The tumultuous life of Stephen Sondheim
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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.
Well, Epiphany, this horrifying and overwhelming song near the end of Sweeney Todd, I had listened to and been impressed by, I don't know how many scores of times, but when I was doing the research and listening carefully, that's when I realized that everything we've heard before in that show comes back in very brief snatches in that one song. It's all tied together. in a way that is powerfully effective without the listener knowing why it's so effective.
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.
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