Isn’t It Rich?By PAUL SIMON
October 27, 2010
The title of Stephen Sondheim’s new book (the first of two volumes), “Finishing the Hat,” comes from a song in his 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, “Sunday in the Park With George,” about the 19th-century artist Georges Seurat, whose painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” inspired the score. The song is the epiphany Seurat experiences, allowing him to complete his painting even as he realizes his model and lover has left him for another:
And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, “Well, I give what I give.”
But the woman who won’t wait for you knows
That however you live,
There’s a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat . . .
Starting on a hat . . .
Finishing a hat . . .
Look I made a hat . . .
Where there never was a hat.
The book “Finishing the Hat” becomes a metaphor for that feeling of joy, the little squirt of dopamine hitting the brain when the artist creates a work of art. It’s a feeling so addictive the artist is willing to forgo love in order to experience artistic bliss. It could be a metaphor for Sondheim’s love of songwriting.
“Finishing the Hat” — a fascinating compilation of lyrics, commentary and anecdotes, covering the years 1954 to 1981 — is essentially about process, the process of writing songs for theater. Performing acts of literary self-criticism can be a tricky business, akin to being one’s own dentist, but Sondheim’s analysis of his songs and those of others is both stinging and insightful. Nevertheless, he successfully avoids the traps of a self-inflated ego and, with one delicious exception (Robert Brustein, who produced “The Frogs” at Yale, is described as “that worst of both worlds, the academic amateur”), of savoring the pleasure of revenge upon an “unprofessional” outsider. After reading “Finishing the Hat,” I felt as if I had taken a master class in how to write a musical. A class given by the theater’s finest living songwriter.
Sondheim’s rhymes are inventive, precise and often brilliant. From “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”:
Pantaloons and tunics,
Courtesans and eunuchs,
Funerals and chases,
Baritones and basses . . .
Goodness and badness,
Man in his madness,
This time it all turns out all right —
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!
Sondheim quotes the composer-lyricist Craig Carnelia: “True rhyming is a necessity in the theater, as a guide for the ear to know what it has just heard.” I have a similar thought regarding attention span and a listener’s need for time to digest a complicated line or visualize an unusual image. I try to leave a space after a difficult line — either silence or a lyrical cliché that gives the ear a chance to “catch up” with the song before the next thought arrives and the listener is lost.
Sondheim’s anecdotes involving legendary showbiz names are historical footnotes to some of the last century’s great musicals. For example: A scene for “Gypsy” originally meant to be choreographed by Jerome Robbins had to be redone when Robbins said he didn’t have time to do it balletically. The plot information would have to come in the form of a song. Sondheim and Robbins went to work that evening in a “shabby” theater on 42nd Street. In a dark house with a single exposed light bulb for the piano and stage, Sondheim began to improvise words and music as Robbins slinked across the stage like a bad striptease artist. They worked for three uninterrupted hours and produced what would become the showstopper “Rose’s Turn.” Sondheim describes the experience as “like every shimmering nighttime rehearsal scene I’d ever loved in the movies.”
Stephen Sondheim shot to fame in 1957 as the lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein on the groundbreaking classic “West Side Story.” His pride in having a Broadway smash was diminished by a regret that “many of the lyrics in ‘West Side Story’ suffer from a self-conscious effort to be what Lenny deemed ‘poetic.’ ” Bernstein’s “idea of poetic lyric writing was the antithesis of mine.”
I saw “West Side Story” when I was 16 years old, and I have two vivid memories of the show. One, I didn’t believe for a minute that the dancers were anything like the teenage hoods I knew from the street corner, and secondly, I was completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the song “Maria.” It was a perfect love song. Sondheim was less enamored with the lyric he wrote for Bernstein. He describes it as having a kind of “overall wetness” — “a wetness, I regret to say, which persists throughout all the romantic lyrics in the show.” Sondheim’s rule, taught to him by his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, is that the book and composer are better served by lyrics that are “plainer and flatter.” It is the music that is meant to lift words to the level of poetry.
Sondheim’s regret about “Maria” reminded me of my own reluctance to add a third verse to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I thought of the song as a simple two-verse hymn, but our producer argued that the song wanted to be bigger and more dramatic. I reluctantly agreed and wrote the “Sail on silvergirl” verse there in the recording studio. I never felt it truly belonged. Audiences disagreed with both Sondheim and me. “Maria” is beloved, and “Sail on silvergirl” is the well-known and highly anticipated third verse of “Bridge.” Sometimes it’s good to be “wet.”
