Finished with the hat

The lyrical genius of a Broadway great

The life and work of Stephen Sondheim could make a good Sondheim musical. A brilliant boy, abandoned by his father to grow up alone with his emotionally abusive mother, finds a mentor in one of Broadway’s greatest lyricists. His own career reveals a hollowness in the older man’s work.

It would be a musical tinged with shadow, rich with ambiguity, highly intellectual, deeply concerned with art and love and loss.

The most admired composer-lyricist of late-20thcentury musical theatre died Nov. 26. His end was as unexpected as anyone’s can be at 91; according to the New York Times, he recently attended revivals of two of his works, and spent Thanksgiving with friends.

While Sondheim’s mature style was inimitable, he transformed the ambitions of lyricists.

To see how, start with Sondheim’s schoolboy beginnings as a family friend of the Hammersteins. Sondheim would say a single afternoon in which Oscar Hammerstein critiqued his adolescent writing taught him “more about songwriting and the musical theatre than most people learn in a lifetime.”

Sondheim’s ambitions vastly outstripped his mentor’s. By the time an actor finished a song in a mature Sondheim musical, the audience was going to know that character better and understand the drama more profoundly. His goal was not hit songs. His goal was a greater play.

He was a relentless self-critic. His 2010 volume, Finishing the Hat, intersperses his lyrics with his reflections. He recalls his early work putting words to Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent score for West Side Story. The combination produced several hits, among them the waltz I Feel Pretty, part of which mortified him.

“I had this uneducated Puerto Rican girl singing ‘It’s alarming how charming I feel,’” he wrote — as if the teenager Maria, new to New York, were a figure in a Noël Coward play.

Sondheim’s mature work was so psychologically rich and profound it can’t easily be quoted in snippets. “Isn’t it rich? / Are we a pair? / Me here at last on the ground / You in mid-air.” The song that produced his book title, from Sunday in the Park With George, traces the emotional distance between the French impressionist Georges Seurat, and the world he observes, and the way that distance has doomed his hope for love.

Talent does an old thing well. Genius makes an old thing new. Rest in peace, Stephen Sondheim, genius.