—This is a guest post by Adam Guettel, the Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist of “The Light in the Piazza,” “Floyd Collins” and “Days of Wine and Roses.” It also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, which was primarily devoted to the arrival of Sondheim’s collection at the Library.
Stephen Sondheim died on November 26, 2021, relaxing into the arms of his husband, Jeff. What a triumph of a life, and what an exit.
The thing is, I hadn’t realized Steve was gone until just now. Maybe that’s because he’s not gone. He’s still here. And let me say right off, he wasn’t my mentor or advisor in a consistent way. His advice was sporadic, but indelible. I think I remember everything he ever said to me about music or writing for the theater.
One of Steve’s great inventions, among many, was his phrasing. He broke from the long, lyrical lines of Kern, Rodgers, Gershwin and Porter. He divided melody into conversational clauses, as Stravinsky divided folk melodies into cells in “L’Histoire du Soldat,” “Les Noces” and “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
Fifty years apart, they shocked and insulted music and theater conservatives in Europe and New York with the same profound insight: that melody could be pixelated and recombined into something original and dynamic. What a blessing that this migration can be charted in the Sondheim Collection and the rich collection of Stravinsky manuscripts in the Library.
And there is the Steve I knew as a person. (So much has been thoughtfully written about his work.) Many were intimidated by him. But for a man at the pinnacle of the arts, he was a social journeyman; rumpled, shy, easily embarrassed, warm, generous, easily offended and quick to forgive. Doing his best. People probably thought Beethoven was grouchy, too.
Once, I brought Steve to Wempe, an elegant watch boutique on 5th Avenue, thinking he might be drawn to a beautiful watch, where less was more, and content dictated form, and God was in the details. He politely turned them all down. On the way to lunch, he said he didn’t understand spending so much on something that did so little. Sort of like the opposite of clarity.
On my piano rests one of Steve’s planetary watches, an orrery. It’s made of metal, beautiful and precise. That’s his level of interest, way up there, his level of endeavor, and now he circles around us, a giant in the sky. He’ll always be a giant here, too, thanks to the Library of Congress. He will never be gone. We can know him, and ask him and have him forever.
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