A week and a half ago, I had the great pleasure to speak via zoom to Mark E. Horowitz, a Senior Music Specialist at the Library of Congress. Thirty-something years ago, Mark had courted the favor of Stephen Sondheim by spending a day with him.
“I covered a room [at the LOC] with manuscripts and items from our collections that I thought would be meaningful to him, 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 Babbit, his collaborators, Bernstein and Richard Rogers, and when I pulled out the original manuscript for Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, that's when he started to cry,” Horowitz told me.
Horowitz won the favor of Sondheim, and built upon it over years and decades, situating himself into a position as one who knew Sondheim well enough to serve for 10 years as contributing editor for the Sondheim Review. He was also entrusted to transcribe the composer's letters, some 4600 or more. Horowitz also shared with me his transcription of Sondheim's introduction and song notes to The Columbia Album of Jerome Kern, presented by Paul Weston and his Orchestra. (listen at 53:33 in the video below)
Here's what Sondheim wrote about “The Folks Who Live On the Hill.”
“This is Kern in his loosest, most rhapsodic mood. There is enough melodic material in this piece for three different songs.”
“He loved Kern,” Horowitz said. “In fact, he wrote liner notes for a Kern album.”
Further proof of Sondheim's affection for Kern's music shows in his glowing appraisal of the Kern/Hammerstein ballad, “The Song Is You.” Wrote Sondheim:
“When you consider the rhapsodic passion of this magnificent song, it is hard to believe it was treated comically in the show, ‘Music In the Air,’ but it was. I think it is the best ballad Kern wrote, and perhaps the best anyone has written.”
(Listen to the song, below.)
The bottom line here is that although Sondheim never met Kern, he truly loved Kern’s music, and likely absorbed some of Kern's attributes.
Below, my interview with Mark E. Horowitz continues. Horowitz speaks and writes with authority about Oscar Hammerstein, and most recently, Horowitz was designated as curator of the Stephen Sondheim Archive at the Library of Congress.
Baker: Mark, what can you tell us about the very real relationship between Stephen Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein?
Horowitz: His parents got divorced when he was 10 or 12, something like that, and his mother moved them to a place not far from the Hammerstein farm in Pennsylvania. Steve was going to the George School there, and one of his classmates was Jimmy Hammerstein, one of Oscar's sons. They became friends, and he would ride his bike over to the Hammerstein's, and they'd play chess or whatever and Oscar sort of took him under his wing, and because for several years there, his mother forbade him from even seeing his father . . . so he was the only sort of father figure that Sondheim had.
I think when he was about 15 at George School, he wrote a school musical called By George, and then brought it to Oscar to criticize and Oscar . . . [Sondheim] sort of had fantasies in his mind that Rodgers and Hammerstein would end up producing this brilliant new musical by this young kid, and he was devastated when Hammerstein said, it's not very good. But [Hammerstein] then said, and if you want to know, I'll tell you why. And they spent an afternoon sort of going through the score. And from that point on, Oscar was sort of officially his mentor. He gave him a course of, I think, to write four musicals over the next few years. One, an adaption of a short story, one an adaption of a play, one that something that he thought could be improved, and the last one was to be an original musical. So that's what Sondheim did, and that was what sort of gave him the brochure to start his career, actually, as this body of songs he'd written for these shows under Oscar's tutelage. As far as I can tell, only one of them was actually produced at Williams College, where he was a student.
Baker: I'm wondering when Steve decided he wanted to be both composer and lyricist?
Horowitz: I think from the beginning he was very hesitant to do just lyrics, but Hammerstein convinced him that he should. He had written the music and the lyrics for a show called Saturday Night which was to be his first Broadway show, but there were a series of disasters, the last one being that the fellow who was going to produce it suddenly died. So what was to have been his first Broadway musical didn't happen. And then he was at a party, and he met Arthur Laurents, and asked him what he was working on, and Arthur Laurents was, at the time writing the libretto for West Side Story and [Leonard Bernstein] had been hoping that Comden and Green would be able to do the lyrics, but it turned out they were stuck in Hollywood. So for a while there Lenny was going to do the lyrics himself, but realized it was just too much. There was so much dance music and things like that that he needed a collaborator, and Jule Styne suggested that Sondheim audition for him. So Sondheim met with Bernstein. I think he played him some of the songs that he'd written for Saturday Night, and Bernstein agreed that he could . . . actually originally they were going to co-write the lyrics . . . but after the show opened, Lenny took his name off the lyrics so that Sondheim would get sole credit. You know, according to Steve, one of the reasons that Oscar convinced him to take it is, he said the experience of working with those professionals, Bernstein, Jule Styne and Jerome Robbins, who was directing choreography, would be an invaluable experience, and one he shouldn't pass up.
Baker: Did Steve ever write a song or songs he later regretted?
