A couple of weeks ago, a press release from the Library of Congress alerted me to arrival at the Library of materials from the Stephen Sondheim estate. I immediately reached out to an old friend of mine, Mary Dell Jenkins, who had recently retired from the Library of Congress. She came up with a name and a phone number for someone she thought might be the go-to guy for any questions I might have. Miraculously, a few minutes after I left a voice mail for the person believed to be the overseer of the recently arrived Sondheim collection, my phone rang. It was Mark E. Horowitz, Senior Music Specialist at the Library of Congress where he’s worked for 34 years.
James Baker: Mark, how did you come to know Stephen Sondheim?
Mark Horowitz: I first met Steve in January of 1980 when I was in college. I was applying for the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop, and I'd asked if I could meet with him, and he agreed. It was, you know, one hour, and he never remembered the fact that we'd met earlier. After graduating from college, I started working at the local regional theater here, Arena Stage, and I was there for 11 years. And my last year there, I took a leave of absence from my regular job to work on their production of Merrily We Roll Along and George Firth was there through the whole rehearsal process, and he and I became quite close, and Steve came mostly, sort of during the last week or so, and we kind of got to know each other a bit during that period. In fact, he even borrowed my rhyming dictionary, and when he returned it, he said he'd written in some missing words, which he had, in fact, done! So that was nice. Then I started working at the library in '92 and then in '93 I saw in the paper that he was going to be getting a lifetime achievement award at the Helen Hayes in D.C. So I wrote him a letter, then saying, “Steve, I'm now at the Library of Congress, and I see you're coming to town, and I'd love to invite you for a show and tell while you're here, I think I can guarantee you a moving experience,” or something like that, and he agreed.
So he came in, was it March or May of '93, and we spent a day together. I covered a room with manuscripts and items from our collections that I thought would be meaningful to him for various reasons, some because I knew they were - there's a radio show in England called Desert Island Discs, which he'd been on twice. And it turned out we had the manuscripts of several of the things that he had cited as being favorite pieces of his, including Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra." We had Rachmaninoff manuscripts, Ravel manuscripts, Brahms. We had the papers of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, his teacher, Milton Babbitt, his collaborators, Bernstein and Richard Rogers. And when I pulled out the manuscript for Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, that's when he started to cry. And I think it was that meeting that convinced him that his papers belonged at the library. Then shortly after that, he sent me the language he'd had put in his will that would leave his manuscripts to us. And it only took 32 years for it to transpire, but it finally did. The collection actually arrived almost exactly three months ago.
Baker: Mark, there was an earlier contribution from Stephen Sondheim to the Library of Congress. Can you tell us about those boxes and boxes of audio recordings from Steve's personal collection?
Horowitz: He had a fire in 1995 in his home in New York, 246 East 49th Street. And after that fire and putting some things back together, he decided that he was no longer going to keep his record collection, which was, I think, between 11,000 and 13,000 LPs, mostly classical, fairly rare, unusual things. A lot of South American, lot of Scandinavian, things like that. And he donated those to us, and we took them.
Baker: How was Steve's collection organized?
Horowitz: Well, it's fascinating... as far as we can tell, he did not keep the jackets with the recordings. He had the jackets in storage. So he had all his recordings in these cases he had made. And when we got the collection, the first thing we had to do was rejoin the jackets with the actual LPs. But it also came with six file boxes of three by five cards or four by six cards that he had typed up and everything was in composer order. And I think presumably, as he acquired them within that and they were full of cross references. So if there was an LP that included Copland, Bernstein and Gershwin, or something like that, you could look up in the card catalog for any three of them, and it would tell you which ones it was joined with and where. He was very meticulous about it.
Baker: Sounds like he had a bit of librarian in him.
Horowitz: Oh, I think so. He was very, I think, Germanic in that way.
Baker: Who do you anticipate will be using the Sondheim collection?
Horowitz: Mostly scholars, people writing theses and dissertations and books and articles, music directors who are doing productions of shows who want to see the original manuscripts. I had one here last week. He was a music director who was fascinated, and conducted several Sondheim shows and he said, looking at the manuscripts, it tells him things that the published scores just don't about Sondheim's intent and how he thought about things.
And my sort of secret hope is a lot of young, upcoming musicians and composers will come, and lyricists, to study how he actually wrote, and my hope is he will inspire them in his techniques and approaches to songs and improve what they do when they see how he did it, because how he did it was so extraordinary.
Baker: We know Stephen Sondheim for taking American musical theater to places it had never gone before. We can hear it in his musical lines, his harmonic invention, and of course, in his lyrics. Did he write songs and lyrics with particular actors and singers in mind?
