We owe the artist, dead on November 26 to 91, the legendary musicals “West Side Story”, “Sunday in the Park with Georges” …
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The superlatives did not miss it: Stephen Sondheim, the greatest author of musicals of the last third of the XX e century, which has just died on November 26, in his House of Roxbury, in Connecticut, at the age of 91, was quickly considered the “Broadway genius”. The coverage of the New York Magazine of April 4, 1994 had to ask, in the wink, the question “Stephen Sondheim God?”.
because the one the New York Times qualifies, with reason, in the title of his Necrology , of” titan of musical comedy “, was unanimously revered, especially in the Anglo-Saxon language and culture countries . When his birthdays were celebrated at the Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, in New York – where his house was close to that of the actress Katherine Hepburn, who harassed him when she heard him play the piano -, the biggest stars of the Scene, song and opera, television and cinema were pressed to interpret its most famous “tubes”.
We still remember Meryl Streep (of which we know that she began her career as a comedian in 1974 with a piece of which Sondheim wrote the music), Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald in a hilarious version of The Ladies Who Lunch, Sang in Teleconference, A Glass Alcohol by hand, during the confinement, for the ninetieth anniversary of the musician and parole …
President Barak Obama, in 2015, giving him the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civilian distinction of the country, had the right words: “as a songwriter, lyrics and like gender alone, Sondheim poses challenges. to his audience. His greatest successes are not tunes that you can hum, they are comments on the paths we have not borrowed and the wishes who have not done. ”
Cards in hands to win at Broadway
Formed by Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyrics of legendary musicals such Show Boat (1927), the king and I (1951) and the melody of happiness (1959) – who becomes his father of substitution – the young man, Born in an easy family, very quickly learns what to do and not do. It also follows extensive studies with a vanguard composer, Milton Babbitt, a propagator in the United States of the serial writing technique and electronic music.
so that Sondheim has a lot of cards in hand to win themselves in Broadway, where he will certainly reinvent the genre, but also, in the 1970s, marking the last fires of the literary and musical requirement in this domain. First single stench (for West Side Story, in 1957, Gypsy, in 1959, do I Hear a Waltz?, In 1965), he finally imposes like lyricist and musician while begins the wave that introduces pop music to Broadway.
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