Oscar Hammerstein called teenage Sondheim's first musical the worst thing he'd read
At 15, Stephen Sondheim proudly showed his school musical to his neighbour and surrogate father, Oscar Hammerstein II. The verdict: terrible, though not untalented. They spent the afternoon dissecting it, and Sondheim said he learned more that day than most people do in a lifetime. He went on to reinvent the American musical.
A New Yorker from birth on March 22, 1930, Sondheim was the only child of affluent parents; his father manufactured dresses his mother designed. A biography describes him as an isolated, emotionally neglected boy. At nine he saw a show open on a butler dusting a piano and was thrilled. After his parents divorced he lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he befriended James Hammerstein and, through him, his famous father, who shaped his love of theatre.
Hammerstein then set him a training course: write four musicals under set conditions, such as adapting a play he admired or one he thought flawed. None reached the professional stage, but the lesson stuck that art is work, not inspiration. At Williams College Sondheim switched from mathematics to music after an elective, and later studied privately with the composer Milton Babbitt, spending weekly four-hour sessions dissecting songs by Jerome Kern and Gershwin alongside Mozart.
Breaking in was slow. He lived in his father's dining room, wrote for the TV series Topper, and saw his first commissioned show, Saturday Night, stall when its producer died; it did not open until 2000, off-Broadway. His first big credits were as lyricist for West Side Story in 1957 and Gypsy in 1959. Writing both words and music afterward, he won the Tony for best musical five times, with shows including Company and Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George earned a rare Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
His work pushed musicals toward darker themes, with music and lyrics prized for complexity and ambivalence, often in partnership with director Harold Prince and later James Lapine. He also won an Academy Award for a song from Dick Tracy. When Hammerstein died in 1960, he had inscribed a portrait for Sondheim with the words 'my friend and teacher'. Sondheim died on November 26, 2021, with theatres named after him on Broadway and in London's West End.
Source: Stephen Sondheim
