"Carving the Language": Sondheim Talks Poetry, and Other Surprises

What's left to learn about composer Stephen Sondheim after you've read everything published about him since 1974? (Don't believe me? See my Sondheim page) I've run across some bits I hadn't heard before in articles printed since his death in November, a lot of them in an interview by D. T. Max in The New Yorker (February 14, 2022). Sondheim met with Max over a period of five years.

For me, the headline is Sondheim's expressing appreciation for works that have appeared in previous interviews only to be dismissed along the lines of, "I know it's good, but it just doesn't interest me." I'm thinking poetry, opera, Mozart.

The conversation takes a surprising turn when Sondheim gives credit to Larry Hart, whom he has often called out for shoddy workmanship. Sondheim tells Max, "If you look at songs prior to the nineteen-twenties, it’s all artificial. The point is that he started to infuse popular songs with the kind of daily talk instead of fancy talk." Max suggests a correspondence to poetry. Sondheim gets excited: "Yes! Oh, yes, absolutely right. William Carlos Williams!" But when Max says it's "painful" to read 19th-century verse because "they tried so hard," Sondheim comes to the defense of "fancy talk". He says, "Tennyson and Keats ... made artifacts that have nothing to do with contemporary speech. That was not what they were interested in. Poetry was about carving and decorating the language—and still saying something, but lots of rhymes, you know, all the artificial stuff."

Sondheim volunteers that opera is like that for him, too artificial. "[W]hen opera works for people it’s much bigger than real life, in the sense that you get real life the way you’re supposed to out of artificial art." He lauds the operas of Berg, and he calls Puccini "a master at psychological songwriting," adding, "I believe his characters."

Here are the other bits that I picked up:

• Max contrasts the tranquility of Sondheim's converted farm in Connecticut to the convivial to-do at Sondheim's Turtle Bay condo, where assistants and friends kept interrupting.
• Sondheim says his father "was a swell guy" but left him "in the lion's den." When Sondheim says he's told the stories of his grasping ego-centric mother enough to feel no pain in them anymore, he likes Max's suggestion that she became "material."
• About the art of composing, Sondheim brings up a couple of composers that he hasn't mentioned in a lot of other places: What it amounts to is, music exists in time, so how do you make it cohere? ...I remember, [teacher Milton Babbitt and I] analyzed Mozart’s Thirty-ninth to see how he held it together. Why is this one symphony? We’re talking about different movements, so it isn’t like he’s using the same tune, and yet there’s a coherence. And, of course, Wozzeck and Lulu are great examples of that presented on the stage. Each one is one piece.
• I especially enjoyed hearing that Sondheim feels the way I do about everyone else's favorite opera, Carmen, "just twenty of the best tunes you’ve ever heard in your life, but they’re twenty different tunes, you know? With a little fate theme that pops up every five minutes."
• On collaborations with playwright David Ives, Sondheim discusses what I've heard before about the Bunuel project -- I'm not a fan of the source material -- but also that he and Ives got seven songs into another project based on a notion Sondheim liked, that any interaction of two people is really a meeting of competing committees. Sondheim regrets that he didn't develop the idea before the Pixar movie Inside Out did it. He was grateful to the film for the insight that sadness has to be in the mix.
• Sondheim has never had much to say about popular music because most of it doesn't interest him harmonically. "The Beatles are exceptional because they were so original and startling," he says, and Radiohead.
• Admitting that he feels old-fashioned, as he has done elsewhere, he hesitates to repeat a joke that his buddy Bert Shevelove made about their common friend Leonard Bernstein for imitating rock music in Mass: "Rip Van With-It." The joke's pretty mild; what's new here is Sondheim's scruple about repeating it.
• What musicians usually call "modulation" from one key to another, Sondheim's tutor Milton Babbitt called "tonicization." Babbitt told him that, after several measures of a piece, “You’ve gotta tonicize something new.” Sondheim explained the technique: "So here you are in the tonic of A major, and now you’re going to the tonic of A-flat. It seems like an academic distinction, but it lays out the path more clearly if you think of it that way: that you’re temporarily making a tonic out of a completely foreign key." Max asked if surprise was the purpose. "What it’s about is making things surprising, but inevitable. That’s the great principle of all art that takes place in time. That can be true in painting, which does not take place in time, but, you know: 'Goodness gracious! What is that red spot in the middle of this blue painting?!'”

After I read that interview, I ran across another surprise at a classical music forum where an erudite string player traced Sondheim's lifelong relationship with the music of Ravel. The surprise for me had to do with Sondheim's accompaniment for the song "Liaisons" in A Little Night Music. For a grand Victorian woman recalling her flings with royalty, Sondheim wrote a colorful chord arpeggiated in different registers for each beat of a slow sarabande -- giving the effect of a ghostly procession of memories. Now I learn that Sondheim took that chord from the opening of Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, Ravel's tribute to the grand waltzes of the early 19th century.

In comments after the Ravel article, a troll sneered that Sondheim was an "amateur" who wrote ugly music. Remembering Peter Sagal's dictum that you don't change an idiot's mind by calling him an idiot, I thought through what this man could possibly mean. I myself have composed several hours' worth of music in my years, and I know there are only a few things that a composer must do. These are things Sondheim does so well, all discussed in Max's interview. Sondheim worked with tunes, harmony, variety, unity, structuring surprise so that it feels inevitable; he draws on a wide range of musical tradition. There are only two aspects of composition that didn't interest Sondheim: orchestration (because, why? The great Jonathan Tunick did that for him) and the human voice. If that, for the troll, makes Sondheim an amateur, well, I won't say what that makes the troll.