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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes Classical Music Happy Hour, a new podcast hosted by me, Pianist Maniacs. Each episode, we'll speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music-inspired games, and answer questions from our listeners. The first episode drops March 4th. Listen on the NPR app.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Stephen Sondheim once described himself as an austere revolutionary. His musicals, the music, the lyrics, the stories, were both more complex and more subtle than their predecessors.
After Alan J. Lerner, who wrote the lyrics for My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, and Camelot, saw Sondheim's groundbreaking 1970 musical Company, he broke into tears and told his wife, my way of writing musicals is over. It's no exaggeration to say Sondheim was a genius. Geniuses are often complicated people with complicated personalities, and Sondheim was no exception.
Perhaps the most difficult relationship in his life was with his mother, who could be cold and even verbally cruel. That seems to have influenced Sondheim's personality in the themes of some of his shows.
In the new book, Stephen Sondheim, Art Isn't Easy, my guest Daniel Okrent offers insights into Sondheim's life and music based on access to his letters, archives, oral history, as well as the 36 hours of interviews that Meryl Seacrest did for her 1998 biography of him, and Okrent's own interviews with many people who knew him.
Okrent has worked as a book and magazine editor and was the first public editor for the New York Times. He's the author of previous books about prohibition, baseball, and how eugenics and bigotry shaped anti-immigration law. Stephen Sondheim got his start on Broadway writing lyrics for Gypsy and West Side Story.
He went on to write music and lyrics for such shows as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion. Daniel Okrent, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's great to have you back.
I'm very happy to be here.
I want to start with you choosing a song, and I'd like it to be a song that you heard something new in as a result of all the research that you did for this new Sondheim book.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Daniel Okrent provide about Stephen Sondheim's life?
And this is a song where Sweeney Todd, who is seeking revenge against the judge that locked him up and then stole his wife and then is trying to marry Sweeney's daughter,
Right. He steals his wife. Well, he steals his wife. And discards her. And wounds her permanently.
Yeah, yeah. And Sweeney ends up killing her because now she's homeless and has gone mad. And she's just, like, in his way. So, yeah. Anyhow, so here's the song. And it's one of my very, very favorite of all Sondheim's pieces. And this is my favorite show of his. And it's a really... Like his desire for revenge is just like overflowing.
And he wants to, everybody's unworthy and they all deserve to die. That's the refrain. They all deserve to die.
So here it is. There's a hole in the world like a great black pit and it's filled with people who are filled with s**t and never one of the world inhabit it. But not for long. We all deserve to die Tell you why, Mrs. Love, tell you why Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two.
There's the one staying put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one's face. Look at me, Mrs. Lovett, look at you. No, we all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief for the rest of us. Death will be a relief. We all deserve to die. And I'll never see Joanna.
No, I'll never. So that's Epiphany from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. And something I found really fascinating about your book is that there's this recurring chord in Sweeney Todd that's a real horror movie kind of chord, like old horror movie. And he knew that chord from a Bernard Herrmann score from a 1945 film, Hangover Square.
And so I went to that movie, which I've never seen, but watched the scene where the concert pianist who is having a breakdown and is murdering people is at the piano playing this very dizzying piece and strikes that chord several times.
It was a chord that the very young Stephen Sondheim, he was a teenager, heard and he just fell in love with that chord.
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Chapter 3: How did Sondheim's relationship with his mother affect his work?
And he went back to see the movie again because he wanted to be able to retain that chord and be able to use it for his own purposes. Now, he was not yet a composer at that point, but he was an incipient composer. And in fact, that chord that he called the Herman chord shows up in his work and shows up particularly in Sweeney Todd, I believe, three times.
So let's just hear a little bit of the music from the concert piece that's being played. It's, you know, with that chord in the Bernard Herrmann score because, you know, the pianist is performing when he's having the breakdown and we hear that chord.
piano plays softly
So that was an excerpt where what Stephen Sondheim called the Bernard Hermann chord is heard in. It's from the movie Hangover Square. I think Sondheim had denied that Sweeney Todd was about revenge or his own desire for revenge. And you found something in your research that relates to that. Would you explain?
Sure. In an interview that he gave to his first biographer, Meryl Seacrest, back in 1996, he Sondheim described the day that Judy Prince came over to hear some of the songs, the beginning songs of Sweeney Todd. She was his closest friend, his self-acknowledged muse, and she often would do this. He would play them for her before anybody else. So she came over.
He had told her before that, that it was a horror show. It was going to be a, you know, a spined tingler. And so she comes over to his house and he plays a few of the first songs, and she stops him two songs into it and says, this isn't, you know, fun with horror. This is the story of your life. And as Sondheim reported it, he said, it never occurred to me, but of course it is.
Now, in the Seacrest book, we don't know what the story of his life is, but I was able to determine through a but primarily Judy Prince, who never gave interviews, that in fact it was about revenge.
And you write that his psychiatrist, Milton Horowitz, wrote papers on revenge and on revenge and masochism. And Horowitz connects revenge to deep loneliness and the need to connect, which you can also relate to Sondheim.
Yeah, there are two major arcs to his life. One is from absolute alienation to finally near the end of his life connection. The other is from an ambivalence that could be crippling at times to resolution, to knowing who he was and what he was capable of doing. But it took 50 years for him to move from one of those poles to the next one.
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Chapter 4: What are the major themes in Sondheim's musicals?
Marijuana, cocaine for a period, but mostly alcohol, great, great quantities of alcohol. The cabaret performer Michael Feinstein reported about having his assistant call Sondheim when Sondheim was coming to dinner at Feinstein's house and asked if there was anything particularly that he would like at dinner. And Sondheim replied, according to Feinstein, vodka, vodka, and more vodka.
And there are dozens of other incidents and moments where the alcohol is so visibly a tool that he uses to make it through his work and I think through his life.
So I want to ask you about a letter, a letter that's very famous to Sondheim fans that, you know, you learned more about. Describe the letter as Sondheim described it and then describe the letter that was actually written. This was a letter from his mother. And they had a very complicated and very stressful relationship with each other, which we'll get into after we hear about the letter.
In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy, that was her nickname, wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed in an interview with the New York Times in 1994, in which he said, in the letter, my mother said, the only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you. Now, that's a kind of a powerful statement.
And that kind of explains the, or at least measures the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother. And it's a story that he, from that point, told over and over and over again. All the Sondheads, as we sometimes are known as those people who really know everything about him or want to know everything about him. We all know this letter. He referred to it so frequently.
I found, however, in the Mary Rogers papers, Mary Rogers was his lifelong friend, daughter of Richard Rogers. He sent her what he said was a copy of the letter he had written to his mother about when he received that. And so the letter in which he says, I never want to have anything to do with you again. This is just the end of our relationship.
But in that letter, which he represents to his oldest friend as the accurate version of the letter that he had sent in 1978, she doesn't say, I regret giving birth to you. She says, the only guilt I have is giving birth to you. And there's a mile of distance between guilt and regret.
There's two ways I can interpret guilt. One is that she knew she wasn't meant to be a mother and she feels guilty that she was such a bad mother. But the more obvious interpretation is she gave birth to a monster and she feels guilty about that, that she unleashed this miserable person on the world.
Oh, that's interesting. I go the opposite direction. I like your first version better. I don't see any evidence that she felt that she had unleashed a monster on the world, even in her bitterest expressions to him.
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