to audiences and making them laugh, make them cry – just make them feel – is paramount to me. ” ,
Many of Sondheim’s hits were turned into films, including the 2014 film “Into the Woods” starring Meryl Streep, and “Sweeney Todd” with Johnny Depp in 2007. A new film version of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote lyrics to the music of Leonard Bernstein, opens next month.
His songs were celebrated for their sharp wit and insight into modern life and voicing complex characters, but few of them made the pop charts.
‘Joker’ hit
However, he had a hit with the Grammy-winning “Send in the Clown” from his 1973 musical “A Little Night Music”. It was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Judy Collins.
One of Sondheim’s biggest wins was his Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park with George”, about the 19th-century French neo-impressionist artist Georges Seurat.
As Sondheim garnered accolades, New York City’s Broadway theater industry underwent many changes. It had a significant role in American culture during the 1950s, with many Broadway songs making the pop charts, but rock music took hold of the masses in the 1960s.
Composer Mark N. Grant wrote in his book “The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical” that gradually, the musical borrowed material from television and films.
Sondheim shared the view that Broadway had experienced decline, expressing repeatedly in interviews.
“There are so many forms of entertainment, theater is becoming more marginalised,” he told the British newspaper The Times in 2012.
But Broadway musicals also became more artistic and Sondheim was instrumental in their development, critics said. He explored such important themes as political murders in “Assassins”, the human need for family and dragging dysfunctional ties into Western imperialism in “Into the Woods”, social inequality in “Sweeney Todd” and “Pacific Overtures”.
He also developed new ways to present plays. Instead of telling a story from beginning to end, he jumped back and forth in time to explore a single theme. It was called “concept music”.
Broadway audiences were introduced to Sondheim in 1957 when he wrote the lyrics for “West Side Story” to accompany Leonard Bernstein’s musical, and it became an American classic. The story about the love affair between a Puerto Rican girl, Maria, and a white boy, Tony, in the working class Manhattan in 1961 was turned into an Oscar-winning film. The central characters expressed their fascination in the songs “Maria,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight.”
conflict with mom
Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City to wealthy Jewish parents who worked in fashion. He described his early childhood as a lonely, with servants as his main company.
His parents separated when he was 10 years old, Sondheim moved with his mother to rural Pennsylvania, where he bought a farm. He later said that his mother took out her anger on him over the divorce. He found a surrogate family in the nearby home of Hammerstein and his wife, Dorothy.
Hammerstein, who teamed up with fellow Richard Rodgers to sing the classic musical “Oklahoma!” and produced “The Sound of Music”, taught teen Sondheim to write musical theatre.
After Sondheim became famous, he mentored others on Broadway. When Miranda began working on a rap musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton, Sondheim encouraged and criticized him. The play became a smash hit on Broadway in 2015.
In box office success, Sondheim fell short of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber of “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats”, with whom Sondheim shared a birthday.
Sondheim pushed audience boundaries, which occasionally resulted in box office flops.
Some of his least commercially successful plays were praised by critics. They included 1976’s “Pacific Overtures,” which depicted Japan during the era of Western colonialism, and his 1990 Off-Broadway production “Killer” about real-life figures who each portrayed a US president. was determined to kill.
Sondheim had many admirers in the academic world. In 1994, five years after the University of Oxford in England named him as visiting professor of drama, a quarterly journal called the Sondheim Review was established to examine his work.
His devotees celebrated the sharp irony of his lyrics, which he described as commenting on everything from the limits of America’s melting pot to the negative side of marriage.
Sondheim had a distinctive piece of wisdom in these lines from “The Ladies Who Lunch” in his 1970 musical “Company”: “Here’s to the girls who play the wife / Aren’t they too much? / Home Keep but hold a copy of ‘Life’ / Just to keep in touch.”
According to a 2000 profile in The New York Times Magazine, Sondheim, who was gay, did not live with a romantic partner until the age of 61, in which she stated that her romantic relationships were rarely intense or long-lasting. .
read all breaking news, breaking news And coronavirus news Here. follow us on Facebook, Twitter And Wire,