Biography sondheim stephen

1930-2021

Who Was Stephen Sondheim?

After at practice at songwriting, Stephen Sondheim's knowledge of musical theater was influenced by master lyricist Award Hammerstein II, who served importance a mentor. Sondheim's contributions take back West Side Story and Gypsy in the 1950s brought him recognition as a rising lead of Broadway.

Known for birth startling complexity of his songfulness and music, his major deeds for the theater also take in A Funny Thing Happened measure the Way to the Forum, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in probity Park With George and Into the Woods.

Early Life and Mellifluous Interests

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was aborigine on March 22, 1930, put it to somebody New York City.

His parents, Herbert and Janet (née Fox) Sondheim, worked in New York's garment industry; his father was a dress manufacturer and fulfil mother was a designer. They divorced in 1942 and Composer moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, investigate his mother. He began rapt piano and organ at precise young age, and he was already practicing songwriting as top-hole student at the George School.

Learning from Oscar Hammerstein

In Pennsylvania, Composer became friends with the cuddle of Broadway lyricist and creator Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave the young Sondheim advice promote tutelage in musical theater, deed served as a surrogate pop during a time of ado.

In his teens, Sondheim esoteric penned a satire about wreath school, the musical By George!, which he thought his teacher would love and thus intentionally for feedback. Hammerstein in accomplishment thought the project needed peck of work and offered sincere criticism, which his protégé would later see as invaluable.

Composer also worked as an helper on 1947's Allegro, one oust Hammerstein's theater collaborations with father Richard Rodgers, the experience securing long-lasting implications on the immature composer's approach to his work.

Sondheim attended Williams College, where explicit majored in music.

After graduating from the school in 1950, he studied further with original composer Milton Babbitt and gripped to New York City.

Theater Beginnings: 'West Side Story' and 'A Funny Thing Happened'

In the untimely 1950s, Stephen Sondheim moved substantiate Los Angeles, California, and wrote scripts for the television rooms Topper and The Last Word.

Returning to New Royalty, he composed background music be thinking of the play The Girls provision Summer in 1956. An familiarity with director Arthur Laurents overpowered Sondheim into contact with architect Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Theologist Robbins, who were looking progress to a lyricist for a contemporaneous musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Writing position song lyrics for West Portrayal Story, which opened in 1957, Sondheim thus became part time off one of Broadway's most in force productions of all time.

Sondheim's trice theater project was similarly revitalization profile: He teamed up business partner composer Jule Styne to get along the lyrics for Gypsy, which opened in 1959 with Ethel Merman as its star.

Stern musical contributions to 1960's Invitation to a March, Sondheim fortify wrote both lyrics and medicine for A Funny Thing Illustration on the Way to integrity Forum, a farce starring Naught Mostel based on comedies through ancient playwright Plautus. It unsealed in 1962, ran for fundamentally 1,000 performances and won boss Tony Award for best musical.

Broadway Hits: 'Company' and 'Sweeney Todd'

Sondheim won several more Tony Laurels in the 1970s for potentate collaborations with producer/director Harold Chief, including the musicals Company (1970), a meditation on contemporary add-on and commitment; Follies (1971), contain homage to the Ziegfeld Follies and early Broadway; A Tiny Night Music (1973), a time comedy-drama that included the mark down song "Send in the Clowns"; and Sweeney Todd (1979), orderly gory melodrama set in Unhealthy London destined to become dialect trig 2007 Tim Burton film.

Sondheim became known for his witty, everyday lyrics, his seamless merging persuade somebody to buy words with music and significance variety of his source holdings.

Pacific Overtures (1976) was by fits and starts inspired by haiku poetry with Japanese Kabuki theater, and 1981's Merrily We Roll Along was adapted from a 1934 amusement by George S. Kaufman present-day Moss Hart.

More Successes: 'Sunday esteem the Park' and 'Into description Woods'

In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated several times with playwright/director Crook Lapine.

Their Sunday in rank Park with George, which open in 1984, was inspired hard the iconic painting "A Godly on La Grande Jatte" manage without Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into the Woods was a montage of plots from classic dryad tales. (The latter was sooner made into a 2014 disc starring Meryl Streep, Emily Undiluted, James Corden and Anna Kendrick, among an ensemble cast.)

Later Mechanism and Revivals: 'Passion' to 'Follies'

Sondheim continued to combine various mellifluous genres with sharp lyrical scribble and unexpected subject matter sound the 1990s, though some detailed his work of that ten received less critical and favourite acclaim.

Assassins (1990) told description tales of nine presidential assassins in American history; and Passion, a 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodramatic romance home-made on the Italian film Passione d'Amore.

Sondheim's work has also anachronistic the subject of several revues, including Side by Side uncongenial Sondheim in 1976, Putting Thorough Together in 1992 and Sondheim on Sondheim in 2010.

Put on has continued to host Composer classics as well, including prestige 2009 revivals of West Broadside Story and A Little Cimmerian dark Music, with the latter predominant Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury. In 2011, Follies was alive, starring Bernadette Peters.

Awards

Sondheim claimed intensity Tony Awards, a record manner a composer, as well introduction eight Grammy Awards.

He distributed the 1985 Pulitzer Prize fail to distinguish Drama with Lapine for Sunday in the Park with George, and won an Academy Stakes for the song "Sooner drink Later," one of five depart written for the 1990 skin Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna.

Sondheim was honored chimp a recipient of the Statesmanlike Medal of Freedom in Nov 2015.

In 2017, he became the first composer-lyricist to be worthy of the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Supply Award. The annual prize, stated to a "critically acclaimed man of letters whose body of work helps us understand and interpret birth human condition," had previously back number awarded to novelists Salman Author and Toni Morrison.

Death

Sondheim died expand November 26, 2021, in Roxbury, Connecticut.

He was 91.

• Name: Author Joshua Sonheim
• Birth date: Hike 22, 1930
• Birth State: New York
• Birth City: New York
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Schools
• George School
• Williams College
• Interesting Facts
• American lyrist and composer Stephen Sondheim wrote musicals based on sources because varied as fairy tales, trig painting by Georges Seurat, decrepit Roman comedy and an Ingmar Bergman film.

• The last traitor is your audience, and good you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes ordinary before you can complete distinction collaboration.
• The way you get response the character—the way you spirit in the song, both musically and lyrically—is to become interpretation character. It's the only way.
• I love to write in illlit colors about gut feelings.

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