RIP, Stephen Sondheim: Composer, Loner, Pessimist

American Thinker.com ^ | December 11, 2021 | Michael Curtis

[Kaslin]

A musical giant, a most controversial major figure, a leading musical theater composer in modern American music, and the man who is said to have reinvented the American musical died on November 26, 2021, aged 91. With his fifteen musicals for the stage, Stephen Sondheim was a sophisticated figure and product of Broadway, though not the most commercially successful one. On his death, lights on Broadway were dimmed for one minute in his honor.

Sondheim, born of Jewish parents, who manufactured dresses, in New York City, was an aficionado of puzzles. His original ambition was to become a mathematician. He became, as he said, a composer largely by chance.

As a composer, Sondheim was the heir of the masters of the Great American Songbook, the canon of the most influential and most played American popular songs and jazz standards, mostly written for Broadway musicals, Hollywood films, and Tin Pan Alley from the early 20th century through the 1950s and which have stood the test of time. Yet even the most popular of Sondheim's scores do not have the wide impact of melodies by those masters, George Gershwin ("Our Love Is Here to Stay"), Irving Berlin ("Always"), Rodgers-Hart ("My Funny Valentine"), Harold Arlen ("Over the Rainbow"), Cole Porter ("Night and Day"), and Jerome Kern ("All the Things You Are").

[skeeter]

I wasn’t aware he had passed away. But then the media mob in charge these days doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to anything but politics these days.

[samkatz]

Most overrated composer in the history of American musical theatre. One good song,”Send in the Clowns.” Yet the elitist NYC gushed praise on every mediocre thing he did.

Sorry he died, don’t know his politics. To me he epitomized the decline of musical theatre. I agree with most of the analysis in the above article except what the author admires is dreck to me.

[9YearLurker]

Sondheim had his unquestionable talents, but he was the beneficiary of having the best and most powerful mentor possible in Oscar H.

Not really that tuneful a composer, which, yes, matters. Strained through his life to show he had the smarts and talent for his position, which led to him following all the nonlinear fads of playwriting and atonal trends of music composition through his productive decades.

It was his genius orchestrator who made much of his music work insofar as it did. Still, nobody else on the planet had the luxury of getting so many money-losing shows to Broadway.