Then there are the books — the brand new biographies and deconstructions and picked up interviews. He permeates our cultural oxygen like a latter-day Shakespeare. As with Shakespeare, his phrases are sometimes utilized in ways in which their creator most probably by no means supposed. To borrow from W.H. Auden’s “In Reminiscence of W.B. Yeats”: “The phrases of a lifeless man/Are modified within the guts of the residing.”
Mr. Sondheim, who specialised in portraits of craving outsiders, would in all probability regard his canonization on Broadway with the deeply combined emotions during which he specialised. (Absolutely, he would have cocked an eyebrow at his apotheosis as the nice and cozy and comforting spirit information that appeared to materialize at that current efficiency of “Into the Woods.”) Whereas he appeared to reinvent himself with every new present, his works have all the time centered on a way of human isolation, and people who perceived the composer in his early years as too intelligent by half failed to note the attendant ache that underlay a lot of what he wrote.
It’s the empathic consciousness of that ache, I believe, that has stored us hooked on his work — not any omniscient knowledge however his capacity to summon so clearly our confused, contradictory humanity. Ravishing particular person songs might reassure us that nobody is alone however, within the 5 many years since “Firm” made his status, Mr. Sondheim had been creating group portraits of a crowded world the place loneliness was an existential truth. When he writes, “Nobody is alone,” it hurts a lot exactly as a result of we sense that it’s finally a falsehood.
It needs to be famous that, when he was alive, Mr. Sondheim was conscious of and amused by rampant tendencies to deify him. Contemplate this sardonic ditty from a present known as “Sondheim on Sondheim,” a 2010 Broadway revue commemorating his eightieth birthday. He wrote the music in response to a 1994 headline in New York journal that requested, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” His musical reply: “It’s important to have one thing to imagine in. One thing to acceptable, emulate, overrate. May as nicely be Stephen, or to make use of his nickname: God!”
That the works of this god have continued to be fruitful and multiply (barely per week goes by once I don’t obtain discover of a brand new Sondheim revival or revue) partly stems from our deep reluctance to ever let him go. There’s a half-voiced concern amongst musical acolytes, comprehensible in a time during which theater itself is newly under siege, that on some degree Stephen Sondheim represents the top of the road for a once-flourishing artwork type.
Modern composers like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Michael R. Jackson and Jeanine Tesori have all been producing work of excessive caliber and originality. But none, with the certified exception of Mr. Miranda, appear more likely to engender the type of enduring, passionate cult that Mr. Sondheim has impressed. Neither is it simple to think about any of them ascending to the unapproachable dominance of their career that was Mr. Sondheim’s for roughly half a century. His mixture of sense (such ingenious rhymes, such intricate melodies) and sensibility (the aching ambivalence that all the time throbs beneath) stays ineluctably singular.