Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber

by Block, Geoffrey

  What Sondheim Learned from Hammerstein

  Sondheim, a native New Yorker whose father could play harmonized show tunes by ear after hearing them once or twice, was the beneficiary of a precocious, suitably specialized musical education. While still a teenager and shortly after the premiere of Carousel, Sondheim had the opportunity to be critiqued at length by the legendary Hammerstein, who, by a fortuitous coincidence that would be the envy of Show Boat’s second act, happened to be a neighbor and the father of Sondheim’s friend and contemporary, James Hammerstein. Sondheim’s unique apprenticeship with the first of his three great mentors, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, one of the giants of the Broadway musical from the 1920s until long after his death in 1960 (see the chapters on Show Boat and Carousel), might serve as a Hegelian metaphor for Sondheim’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of modernism and traditionalism, high-brow and low-brow. His great aesthetic achievements have been as a loyal revolutionary (not unlike Beethoven) who thoroughly engaged with—rather than rejected—Broadway’s richest traditions. Before his collaborations with three major composers in this tradition as well as Robbins and Laurents and Merman, Sondheim was able to learn invaluable lessons about the craft of Broadway from one of its greatest pioneers. Sondheim never forgot Hammerstein’s priceless lessons in how to write and how not to write a musical. To help his student develop his craft and discover his own voice, Hammerstein suggested that Sondheim write four kinds of musicals to develop his craft.5 For the next six years Sondheim would attempt to follow this advice.

  Some of what Sondheim learned about lyric writing and dramatic structure from the master soon became available to musical theater aficionados when Hammerstein published a seminal essay on the subject in 1949.6 One central premise stated early in the essay is Hammerstein’s conviction that “a song is a wedding of two crafts.”7 Later, Hammerstein articulates the importance of “very close collaboration during the planning of a song and the story that contains the song” and espouses the view that “the musician is just as much an author as the man who writes the words.”8 The resulting marriage of music and words, the welding of two crafts and talents “into a single expression” is for Hammerstein “the great secret of the well-integrated musical play.”9 Unlike Hammerstein, Sondheim would assume two mantles, author and musician—although, unlike his mentor, Sondheim did not write the librettos for any of his Broadway shows.

  Throughout the course of his essay Hammerstein explores a number of issues and ideas about theatrical songwriting that did not go unnoticed by his student and neighbor. For example, Hammerstein advocates what we might call a non-operatic approach to the musical that maintains clear and sharp distinctions between spoken dialogue and song. With few exceptions, and in marked contrast to his popular contemporary Lloyd Webber, Sondheim has followed this approach ever since. Hammerstein also never wavered from his conviction “that the song is the servant of the play” and “that it is wrong to write first what you think is an attractive song and then try to wedge it into a story.”10 His protégé would follow this advice as well, in fact unwaveringly for the next forty years.

  Hammerstein goes on to share his ideas about the craft of lyric writing. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Hammerstein on rhyming: “If one has fundamental things to say in a song, the rhyming becomes a question of deft balancing. A rhyme should be unassertive, never standing out too noticeably…. There should not be too many rhymes. In fact, a rhyme should appear only where it is absolutely demanded to keep the pattern of the music. If a listener is made rhymeconscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the song. If, on the other hand you keep him waiting for a rhyme, he is more likely to listen to the meaning of the words.”11 As an example of the latter technique, Hammerstein points out the delay of the “cotton” and “forgotten” rhyme in Show Boat’s “Ol’ Man River,” a delay that focuses the rhymes on the most crucial words when additional and possible rhymes would detract from their power. Interestingly, Hammerstein considers the exuberant mood of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific an opportunity for “interior rhymes, undemanded rhymes and light-hearted similes.” These were techniques that Sondheim became justly critically famous for, but would generally avoid in later years, especially when setting lyrics for less educated characters. Opting for character over craft (“song” as “servant of the play”), Sondheim criticized his own brilliant lyrics for Maria’s exuberant number in West Side Story, “I Feel Pretty,” for their lack of verisimilitude.12

  • Hammerstein on phonetics: “The job of the poet is to find the right word in the right place, the word with the exact meaning and the highest quality of beauty or power. The lyric writer must find this word too, but it must be also a word that is clear when sung and not too difficult for the singer to sing on that note which he hits when he sings.”13 Although Hammerstein points out a number of successful song conclusions that follow this principle, most of which end on a vowel (e.g., “Oh, what a beautiful day”), the self-critical lyricist chose to dwell on what he felt was one failed ending, the consonant that concludes “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’” in Carousel (“all the rest is talk”).

  • Hammerstein on sincerity: “The most important ingredient of a good song is sincerity. Let the song be yours and yours alone. However important, however trivial, believe it. Mean it from the bottom of your heart, and say what is on your mind as carefully, as clearly, as beautifully as you can.”14

  A quarter of a century later Sondheim published some of his own thoughts about lyric writing adapted from a talk he simply called “Theater Lyrics” first given to the Dramatists Guild and then later published in a slightly altered form in the collection Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theatre. On the first page of this talk in its published form Sondheim informs his audience and readers that most of what he knows he learned from Hammerstein, his first mentor (although he also acknowledges the example of other lyricists, including Cole Porter). Sondheim recalls that the mentorship officially began when Hammerstein critiqued a draft of a musical called By George, a musical à clef about the preparatory school where the young protégé was then a junior.15

