Stephen Sondheim Interview (page: 8 / 9) Award-winning Composer and Lyricist	Print Interview

In Meryle Secrest's biography of you, you're quoted as saying that you found writing music easier than writing lyrics. Is that true?

Stephen Sondheim: I just said that lyric writing is harder than writing music. In the sense that your resources are so much more limited.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there, and it sounds natural. Well, that means things like inflection, the elongation of syllables. Now I'm talking about a certain kind of songwriting. You know, opera librettists and opera composers will take a word and do a whole melisma on it, because it's not about the language. It's about the voice and the music. But if you're dealing with a musical in which you're trying to tell a story that is like a play, and particularly if you're trying to tell a contemporary one, or something from the last 50 years, it's got to sound like speech. And in order not to sound so songlike that you lose the scene. At the same time it's got to be a song in the sense that -- I loathe recitative -- and so it should have a form, and I think the form is what gives it power, and the more formal, in a sense, the song is. You have to juggle all those things, and that's hard work. That's really hard, and usually it doesn't come out quite the way you want it. Maybe all writers would say it never comes out the way you want it. It's particularly noticeable in a lyric because the form is so short. You know, you've got 50 words. One of them out of place is like having a novel with one out of 50 chapters out of place. But you've got 49 long chapters so that -- but in a short period of time it stands out, the wrong word, and because each word becomes so important.

John Updike was quoted in a New York Times article as saying that every time he walks into a bookstore he sort of snickers because he can't believe somebody would buy one of his books. He feels like such a fraud. Do you recognize that feeling?

Stephen Sondheim: very writer that I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other. You don't feel it all the time, but particularly if you're successful, or rather if people admire you a lot and it's not even success. That increases the sense of fraudulence. "Hey, I'm not that good! Stop comparing me to so and so." And then you do feel fraudulent.

I guess if you weren't self-critical, the stuff wouldn't be as good.

Stephen Sondheim: No, probably not. Sometimes you can be so self-critical you take the blood out of a piece, and that is often a danger. Or you can be Thomas Wolfe and just collect all the stuff in a box and have Maxwell Perkins edit it for you. So there are extremes. Those books are good and rich and full of life, and he had an editor who really took what he had and helped form it. They're full of blood and life. Maybe if he'd been self-critical it wouldn't be as good.

At Oxford University, you told the students they should not be critical, at least at the beginning.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Stephen Sondheim: The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. It's particularly true in lyric writing because things become... You know, it's easy for a novelist to say, "I love you." You know, it's three words out of 300,000. But if that's in your lyric and you think, "Oh Jesus, I can't. No, that's just too flat, and it's too..." Well, if you start thinking that way, you won't write anything. And so yeah. I know it for myself. That's why, in teaching, I always emphasize it, 'cause it takes one to know one. It's that moment. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can possibly put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, no matter how clichéd it may seem, you'll do yourself a service.

Early on, we were talking about your parents. Did they live to see your success?

Stephen Sondheim: No. Well, my mother lived quite a long time. She lived until the early '90s. My father, unfortunately, died when he was 70, and that was 1965. So the only music he ever heard of mine on the stage was Forum and Anyone Can Whistle. The last thing he heard, I think, was Do I Hear A Waltz?

Were they supportive of you in your career direction?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Stephen Sondheim: Yes. My mother was supportive of me once she found out that I was now hobnobbing with Leonard Bernstein, all the celebrities. Then she thought it was fine. But my father was indeed proud of me, although he had been not terribly supportive when I first started. I lived on a scholarship for two years out of college and that bothered him a lot, that I wasn't "Earning a Living," capital E, capital L. And he did his best to make me feel guilty about that, not consciously, but it mattered, it mattered. But when I got my first job in television and I was actually earning a living as a professional writer, he relaxed, and then... I'll tell you an anecdote. I got the job writing West Side Story, and he asked to read the script because he said, "I could get some friends and we could invest." He'd never invested in a show before. And I said, "Oh, you don't have to do that, Dad." He said, "Oh, I'd like to read the script." I gave it to him, and I was sitting in the living room, he came out of the bedroom where he'd been reading it and his face was the color of that paper, and he said, "Not a lotta laughs, are there?" I said, "No, Dad. Please, you don't have to invest in this show." He said, "No, no, no," and he and some friends invested 1500 bucks, which in those days -- it was a $300,000 budget, and that was called a percent. You know, it's only a half percent. It's a percent because of the way you have limited partnership and general partnership. But I'm glad he did.

Broadway shows have become somewhat more expensive than back in the '50s.

Stephen Sondheim: But so has bread. What's happened nowadays is you can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, and so you have to have corporate investment. Or a lot of rich people. Nowadays, you look at the producers of a musical, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.

Has that diminished what is produced?

Stephen Sondheim: Oh, sure. There are fewer new shows, also shows run a much longer time now. So the theaters are filled for many, many years. Whereas, in the periods we're talking about, a big hit would run maybe three years. So there was a turnover in theaters. And then the tastes, the dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them.

Do you think audiences are more interested in spectacle now?

Stephen Sondheim: There's more to it than that. There are compendium shows of pop songs that they're already familiar with, rather than having to listen to new stuff. It used to be in New York, about ten years ago, that two out of every three theatergoers were local, meaning from the tri-state area, let's call it. Now two-thirds are tourists, and because people come to New York to see a "hit show" and make a real night out, which is going to cost them a lot of money, because the tickets are expensive. But it means one show, maybe two. So they're not going to see the new experimental musical down the block. They're going to go see Spamalot or something that's hard to get a ticket for and that has a reputation of people liking it.

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