Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Stephen Sondheim0:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1980, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

This week our cast away is the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

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Mr. Sondheim, how important have records been in your life? Very. I've been in I've been collecting records since I was seventeen. I have an enormous collection, mostly twentieth and nineteenth century music. And I particularly like obscure stuff. Did you find it hard to to narrow your choice down to eight? Oh, very hard. I w I decided to pick the pieces that would, I think, last me the longest, and I decided to be honest, so I've I've made a fairly plebeian list. Right. What's the first one? Well, the first one is uh I suppose the composer who's most influenced me, namely Ravel.

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I'm a fan of French music and a fan of his and one of the pieces I like best properly because I played it on the piano.

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is the Volsnoble sentimentale.

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Particularly the seventh one, because it's the most fun to play. And who's to play it?

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Oh well, this is the orchestral version. This is done by Anserme.

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The seventh of Rabel's Vals Noble Santimontal

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The Orchestra of the Swiss Romand conducted by Ansemeis.

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Now, you're a New Yorker, reasonably prosperous background.

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How much musical influence was there in your home?

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Very little. My father played the piano by ear and it was fun to listen to him play, and I used to follow his fifth finger when he would play the melodies with the right hand, and I would put my hand on his hand when I was a tiny kid.

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And I was uh pushed into piano lessons like all.

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Nice middle class Jewish boys were pushed into in those days. Now the story's been frequently told that you were a friend of Oscar Hammerstein's young son, and through Hammerstein you became obsessed by the musical theatre. Now Hammerstein, of course, was the lyricist of the Rogers and Hammerstein team.

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When you developed that interest, were words more important than music? It was simultaneous, really. I had been taking piano lessons, and I'd been in military school and taking organ lessons by the time I'd met Oscar, and I was equally interested, although it never occurred to me to make a career. I'm afraid what I was really interested in was neither words nor music, but the theatre. I think it's one of the reasons I did not become a concert composer, or whatever you call kind of composer who does not write for the theater. It's because I wanted to be whatever Oscar was, and he was a theater man. I think if he'd been a geologist, I would have been a geologist who played the piano on the side. In fact, you followed in his footsteps by writing a musical at a very young age indeed. Yes, I wrote one for school when I was 15, and he criticized it very seriously, and then set me on a course of writing different kinds of musicals to train myself. So by the time I was 21 and out of college, I'd had a thorough background. A very growing course.

Stephen Sondheim3:45

Was that head of

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Well, Grueling accepted it was such fun to do. Did he let you into the theatre during rehearsals of his own shows? Yes, I was his assistant on a show called Allegro, which was the third musical that they wrote and their first flop.

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And also their most interesting musical. It was experimental, and one of the reasons that it was a flop was that the audiences were unprepared to take it.

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It should have discouraged me from doing experimental work, but I think perversely it encouraged me. And I typed script form and fetched coffee and spent the summer luckily it was uh in rehearsal during the summer when I wasn't in school. Stayed with it till it opened out of town and then had to go back to college. Now you majored in music in college. You were awarded a fellowship. Yes. There was something called the Hutchinson Prize at Williams College was a New England college that I went to, a small one with a music department of just two men, but a really first rate teacher.

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who headed the department, whose name was Robert Barrow, and he encouraged me to try for this prize, and I got it, and it was a cash award that went on for two years and allowed me to study privately in New York, which I did with a composer named Milton Babbitt. What was the first

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Grown up show you wrote.

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It was a show called Saturday Night and it was an adaptation of an unproduced play and it was to be produced by the man who had produced Kiss Me Kate and he unfortunately died while we were

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In the middle of Backer's auditions, he had been very ill and it was not all that unexpected. But the rights to the piece then passed to his widow who really wasn't interested in producing, and so it all kind of disappeared. But it afforded me my first professional experience in that I had to play auditions for professional backers and for professional actors, and I also had to write professional songs. And then I had a small catalogue, too.

Stephen Sondheim5:19

Yeah.

