Stephen Sondheim by Meryle Secrest

Author:Meryle Secrest [Secrest, Meryle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-94685-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

MANY PEOPLE SAW Sondheim in terms used to describe the English artist Mark Gertler by Michael Holroyd: “There was indeed something striking and unforgettable about his presence—the shock of hair, the amazing vitality, the versatile gift of mimicry and extravagant humour, and the romantic excitement he communicated was given depth by a contrasting look of profound suffering in his eyes …” Sondheim’s view of himself was prosaic. He saw himself simply as a playwright-actor, with a gift for composing music and juggling words. “And when I write songs I become the actor, and that’s why actors like my stuff. It isn’t a conscious effort to put a subtext in—it’s just that I approach it as an actor.” If, as Isaiah Berlin quipped, the world were divided between foxes, who knew a great many things superficially, and hedgehogs, who knew one thing well, he would have to consider himself a fox. He was a pragmatist, with a schematic imagination. That he could be, however, equally intuitive about his work was made clear by Jule Styne, the composer of Gypsy. Shortly after writing the music for “If Mama Was Married,” the song near the end of the first act in which the two daughters of Madame Rose hope their mother will settle down so that they can leave show business, Styne played it for his collaborator. “And Steve analyzed it perfectly,” Styne said. “He felt that the music already established that Mama was not going to get married. He pointed to a certain measure in the score and said, ‘You know what that note means? It ain’t going to happen.’ ”

Sondheim saw himself as lacking self-confidence, which was a real handicap when the time came to assess his own work, because he would be persecuted by doubt. Did he like it because he wanted to like it? Did he reject it because he was too insecure to see its merits? At a certain vulnerable moment, he was in danger of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” which was why he valued the opinions of his collaborators. He added, “I really don’t like to play anything to anybody until it’s polished, because songs are such short forms that unless you polish them well, the smallest flaw is a mountain.” Could this tendency to magnify his own imperfections, what Hal Prince called his “negativity,” have anything to do with his habitual ennui? Sondheim said of that, “I’ve always been a low burner. I’m just slightly down.” He toyed with the idea of the four humors, phlegm, blood, choler, and melancholy (thought to be the types of fluids in the body responsible for one’s mental attributes), as a way of describing how he felt. He did not have an explanation. “That’s just who I am.”

If Sondheim were frequently depressed, feeling enisled in the sea of life, as Bernard Berenson wrote, he seemed less conscious of his own expansive moods, and the exuberance that his friends witnessed. His only memory of the creative process might be the acute drudgery involved.

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