Stephen Sondheim: An Appreciation

The following is a guest post by Senior Music Specialist Mark Eden Horowitz, author of “Sondheim on Music.” The text is adapted from an article the author wrote for Signature Theatre. The Library of Congress announced the acquisition of the Stephen Sondheim Papers on Wednesday, June 25, 2025.

In March 2005, Symphony Space presented a twelve hour Wall to Wall Sondheim concert. Isaiah Sheffer opened the event by asking, “What do you do for a guy who’s had the Kennedy Center Honors and lavish, well-deserved tributes at Carnegie Hall, the Barbican in London, and countless other honors, celebrations, and retrospective seasons?”  I was sitting within earshot of Sondheim, and heard him suggest hopefully under his breath: “You leave him alone.”

But that is not possible, because Sondheim’s work does not leave us alone. His songs captivate us, becoming part of our psyches.

When Eric D. Schaeffer, co-founder and former artistic director of Signature Theatre, originally requested this article, he suggested it focus on Sondheim’s place and influence in the world of American musical theater. Though Sondheim frowned on such overviews, there are some points—both obvious and obscure—worth mentioning.

There are few composers for musical theater who have had Sondheim’s influence on the creators who came after him. There is an often recollected (and possibly mythical) story about an artist who visited Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Upon his return he said, “I looked at the Frans Hals—with their brio and flash and the ability to capture a moment in a life—and I couldn’t wait to experience the sheer joy of painting myself. Then I looked at the Rembrandts—where the underpainting magically glows from beneath the depths of glaze on top of glaze, revealing the inner life of the subject—and it made me never want to lift a brush again.”  Sondheim is both a Hals and a Rembrandt—inspiring and intimidating.

The last time musicals experienced such a seismic upheaval was the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution that began with “Oklahoma!” in 1943. This was a game-changer both for the next generation, but also for their contemporaries. Some could not or would not adapt, some tried with varying degrees of success. There are interviews with both Irving Berlin and Cole Porter where they are fearful that their abilities are not up to the demanding new expectations. With “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Kiss Me Kate” they each managed to write the finest scores of their careers, both redolent of their individual voices, yet integrated with the plot and revealing of their characters.

No one who writes for the musical theater today can help but be influenced by what Sondheim accomplished—even if it is to consciously reject what they think he represents. The irony is that what he represents more than anything is experimentation. While certainly feeling the weight of expectations, Sondheim has avoided the curse of importantitis that afflicted his early collaborator Leonard Bernstein. Some of the songs Sondheim wrote for the revised version of “The Frogs” at Lincoln Center in 2004, are as funny and pointed as songs he wrote for “A Funny Thing” 47 years ago; they are the songs of a young man. His 2008 musical, “Road Show,” has bite and nerve—full of depth without pretension.

Sondheim’s own likes can be more than surprising.  He seems most responsive to those who do not try to emulate him, but who, as he describes it, find their own voice (mentoring several in their pursuit). The first time I met him (in 1980), I asked him what recent shows—other than his own—he liked. His reply, “The Wiz.” He went on to explain the nigh perfect prosody (which he also defined) of “Ease on Down the Road,” and how genuinely moving he found the song “Home,” adding “we tend to admire most in others that which we can’t do ourselves.” In 2000, he began emailing and faxing song titles—“Songs I wish I’d Written (at least in part)”—for consideration to be performed in a concert the Library of Congress was producing to celebrate his 70^th birthday. “My Man’s Gone Now” and “Blues in the Night” were not so surprising, but expectations were upended with “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” “Hard Hearted Hannah” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”

The real lesson of Sondheim? You can musicalize anything that excites you. It can be the history of the Westernization of Japan; the story of a barber bent on cannibalistic revenge; imagining the results of the actions taken in several classic fairy tales; bringing a painter and his paintings to life; a carnival in purgatory peopled with presidential assassins; or a more traditional operetta where man loses woman, gets girl, loses girl, girl gets man’s son, woman gets man, and they all live (except grandmother) reasonably happily under a half-lit night. The point is to be true to your characters, true to your story, let content dictate form…well, there are several other points…but perhaps the most important is to do what you do well, with craft, passion and imagination.

We cannot leave Sondheim alone because his work will not leave us alone. The stories that excite him, the characters he comes to know and give voice to, they speak to us and touch us. They used to say of Irving Berlin that he provided the soundtrack of people’s lives, writing the songs that people met to, danced their first dance to, got married to, celebrated anniversaries and holidays to. Well, to those of us lucky enough to know Sondheim’s work, he provides the soundtrack in our minds—the harmonies that express our truest feelings and the words to our innermost thoughts. The Library of Congress Music Division is honored to be the new home of the Stephen Sondheim Collection, ensuring that his legacy is preserved and accessible for the American people for generations to come.