Speaker 45:19

Uh

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A portfolio, let's put it that way, to demonstrate to producers around town. After that big disappointment, what did you do? What was the next move? Well, I had to earn a living, and so I went out to California and wrote some television scripts for a while. And then I luckily, through playing that stuff around, I came to the attention of Arthur Lawrence, who was about to embark on what turned out to be Westside Story.

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And they needed a lyric writer, and so he brought me to Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins.

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We spent two years and wrote West Side Story.

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Let's break off your second record, what shall that be?

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Well, one of the pieces that particularly impressed me when I was a kid, it was sort of my first exposure to what we could call contemporary music, meaning 20th century music, was the Bartalk Concerto for Orchestra. And I remember distinctly was the Fritz Reiner recording. I am incidentally not, though I'm a record collector and a music, let's put it buff, I'm not all that interested in performers and performing. So one performance doesn't mean an awful lot compared to another to me, not as much as it probably should. I don't probably listen carefully enough. So generally these records that I've picked are ones that these are the first performances I heard. The Reiner recording was the first I heard of the Bartalk, so for me it's the exemplary recording.

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An excerpt from the Bartock Concerto for orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

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Right, West Side story. Now this proposition

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was for a musical based on Romeo and Juliet, Leonard Bernstein's music, your lyrics, a Puerto Rican setting. Did you do any research into the way Puerto Ricans live? No, not at all. As a matter of fact, the only research done on that show was done by Jerome Robbins, who went to a gang dance.

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And this shows the the the foolishness, or often the foolishness, of doing research. And he picked up a specific from the gang dance that he thought would be very effective on the stage, namely that they all accepted roses from the girls at the dance, which they put into the cuffs of their pants.

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So Jerry thought this would be wonderfully effective on the stage, which theoretically it was until dress rehearsal.

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When they all started doing his choreography and the stage was awash with flying roses, with thorns cutting people right and left, and trampled flowers all over the stage, that went out with the dress rehearsal, and that was the one note of authenticity in the piece. We also knew that Arthur and I, Arthur Lawrence, who wrote the libretto, that the language that we would write, if we did any research,

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Arga, as you know, dates very quickly, and by the time the show got on, it would already be old-fashioned, so we made up our own street language. And the only

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researched street language that we did were words that were in kind of common currency that one knew would stay around for a while, like the word cool, which still exists because it was a jazz term and not a not a a particular street gang term.

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Uh otherwise uh Arthur uh uh and I uh particularly Arthur made up most of the language. In spite of which it was a Virismo musical. Yeah, it was a Virismo r musical, but I think one of the ways of making Virismo is to make your own. Surely. And a big success. Now your next show was also as a lyricist to Julia Stein's music in Gypsy. Neither of those shows were as successful as movies. What what are your views on that? Why was that? Westside was much more successful as a movie than it was as a show. Was it? Oh yes, it only ran for about a year and a half in New York, and the last six months were on what we call Twofers, two tickets for the price of one. It was for the most part very well received by the critics, though it won no awards. It didn't win the Tony Award or anything like that. It was considered much too sort of

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unpleasant and avant garde to be popular musical theater, and was sneered at by most of the Broadway community.

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And by most of the audiences too. But the movie was enormously successful. Gypsy is the reverse. Gypsy was quite successful, although not as successful as it should have been. Considering the reviews which were superb, it didn't run as long as one might have expected, partly because the subject struck people as unpleasant.

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Uh the movie was not a success at all. I think movie musicals are uh at best very shaky propositions. I think a musical for a movie has to be written for film. It should not be an adaptation of a stage piece. There's such different languages and um what holds one's attention through stage convention simply is uh boring enough.

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On film, I think. Did you work closely on the films? No, I did some rewriting for the lyrics of Westside Story and hung around shooting for about a week when they were shooting in New York, but otherwise, no. You had had a spell in in in Hollywood working on on television? Yeah, just television, yeah, but that's quite a different proposition. Mm-hmm.

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For your third record, what shall we have?

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Well, let's move into the area I'm particularly interested in, which is musicals.

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If there's one American musical that that has any chance, I think, of lasting more than a generation or so, it surely is Porgy and Best, which I think is a first rate work of art on every given count and a deeply moving piece.

