The Stephen Sondheim Collection: A Researcher Shares His Experience

In 2025, the Library of Congress acquired the papers of Stephen Sondheim, one of the most celebrated figures in twentieth-century musical theater. This is a guest post from Ed Zanders, a British composer and musical director based in London. Trained in classical composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Zanders works extensively as a pianist and improviser in the West End and worldwide and is currently writing a musical with Mischief. 

On a recent humid July day in Washington, D.C., I sat at a desk in the pleasingly air-conditioned Performing Arts Reading Room at the Library of Congress. My reading material for the day: multiple boxes of sketches and manuscripts from the Stephen Sondheim Papers. As a songwriter currently working on my own musical, I wanted to get a glimpse into Sondheim’s process—to take songs I was familiar with and track their creation to see what I could learn and perhaps use in my own writing.

Having seen various items from across his career, I’d like to share some observations and examples from that day.

It became quickly clear that Sondheim crafts his lyrics through a process of constant refinement and purification. He said art itself was “an attempt to make order out of chaos,” and his songs too go through several cycles of chaos to order before reaching the shiny final product.

He first scribbles and drafts on yellow legal paper, using his famous Blackwing pencils. These pages can at first glance seem dense and impenetrable—full of many ideas and lists of words that may eventually become useful. After subsequent pages of notes, a first form appears. He types this up on a typewriter and extensively annotates in pencil. He then types up these edits, and repeats the process. Again and again: improvement after improvement, word by word.

For example, several typed drafts of “Giants in the Sky” from “Into the Woods” have Jack singing the following:

The roof, the house and your mother at the door.

The roof, the house and the world that don’t seem small anymore.

Not bad. But Sondheim explores further possibilities, scribbling many alternatives in the free space nearby. He circles one of them thickly; it is:

The roof, the house and your mother at the door.

The roof, the house and the world you never thought to explore.

Bingo! What’s particularly interesting to me is how such a practical matter as finding a rhyme could lead to a genuine shift in the philosophy Jack is trying to express. Finding a rhyme for door leads Sondheim to explore, which opened up a whole new perspective.

Another delightful line, from the same musical:

There’s no time to sit and dither

While her withers wither with her

This came about less from divine inspiration, than Sondheim listing endless cow parts in his margins. Loin, horn and udder provide less useful fodder, but withers sits there waiting and Sondheim has the nouse to explore further. Once dither occurs to him, he’s off to the races, and the rest of the page is strewn with options like the following:

With her withers as they wither

See her withers — how they’ve withered

While we wither with her withers

For me, the most striking example of a single altered word changing the entire philosophy of a song comes in the Act I finale of “Sunday in the Park with George.” Several typed drafts have the song “Sunday” concluding like this:

People strolling in a park

On a humid afternoon

On an island in the river

On a monumental Sunday …

Monumental eventually changes to ordinary and the entire notion is cemented; that the people in the painting are unaware their inconspicuous Sunday afternoon is being immortalized forever. It is fascinating to see how in flux Sondheim was all the time, how totally open to new and better ideas he was.

A final observation, on a more personal level: as much of a genius as Sondheim was, seeing the frail ordinary looking paper and scribbles firsthand made clear how human he was. How he was just a person working away and trying and failing like the rest of us.

As a writer it was also, frankly, encouraging to see how inelegant some of his initial attempts were! For Sondheim, the thought was king; all the verbal subtleties could be worked at later, but it was the thought, the deeper idea, that really mattered. How fortunate we are, too, that he sketched his process out at all. Now future generations can come and view his process firsthand and return to their writing as energized and inspired as I was on my recent visit.

Treasures from the Stephen Sondheim Papers
A small set of materials from the Stephen Sondheim Papers is now on display in the Music Division’s Performing Arts Reading Room through March 28, 2026. The featured materials include highlights from the collection, including lyrics and music from his musicals “Into the Woods,” “Sunday in the Park with George,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “A Little Night Music.”