Horowitz: The primary one is “I Feel Pretty,” which he was very proud of initially, ‘till a friend of his, who was also a songwriter, mentioned something to him, and he always became very self-conscious and embarrassed by it… because here you have a very young, innocent, naive girl from Puerto Rico, and she sounds like she's coming out of a Noël Coward show, you know? It's, “I feel charming. Oh, so charming. It's alarming how charming I feel.” You know, it's full of these inner rhymes and these words that're just not right for the character. You know, if it were just a pop song, it would be perfectly fine. But if you're writing for a character in a show… it's not the character of Maria. The feelings may be, the thoughts may be, but not the actual word choices. So I believe he actually rewrote the lyrics and tried to convince his collaborators to accept it, and they wouldn't. He was also not thrilled with “Somewhere,” and he referred to it as the 'UH' song, because typically, in a song, you know, the high note in the song is the big statement, the big point, and you want the word that it lands on to have real significance. But if you think of “Somewhere,” it's “There's a place,” you know, the best word he could come up with for the high note was “uh.” So that always bothered him.
Baker: Sondheim continued to seek opportunity to write both lyrics and music, but before A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum provided Steve both composer and lyrics credit in the program, there was one more favor he had to honor...
Horowitz: He made Hammerstein a deathbed promise that he would collaborate with Rogers after Hammerstein passed. So they then did Do I Hear a Waltz?, which is the one musical that Sondheim regretted ever doing. He said it was a “why” musical. Well, there was no real reason to turn it into a musical, and his experience working with Rogers was not a great one.
Baker: Do I hear a Waltz? dates to 1965. By this time, pop music was ruling the airwaves. The Beatles had played to screaming crowds on The Ed Sullivan Show, then to a sold out Shea Stadium. Alec Wilder declared in his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators that no later than the mid ‘50s should be marked as the final page of the Great American Songbook. Of course, if this were so, where does Stephen Sondheim's range of activity, roughly 1957 into the second decade of the 21st Century, fit with the American musical theater, still alive and well, today?
Horowitz: My view is slightly different from yours. I mean, I think what happened was, you know, earlier American popular music and musical theater were pretty much synonymous, you know, the top 40, the covers, everything, most things came from either Broadway or film musicals. And then with the advent of rock, that changed and there was a break, and what you heard on the Top 40 was not songs from shows. But shows didn't stop, and it wasn't, 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. I mean, to my mind, no one's his equal. He started writing musicals about things that nobody would have ever thought of writing a musical about before, I mean the things he adapted his musicals. You know, who would imagine a musical about the westernization of Japan? Who would imagine a musical about a serial killer and his partner who bakes the victims into meat pies? Who would have imagined a musical about a painting and the artist who painted it? I mean, it just went on and on and on… presidential assassins! You know, these were topics that were not typical musicals.
Baker: Mark, as we wind down our conversation, let me suggest one more link between Sondheim and the great innovators Alec Wilder alludes to in his book about American popular song. Cole Porter is described by Wilder as more lyricist than composer, though he was certainly adept at both. Porter's virtuosic wordplay was matched by no one, that is, until Stephen Sondheim's genius revealed him as the true top of the game. Mark, what made Sondheim's rhymes so distinctive and so delightful?
Horowitz: Well, the thing is, he was so famous for rhymes where he combined words to make the rhymes. So you can't find those in rhyming dictionaries, you know. One can argue about who's the best or better composer. I know some people think he wasn't as tuneful as some other composers, and I'll leave that to others, but I don't think anyone can argue that there's ever been a better lyricist. He could just do things with words that are beyond what anyone else has been able to accomplish. I think my favorite example is from the London revival of Follies. He wrote a new song called “Ah! But Underneath” and there's a section that is the most brilliantly and densely rhymed of any I'm aware of in musical history, which is:
“In the depths of her interior
Were fears she was inferior
And something even eerier
But no one dared to query her
Superior
Exterior”
Horowitz: . . . and the thing you know, it's not just a series of the eerier rhymes, but the substance of what the lyric is about is breathtaking on its own. So it's not only being able to rhyme, but being able to rhyme and have real meat on the bones. It's not just being clever for cleverness’ sakes. It's really saying something and revealing of the character and all in the situation and all of that.
Baker: Who's up next? Who's carrying the torch, so to speak?
Horowitz: Well, I certainly think there's no question that the most successful musical theater songwriter of the last several years has been Lin-Manuel Miranda . . . and who I know admired Sondheim very much, and I know they had several encounters. In fact, Lin-Manuel was hired to rewrite some of the lyrics for West Side Story in Spanish for a production that Arthur Laurents was directing, and so he met with Sondheim as part of that process. I don't know if that's the first time or not they met, but it sort of began their relationship. Certainly, Stephen Schwartz continues to be quite successful with Wicked and things like that. There are several songwriters, musical theater songwriters, that I'm a fan of, and in fact, there's a very young fellow who I met when he was 15, and he's now either 19 or 20, and a sophomore at Yale.
Baker: And what's his name?
Horowitz: Sam Tucker-Smith. To me, he's the next Sondheim. He's the most exciting songwriter I've encountered in many, many years, and I look forward to seeing what he writes, because I think he's quite brilliant and I certainly know he was very influenced by Sondheim.
Baker: Thank you so much Mark for giving us all a better estimation of the vast reach of Stephen Sondheim, his catalog and his archive now in your hands at the Library of Congress. Thanks also for the heads up on Sam Tucker-Smith, I know I'll be looking him up, as I'm sure many listeners to this interview will. I've been speaking to Mark E. Horowitz of the Library of Congress, and thanks again, Mark, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
Horowitz: My pleasure! You take care.