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And rather than take one of the more familiar pieces of it, why don't we listen to a little bit of the trio near the end of the last act?

Speaker 411:01

Yeah.

Speaker 311:20

Where is

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The trio from the last act of Gershwin's Polkian best.

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An excerpt from the first complete recording conducted by Lehmann Engel.

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Now, your first show with your words and music, uh a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. It was a fairly knockabout sort of show. There was an aura of burlesque about it, but your music and lyrics were much more sophisticated somehow than the show. Was that deliberate? No, it wasn't deliberate, and the show's much more sophisticated than it seems. It is a very, very carefully written book. It is, in my opinion, the best farce ever written, and I include Fadeau's. It is much better plotted than Fadeau's farces. It is written very elegantly.

Stephen Sondheim11:50

No what

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Its feeling is that it was written over a weekend and just s slapped onto a stage. Any actor who's ever worked in it comes away with enormous admiration for it. Unfortunately, I was writing more of a salon score than I was a low comedy score, and I think I was influenced by the elegance of the script rather than by its essential low comedy. The result is that the score and the book don't quite match. The score is, as I say, a little a little more salon.

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Well, I do. That's been a grossly exaggerated. I don't do it very much anymore. I subscribed for years and still do to The Listener and enjoyed doing the puzzles a lot up until a few years ago when I thought I can't spend the rest of my time solving listener puzzles. You did, in fact, invent puzzles. You did the crossword puzzles for a magazine for quite a while. Yes, a magazine was founded in New York called New York Magazine in 1968, and they asked me to contribute a puzzle page. So I did one based on the listener puzzles, which I love because they each have a gimmick or a design. Some I invented entirely whole cloth myself for about a year and a half, and then I had to work on Company, which is a musical that I wrote in 1969.

Stephen Sondheim13:00

Yeah.

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So I stopped doing it. And I used to collect them. I still collect puzzle books, but I don't do them very often. Well, back to the theatre and back to your next show. Back, unfortunately, to a flop, your only real flop. Anyone can whistle. It's nice of you to say it's my only real flop, but that's not true. It's the shortest run.

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But I've had a number of flops.

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Then for Do I Hear a Waltz? You collaborated with the old master, Richard Rogers. W was he good to work with you? It was difficult. Um i it was partly my closeness with Hammerstein. You know, curious way got in the way. The reason I did the show was Hammerstein, when he was dying, asked me if uh he said that uh Rogers was going to feel

Presenter13:56

Very partnerless for a while, and if anything came up, he knew how much I didn't want to write just lyrics ever again, but he would uh he would greatly appreciate that's not the word he used, but that was the sentiment, certainly, if I would give a second consideration. Well, of course, I admire Roger's stuff enormously, and to work with a man like that was a privilege, and I thought I could learn something.

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And when this opportunity arose because the book was being written by Arthur Lawrence, with whom I'd had a number of successful collaborations.

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It seemed like a way of killing two birds with one stone, but in fact it taught me a lesson which is you must never, never, never write out anything out of anything but love.

Stephen Sondheim14:30

Never, never.

Presenter14:34

In the theater. It's just too much time and too much effort. You you must write something that you believe in, not something for other reasons. Right.

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What's your fourth record? One of the pieces that also I grew up with was uh the Brahm Second Piano Concerto. Piano concertos are sort of my favorite form of large scale concert music. I love the piano as an instrument. It is my instrument. It's the only instrument I know and the only instrument I know how to play.

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And the combination of piano and orchestra I've always found uh exhilarating.

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The Brahms is, I think, the noblest example, for me anyway, of the piano concerto, and the second piano concerto is is a particular favorite of mine.

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The opening of the last movement of the Brahms' second piano concerto, Horowitz, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

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You mentioned company. That was the beginning of your collaboration with uh Harold Prince, who's staged everything of yours since. Where did you meet him? Where how did that associate? Well, that wasn't the beginning of our collaboration. That was the beginning of our collaboration with him as a director and me as a writer. We had done uh Westside Story, which he produced, Forum, which he had produced. So it was not the beginning of our collaboration, so to speak. But it was certainly the closest we had worked together. And of course it's a different kind of collaboration when when he's a director than when he's a producer. We uh we had met uh opening night of South Pacific.