When I think of Stephen Sondheim songs, I think of his melody and lyrics as one. His career as a lyricist for other composers (Bernstein, Jule Styne and Richard Rodgers) is as distinct from his later work as night is to day, or conversely, day to night, since the quintessential Sondheim song is perceived to be somehow darker, lyrically more cerebral and colder than his earlier collaborative work. From “Sweeney Todd”:
There’s a hole in the world
Like a great black pit
And the vermin of the world
Inhabit it,
And its morals aren’t worth
What a pig could spit,
And it goes by the name of London.
“Company,” one of my favorite Sondheim musicals, is often cited as another example of his cerebral, cold writing. The plot is a bitter examination of the “joy” of marriage and the existential loneliness of its unmarried protagonist, Bobby. Some have speculated that Bobby is an autobiographical stand-in for Sondheim, although he dismisses this as the trap of attributing the character of the art to the character of the artist. It’s harder to read autobiography into the words of a composer who writes for theater than it is for a pop music counterpart. A song from “the heart” of a character has to be truthful, but if it isn’t, it’s not the author’s lie — it’s the character’s. But if a pop singer or songwriter writes a love song, a song of regret or even a bit of inscrutable doggerel like “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” it’s autobiography. The lyricist in a musical is writing the art of the character. Both are pathways to a truth, but there is a profound difference in process.
To be fair to Sondheim’s critics, the heart/mind dilemma is a constant for many songwriters, myself included. If a writer composes a lyric with a complex thought or vivid image and fails to say it well, then the lines seem pretentious. If the songwriter goes for the heart and misses, then it’s sentimental. Sondheim is the farthest thing from a sentimental songwriter that I know, but his songs of the heart are shaded with rueful sorrow (“Send In the Clowns”) and translucent compassion. Here is the last verse of “Being Alive” from “Company”:
Somebody crowd me with love,
Somebody force me to care,
Somebody let me come through,
I’ll always be there
As frightened as you,
To help us survive
Being alive, being alive,
Being alive!
Sondheim’s music, which is only touched upon in “Finishing the Hat,” is distinctive but (and this is not unusual when words try to describe music) hard to define. He often uses dissonance (notes from one key added to chords from another, as if the ear were hearing two different keys at the same time) to indicate a character’s inner turmoil. Still, he doesn’t acknowledge any interest in or debt to jazz, the mother of dissonance. His favorite song composers are Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen, both of whom were jazz lovers, and he holds Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” in high esteem. Lots of jazz in his antecedents, but little in Sondheim. Perhaps he is more a mixture of Ravel and Berg with a dash of Rachmaninoff in the piano. His music sounds like “Broadway,” or is it that Broadway has come to sound like Sondheim? Which brings us to the final objection that stands between the words “Sondheim” and “genius”: hummability. Awkward word for such an elegant composer.
Some critics have made the case that with the exception of “Send In the Clowns,” Sondheim has never written a pop hit and is not a notable melody writer. But then why do theater audiences return year after year to myriad Sondheim revivals? I think it’s because he’s the “total package.” His best works have dazzlingly original premises (he sees a London staging of a potboiler called “Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and brilliantly envisions a Grand Guignol ballad opera). He studiously chooses great book writers, great directors and talented casts. He has wonderful arrangements, writes supremely intelligent lyrics and music that is more melodic than he is given credit for.
Sondheim says, “It’s the melody which dictates the lyric’s rhythms and pauses and inflections,” and “When it comes to theater songs, the composer is in charge.” Yet he is so adept a lyricist that he lends his melodies the grace or angularity necessary to create a classic song. I would argue that Sondheim’s lyrics are deeper, more invisibly intricate and braver in their search for truth than those of any who have preceded him.
Sondheim celebrated his 80th birthday this year, but there is no reason to believe that his creative juices have diminished. Verdi wrote “Falstaff” in his 80th year, and there may be a masterpiece incubating in Sondheim’s fertile mind, or for that matter, already sketched on his yellow legal pad.
FINISHING THE HATCollected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes
By Stephen Sondheim
Illustrated. 445 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $39.95
Paul Simon’s new album, “So Beautiful or So What,” will be released in early 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/books/review/Simon-t.html?_r=4
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