Stephen Sondheim wanted to explore a new world every time

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IN A TOWNHOUSE in central Manhattan, in a room with a grand piano, lights would often burn all night. The man who sat there had an air of intense and nervous preoccupation. He would throw himself back in his chair, twist his neck to interrogate the ceiling, lean dangerously sideways, arch his arm over his head, as he strove to link his words to music and his music to words.

To do both things, write lyrics and compose, was rare and tricky. Music was fun, abstract and inside him; lyrics were a sweat, though he thought of himself as a playwright first. Combining them required not inspiration, like some girl twittering on his shoulder, but patient craft. He had to let the lyrics sit lightly on the melodic line, bubble and rise, while ensuring that the music made them shine and sometimes explode. As he worked he was painfully aware of his mistake in “West Side Story” (in 1957, when he was starting out, and the music was Lenny Bernstein’s, not his), of putting the indefinite article on the highest note of a phrase in “Somewhere”, or failing to notice how long a purple line might embarrass him afterwards. (For ever, in fact.) Less is more, keep it simple, he kept reminding himself. Clever rhymes and puns were his forte, but why were “love” and “life” so near-impossible to rhyme with anything? For Stephen Sondheim, working with the English language he adored was very, very hard.

Nor was it his nature. He was instinctively a mathematician, sidetracked while still at school by the great lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, the father of his best friend, who taught him almost all he knew. Maths was kept for the puzzles and cryptic crosswords he invented where slowly, link by link, the solution gleamed into view. By contrast, the 15 musicals he wrote for the American stage, works that propelled him into the company of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Noël Coward, were studies in disconnection. Though he might place his characters in ostensibly jovial parties or reunions, deep emotional fissures soon appeared again.

In both “Company” (his breakthrough work, in 1970) and “Follies” (1971), marriages were foundering, but new commitments were too difficult. “Into the Woods”, a revisiting of classic fairy tales, delved into the love-hate relationship between parents and children, one he had vividly known himself. “Sunday in the Park with George” (1984) explored the competing claims, on the painter Georges Seurat and George, his struggling-artist great-grandson, of the human love each wanted and the art they had to do.

These conflicts meant that the twin Sondheim roles, lyricist and composer, often sparked against each other. Despair could be hidden under banter, and malice under gentleness. In “Follies” he wrote the bitterly witty “Could I leave you?” (“Could I bury my rage/with a boy half your age/in the grass?/Bet your arse!”) as a grand waltz; in his cartoonish semi-opera “Sweeney Todd” (1979), the demon barber crooned the soft, blithe “Pretty Women” as he prepared to cut a customer’s throat. Often, too, a Sondheim musical would fracture time itself, punctuating the action with flashbacks, as in “Company”, or reversing chronology entirely (“Merrily We Roll Along”, a disaster). The linear musicals American audiences had come to expect, ending with a grand chorus number and guy and girl dazzlingly together, became in his hands messy slices of life in which nothing had been resolved, nor ever could be.

Audiences therefore tended to leave the theatre baffled. Plenty walked out. They found him too intellectual, the subjects uncomfortable and nothing hummable in the flowing, conversational scores. With the exception of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), his first foray into Broadway in both hats, his runs were short. His name could be twisted into the pleasing anagram, “He penned demon hits”. But his only one (big though it was) was “Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music”, a song written mostly as simple questions and again about disconnection. (“Isn’t it rich?/ Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground/You in mid-air?”) He treated the 32-bar torch songs, again really hard to write, as commentaries or little one-act plays to move the plot along. If there was a plot.

Lack of popularity did not bother him. He had never set out to be corporate or commercial; he loathed all that. His only desire was to experiment, to make himself nervous in new territory and not do the same thing twice. Among the subjects he threw himself into were the emergence of Japan (in “Pacific Overtures”, done as a piece of kabuki theatre) and the killing or attempted killing of America’s presidents in “Assassins”, staged in a fairground. Vaudeville and pastiche were strewn around, spiking his work with irony, and he wrote in unfriendly sharp keys just to challenge himself. “Maverick” was a word he feasted on.

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He also saw himself as an outsider: an only child who got the best marks at school, Jewish, gay, shy. His first experience of musicals was Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” at 15, when the sight of the villain-outcast Jigger ostracised by the townsfolk reduced him to tears. He loved collaborating on musicals, notably with the producer Hal Prince and the writer James Lapine, because he had found such family feeling nowhere else. Until he was 61, he lived alone. The work was all-consuming to the end, and his prime concern was that it should go on being done, in schools, communities, anywhere. Done and done and done.

His only attempt at memoir was a two-volume analysis of all his musicals. People therefore wondered which of them contained the key to him. “Company”, perhaps, where the outsider Bobby moodily observes his friends’ marriages in an effort to find happiness himself? Or “Into the Woods”, with its strong echoes of the analysts’ couches on which he had spent so many hours? Or “Sunday in the Park with George”, where in the last act George is counselled in the night park by his great-grandmother’s ghost:

Stop worrying where you’re going/Move on
If you can know where you’re going/
You’ve gone Just keep moving on…