Speaker 416:25

Well that one's

Stephen Sondheim16:25

Dobby

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But I didn't really get to know him till he'd gotten out of the army.

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and was stage managing the show called Wonderful Town.

Speaker 416:56

Mm-hmm.

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And then we became friends. And um we always talked of working together, but in those days uh nobody knew that he really wanted to be a director, or a I a writer in fact, I think is what he wanted to be.

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And he was just a successful producer, as far as everybody knew.

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And then he bl blossomed into this uh first rate director.

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Well, after company you and he tackled a really big production follies.

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The music in that mainly pastiche writing, but the greatest partly pastiche. It was about fifty percent at the most pastiche and fifty percent not pastiche. It's very important because it dealt with two worlds, the emotions of the people involved and the world that they'd come from, namely show business. Excuse me for interrupting, but I it it is only partly pastiche.

Stephen Sondheim17:25

The grain of writing

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We

Stephen Sondheim17:38

Is it

Presenter17:41

Which must have been great fun to to to work in the style of Gershwin. Oh yes, I I was able to express my admiration for all the composers of musical theatre I've been brought up on, from Cole Porter to Gershwin to Rogers to DeSille, Brown and Henderson.

Speaker 417:45

Uh Oh yes I am.

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and Kern particularly. And uh this afforded me an opportunity to imitate their styles, which is not as easy as it sounds, uh particularly when they're as subtle as somebody like Kern. He sounds easy to imitate and then you realize why he took so long to write what he did, because he had a lot of trouble writing. And uh it's because the stuff is exquisitely turned. He's sort of the Mozart of the m of musical theater, I think. Uh change of mood. Next, romance. Slightly bitter romance perhaps, but lovely to look at and to listen to. That was a little night music.

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How does that rate in in your affections? Oh, that's my tribute to Revelle, I guess.

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We started out by doing an adaptation of uh an Anui play.

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called uh well, called Invitation of the Chateau. I guess over here was called Ring Round the Moon in the Christopher Eye translation. And that would have been very French, and that's what I wanted to do, and then I knew he wouldn't give us the rights to do it. So we looked for a piece that had similar feeling and weight, and I had remembered this movie, Smiles of a Summer Night.

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And uh

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I thought I'd better be careful not to make it too French, because it really is Swedish. It does have to do with, you know, those endless summer days where the night never falls.

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It's a play about flirtation.

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And so I determined that it should be French, but I flavored it with other things, a little Russian here and there, and even a little Viennese.

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and uh made a sort of amalgam and I think came out very nicely.

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It's a piece that I never think I'm as fond of as I do until I hear it again, and then I think, oh, that's nice, that's nice.

Stephen Sondheim19:22

Oh, that's nice.

Presenter19:24

Yeah, I like it. It's it's not it's not a bloody piece, but it's a very nice piece.

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Now the next record on your list is one from

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A show of yours which we don't know much about, we haven't seen. I believe the setting is is Japan in eighteen fifty. That's Pacific Overtures. Pacific Overtures is a show we're going to do over here in London next summer at the Mermaid Theatre, and in a different way than we did it in New York.

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The song I've I've selected for this show is um

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a song called Poems, and it's a journey of two men.

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and they decide to pass the time by exchanging poems, which was a common way of passing time in Japan in the nineteenth century, and they're in the form for the most part of haiku, which are very specific, small, seventeen syllable poems.

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And so the two of them are taking this journey.

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and tossing poems at each other, and at the same time demonstrating what they feel.

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Yeah.

Presenter20:19

What's going on?

Speaker 420:20

Rain.

Speaker 420:23

Glistening on the silver birch, like my lady's tears.

Speaker 420:34

Your turn.

Speaker 420:38

Rain gathering, winding into streams like the roads to Boston.

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A number from Pacific Overtures, poems by two members of the New York cast. Now, Sweeney Todd.

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Currently at the Theatre Royal Droider Lane.