Horowitz: I think he felt it was always easier to write when he knew who he was writing for, which he didn't always have the luxury of being able to do. You know, he might have started to score long before casting began, but when a show was cast and he could then know the voices and the quality and the persona of the actors playing the part, it made it much easier for him. And the most famous one is “Send in the Clowns,” which was one of the last songs he wrote for A Little Night Music. In fact, he wrote it, I think, the day before they left for out of town. And the story there was, it was originally supposed to be a song for the other character in the scene, for Frederick, the man of the scene and Hal Prince decided that he thought it should be Desiree's song, and he directed the scene for Sondheim, in a way, so that Sondheim could see his vision of how it should be. And the actress, Glynis Johns, had not been thought of as much of a singer, but because they'd cast her, and they knew her voice by that point, and it was a very . . . Sondheim describes it as a light, silvery voice, but she didn't have much breath, so she couldn't sustain long notes. So he wrote the song very specifically her for her voice. So it's, “Isn't it rich? Isn't it queer?” You know, it's full of very short phrases and their questions, because he thought that would suit her voice. So ironically, this voice that was sort of tailored, almost for a non-singer, became his biggest hit by far, you know. And it's a song that's in 12/8, which is typically sort of a jazzy thing. But in this case, it's pure ballad but it's very unusual as a song in ways that I think people don't appreciate because it's become such a standard.
Baker: What does this archive tell us, Mark, about Sondheim as both a composer and perhaps more notably, as a lyricist?
Horowitz: That's the staggering thing about the collection. I think there's no question he was a genius, but you see how much perspiration there was, along with the inspiration. Page after page after page of lyric sketches and music sketches. And then even after he's got what looks like a brilliant final song, a piano vocal score, you'll see another 10, 20, pages of typed script lyric sheets that he's still annotating and changing, you know, replacing words or phrases or lines. It's just constant polishing and it I'm gobsmacked at the effort that he put into everything.
Baker: Mark, what sets Sondheim apart in the post-Bernstein, Harold Arlen, Hugh Martin era of American musical theater? He wasn't alone, but with Sondheim, there seems to be something different, taking us places we've never been before.
Horowitz: You know, there was not only Sondheim, but there was Kander and Ebb and Bock and Harnick and Adams and Strouse. So he wasn't the only one, but I think what sets Sondheim apart was the sheer brilliance. To my mind, no one's his equal. You know, he just did things that nobody had done before. I think it started with Company, where all of a sudden people realized there was an intelligence there, a sophistication. You know, the song “Sorry/Grateful” is a wonderful . . . there weren't many songs before that that were about ambivalence. You know, songs tended to be, this is how I feel. This is it's either happy or sad or good or bad, and all of a sudden, with Sondheim, there were there . . . it's less about black and whites and more about grays and in-betweens and frustrations and unsurety . . . and his view was thoughtful . . .
Baker: Before I let you go, I'd like you to tell us about the Library of Congress, maybe some things we don't know.
Horowitz: I've been here for 34 years and very proud of who we are and what we do. I wish everyone had a broader appreciation of the variety of things we are and what we do. You know, we're not only the home of the library itself, but we're home of the copyright office. We're the home of the congressional reference service, the Library for the Visually Impaired and the Blind. But our collections are beyond extraordinary. Just the division I work in, just the Music Division, we count our holdings in about 28 million items, and you know, most of that is published materials that come that any library might have. But then there are several, several 100 Special Collections, which are the papers of composers and lyricists and directors and songwriters and performers. And it's there. They're just spectacular, but we collect them for the American people and the library's Manuscript Division. They have the papers of the first, I don't know, 15 - 17, presidents. You know, we think of all these presidential libraries where we're the home of the original presidential libraries for Washington and Jefferson and Adams and Lincoln and all of those. And then they have the papers of the Wright brothers and Freud, and it's just, you know, every day I sort of their discoveries of I can't believe we have that. I can't believe we have that. And I'm thrilled when researchers are coming. And I just wish, you know, to my mind, we should have lines out the door of our reading room every day. And so I just encourage people to take advantage of this. You know, we've also tried to put as much as possible online, but it's just a tiny fraction of what we've got. So please come, please take advantage of your nation's library.
Baker: Do you pinch yourself in the morning whenever you get up?
Horowitz: I feel like a very, very lucky person!
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Thanks to Mark E. Horowitz and the Library of Congress, for the wonderful conversation. Please note that this is only Part I of this exploration of the Stephen Sondheim collection, newly arrived at the Library of Congress. Part Two will explore the full range of the Great American Songbook, from Kern to Oscar Hammerstein II to Jule Styne, Leonard Bernstein, and well beyond to Stephen Sondheim. This is Classics à la Carte, on your classical oasis. We are KPAC San Antonio, KTXI Ingram. Thanks for listening!
