He exploited time signatures and forms; for “Night Music,” he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — nearly an entire score written in permutations of triple time.
He was both incredible and incredibly exacting - something the discussion of west side story doesn’t cover is that he also hated some of his work in that show. For “I feel pretty” he regretted that the lyrics were more poised than the character would have delivered, and for “America”, he hated how some of the rhymes landed, e.g. “everything free in America/for a small fee in America” - a great rhyme, but sung at tempo it sounds like “for a smafee in ame-ri-ca”
So you write the lyrics for one of the iconic musicals of the American canon, and spend a lot of time dissecting the flaws in your own work.
Then there’s some of my favorite lyrics from his shows, for example, from Into the woods, where jack’s mother is singing to jack (of beanstalk fame) about selling their cow:
“We’ve no time to sit and dither
While her withers wither with her”
Amazing. Even Sondheim talks about one of his proudest moments being when he played for coke porter late in his life:
“ Porter had recently had both legs amputated, and Ethel Merman, the star of Gypsy—in which Sondheim’s words accompanied music by Jule Styne—had brought the young lyricist along as part of an entourage to cheer him up. Sondheim played the clever trio “Together.” “It may well have been the high point of my lyric-writing life,” he writes, to witness Porter’s “gasp of delight” on hearing a surprise fourth rhyme in a foreign language: “Wherever I go, I know he goes / Wherever I go, I know she goes / No fits, no fights, no feuds, and no egos / Amigos / Together!”
The level of detail and precision is incredible. The music is just as, if not more, precise.
I was well aware that Leonard Bernstein didn't want to be "just the guy who wrote West Side Story" -- he did lots of more serious stuff. But dammit! None of it ever made as big a noise as West Side Story did. I guess Sondheim felt the same way.
But you know, that's a pretty good life's work, right there.
"Send in the Clowns" could be call a tired lounge-act song, but when you hear it in its proper context, in "A Little Night Music" sung by the aging actress, you understand why it was a success.
The NYT said:
In the song “Somewhere” from “West Side Story,” for example, the highest note in the opening phrase is on the second beat, which means that in the well-known lyric — “There’s a place for us” — the emphasis is on the word “a.”
If you're really a perfectionist, I guess that's a problem. Most of us would be thrilled to write anything 1/100 as good as that song, even if it did have an emphasis on "a".
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/theater/stephen-sondheim-...
Among many greater insights, this caught my eye:
He exploited time signatures and forms; for “Night Music,” he wrote a waltz, two sarabandes, two mazurkas, a polonaise, an étude and a gigue — nearly an entire score written in permutations of triple time.