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A butt, a woman who sells hot meat pies made from the victims of a mass murderer, a curious subject for amusical.

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Why?

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Well, I've always been interested in Grand Guignol, and I've always wanted to do a scary musical. People have attempted to do suspense music, they've never worked, or scary musicals.

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And I realized after thinking about it for a while that that what was missing was the sense of sustained music, that what makes a Hitchcock film or a horror film work is the constant presence of music on the sound track so that silences count for something.

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Whereas in most musicals what you have is long periods of silence punctuated by songs, and you can't sustain a mood that way, because the minute the music intrudes it is indeed an intrusion. And I happen to be in London for rehearsals of Gypsy.

Presenter21:41

In nineteen seventy three, and they were playing at Stratford East a version of Sweeney Todd. I'd never seen it. I'd heard about the legend because I'm an Anglophile and I knew something about it, but I'd never seen it, so I went out to see it and I was bowled over.

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because it had real charm and it was also very creepy.

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and it laid itself out like a libretto.

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And I thought it would be fun to set musically, and I really intended to set the whole thing.

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But it would have been too long if I'd set the whole thing, I think, and I wasn't sure of how to cut it. So the play was by Christopher Bond. It was a brand new version, and it has nothing to do with any of the other versions of Sweeney Ta that have existed for a hundred and fifty years. He invented the whole story, whole cloth, he wanted to.

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Recreate for a twentieth century audience what a nineteenth century audience of the melodrama must have felt the the so called blood bath theaters in the nineteenth century real sense of shock and suspense and horror.

Stephen Sondheim22:23

Getter

Presenter22:27

So he wrote this version.

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And this was the version that was performed at Stratford East and the version I saw and I went back to the United States and negotiated for the rights to it and proceeded to write it. It had this combination of charm and creepiness that I thought would be really fun to see in a musical theater. Yes, and and of course a great deal of humor. Uh despite the grisly sound. Oh, it's very funny. It's very funny, funny piece of it. You sometimes seem to frighten the audience after a

Stephen Sondheim22:46

Oh, it's very funny.

Stephen Sondheim22:49

You'll see.

Presenter22:53

A comedy number, then you've got a hideous, discordant whistle that seems to shock the audience back to paying attention and being rather frightened of what's going on. It's not so much getting them to pay attention again, it's the old Hitchcock principle. I say Hitchcock, he's not the first or the last to use it, but he understood very well in the best of his movies the relationship between humor and horror. There is a very fine line between the tension that is released in humor and the tension that is released in a horrifying act, and the two things reinforce each other. In the best of his suspense pictures, his suspense sequences are always broken up or interrupted by screamingly funny. I mean, think of the two cricket players and the lady vanishes. He's constantly doing it. The psycho is full of funny moments, really funny moments in the middle of the horror. That's the principle here, too. Are you disciplined if if you're sent away to write a another number to cover a certain situation or to rewrite a scene? Can you go straight away, sit down and write? When there's a real deadline, there's absolutely no problem at all. When I know that something has to be in because we're going out of town next week, there's no problem. My moderately well-known example, because I've spoken about it before, is I wrote Send in the Clouds overnight because it was needed with the last week of rehearsal, and Glynis Johns needed a number in the second act where we didn't think she needed one before. And it had to be ready for her so that she could have time to learn it. It could get orchestrated and open in two weeks in Boston. So, you know, when you have to, you have to. A selection of your songs made into a mini-review called Side by Side with Sondheim had great success in London and many other cities. That must have been very gratifying. It was indeed. I must correct you. It was called Side by Side by Sondheim. Beg your pardon. That's all right. That's a mistake that made before. But since it it's based on the song Side by Side by Side, that's the reason for that preposition. It was very gratifying and flattering and it was fun. I'd heard about it. Ned Sharon was somebody I knew and he was putting it together for

Stephen Sondheim24:32

Yeah.

Speaker 424:33

Uh

Presenter24:42

Uh really for fun. I don't know that he had any ambitions beyond he may have had beyond just doing it at uh Johnny Dykeworth and Cleo Lane's little theater up in the country, and from there went to a couple of other places. There was a certain demand for it, and finally it ended up at the Mermaid.

Presenter24:58

We got to record number six. Some more music.

Presenter25:01

Well, I can't let Revelle go, so I picked another Revelle piece. This is the piece I did my senior thesis on as a music major in college, and it's a great favorite of mine. Again, it combines my two favorites, Revelle and piano concertos. But it's not his more popular piano concerto, the G major, it's the left hand.

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which I find it

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Deeply romantic work and which I love and which I know note by note because I had to write about it.

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An excerpt from Ravel's piano concerto for the left hand, Robert Casa de Sou with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Omondy. Let's move straight on now to record number seven.

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Well, this this, apart from being, I think, my candidate for one of the truly majestic works of the twentieth century, uh also contains my favorite chord progression of the twentieth century. It's the Symphony of Psalms.

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A a friend of mine from college and his wife, and a girl I know who now lives in England, used to stand on street corners and sing the Alleluia from the finale.

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Here it is. This is Bernstein's recording, which is my favorite recording simply because his feeling for the music is so intense, I think it comes across on the record.

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The finale of the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms.

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Leonard Bernstein with the English Bach Festival Chorus and the London Symphony Orchestra.

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Now, you're on this desert island, mister Sauntyne. Are you a practical man? Have you got any ideas for rigging up shelter, for looking after yourself?

Presenter28:18

No, I'm not a practical man. I would probably complain a lot to myself and then finally figure out a way to do it.

Presenter28:24

But I'm not sure that I would succeed. I'm not sure I'm sure I would survive the after the first rainstorm.

Presenter28:30

Have you done any fishing or cultivating or any of those outdoor hobbies? No, I've never uh not since I was a kid. I'm strictly a New York boy and I'm used to turning on a faucet and getting hot water running out and I really I don't think I'd be very good in a survival situation.

Stephen Sondheim28:33

No.

Presenter28:44

No experience with small craft, no navigation, none of that.

Stephen Sondheim28:46

Yeah.

Presenter28:52

Well, let's hope it doesn't happen. Your last record.

Presenter28:56

Well last record is uh because I I do genuinely like it. This isn't just a plug, but I'm I'm proud of and I like Sweeney Todd very much and I thought it would be fun to play the opening.

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Ballad

Speaker 329:07

But tend the tale of Sweeney Todd.

Speaker 329:11

His skin was pale and his eye was odd.

Speaker 329:15

He shaved the faces of gentlemen Who never thereafter were heard of again. He trod a path that few have trod. Did sweet he todd.

Speaker 329:26

A Dave and Barbara Fleet Street.

Presenter29:29

The opening ballad from Sweeney Todd. If you could take only one disc out of the eight you played us, which would you choose?

Presenter29:36

I think it would be Porgy and Bess. That's a work that moves me on so many levels and also makes me laugh. And you may take one luxury to the island, one thing purely for the fun, the pleasure it gives you. That's a piano. Piano, right. I'm afraid it has to be an upright, because you could live under a grand. I worked on an upright for many, many years before I could afford a grand. It's perfectly fine. If it's got eighty-eight keys, that's all it matters. Good, yes, we'll count them before you go. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, and we don't approve of big encyclopedias.

Stephen Sondheim29:52

Drupal

Presenter30:07

I take the collected works of E. B. White. I I'm not much of a reader. I haven't read an awful lot.

Presenter30:13

And among the few books that have given me continuous pleasure I shouldn't even say books are the pieces of E. B. White, his essays particularly. About New York. Yeah, well, Here is New York is a wonderful essay, but the essays about his dog, the essays about the state of the world, the essays about

Stephen Sondheim30:20

The battery

Stephen Sondheim30:21

Well the

Presenter30:28

uh his place in Maine, not to mention uh, you know, novellas like Charlotte's Webb. He makes me laugh and he makes me cry, and he writes exquisite English prose.

Presenter30:38

The Collected Works of E. B. White.

Presenter30:41

And thank you, Stephen Sondym, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you, Roy. Goodbye, everyone.

Stephen Sondheim30:53

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.