  What Hammerstein taught the novice at their historic first session not only encompassed lyric writing but also addressed larger dramatic issues. This is how Sondheim recalled his lesson nearly thirty years later: “Detail by detail, he told me how to structure songs, how to build them with a beginning and a development and an ending, according to his own principles, how to introduce character, what relates a song to character, etc. etc. It was four hours of the most packed information. I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, that I learned in that afternoon more than most people learn about song writing in a lifetime.”16 Some of what his teacher told him (e.g., the remarks on rhyming, phonetics, and sincerity quoted earlier) appeared a few years later in Hammerstein’s essay. Over the years Sondheim also often repeated Hammerstein’s anecdote about the importance of detail, which was inspired by his mentor’s astonishment when he learned that the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty carefully detailed the top of Lady Liberty’s head long before it was possible to anticipate the popularity of photographs of the iconic image from above.17

  The first of the four apprentice musicals assigned by Hammerstein was to be a musical based on a play he admired, the second a musical based on a play he found flawed and felt he could improve, a third based on a novel or a short story, and for the finale an original musical. In the end only the first, Beggar on Horseback, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, was completed and performed (at Williams College in March 1949 at the end of Sondheim’s junior year). Sondheim continued to work on the second, Climb High, based on Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, for several years after he graduated and made substantial progress on the third show, based on the Mary Poppins stories.18 At the end of his sophomore year a fifth non-pedagogical show, a spoof on Williams College life called Phinney’s Rainbow, was staged there and Hammerstein came up to Massachusetts
to see it.19 The final original musical was the post-collegiate Saturday Night. Abandoned after the unexpected death of its producer Lemuel Ayers in 1955, shortly before Sondheim was asked to join the West Side Story team, Saturday Night would not receive its first professional reading for another forty years.20

  In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim encapsulates the craft of lyric writing from two seemingly straightforward but potentially profound central principles: (1) “Lyrics exist in time” and (2) “Lyrics go with music.” Both principles possess far-reaching artistic consequences for Sondheim’s future in musical theater and both take as a given the wedding of music and lyrics that Hammerstein emphasized in his essay a quarter of a century earlier. The lyric writer must take into account not only the fact that “music is a relentless engine and keeps lyrics going,” but that lyrics need to be “underwritten” and “simple in essence.” In addition, a lyric writer must learn the difficult lesson of the fundamental difference between serious poetry and lyric writing. Sondheim begins with his “favorite example,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ / Oh, what a beautiful day” from Oklahoma! (a lyric that seemed simplistic on paper but came to life when sung) to demonstrate this last point: “I would be ashamed to put it down on paper, it would look silly. What Hammerstein knew was that set to music it was going to have an enormous richness. It did, it’s a beautiful lyric—but not on paper.”21

  Another great Hammerstein lesson was a variation on the theme of sincerity Hammerstein espoused in his published essay on lyrics: the importance of expressing your own lyric voice (to “Say what you feel, not what other song writers feel”). Sondheim’s view of the world was by no means the same as his mentor’s. Nevertheless, for the rest of his career Sondheim would live by Hammerstein’s example, which is eloquently captured in the advice Dot gives to her great-grandson in the song “Move On”: “Anything you do, / Let it come from you.” In addition to what he was able to impart about lyric writing and dramatic construction, Hammerstein played a major advisory role when he encouraged the aspiring composer-lyricist to accept seemingly less ambitious opportunities and agree to work exclusively as a lyricist with such talented and experienced composers as Bernstein, Styne, and Rodgers, a major star such as Merman, and a director-choreographer of Robbins’s talent and stature.

  Other Lessons Learned

  Burt Shevelove, who co-authored the book for Forum, and Arthur Laurents, the librettist for the other four Sondheim shows staged between 1957 and 1965, also gave Sondheim lessons that would last long after he moved on to other creative partnerships. From Shevelove, Sondheim learned “that clarity of language was as important as well as clarity of thought” and to “never sacrifice smoothness for cleverness.”22 In a remark that might be considered dismissive of such musicals as Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I Sondheim credits Laurents as someone who taught “playwriting principles about lyrics, much deeper and subtler than Oscar because Arthur writes deeper and subtler plays than Oscar.”23 This brings Sondheim to the major lesson he learned from Laurents, “the notion of sub-text”:

  Now this is a word I had heard tossed around by Actors Studio types for a long time and really rather sneered at: but what it means simply is, give the actor something to act. I think this is a real secret; if I had to sell secrets about lyric writing I would sell this secret about sub-text. Watch how even some Broadway lyrics that you admire just sit there, with nothing for the actor to play. They just play the next logical step. A playwright when he writes a scene always gives some sub-text, or it’s a very shallow scene. Well, that happens with lyrics. They may be very good, but if they’re just on the surface, if there’s not pull, there’s a kind of deadness on the stage.24

  Sondheim’s unstated parallel between subtext in a play and subtext in a song is a telling one. A few years before Sondheim’s tutorial as an adolescent, Hammerstein wrote that songs “must help tell our story and delineate characters, supplementing the dialogue and seeming to be, as much as possible, a continuation of dialogue”—in short, to exhibit the characteristics of a well-made play.25 Through a conscious use of subtext, Sondheim goes further when he takes the strengths of a well-made play and applies them to a well-made song. The result is a song that expands into its own miniature play.

  Among the examples that Sondheim uses to illustrate subtext is “In Buddy’s Eyes” from Follies. In this poignant and touching song, Sally Plummer tells her former and inextinguishable flame, the seemingly self-confident but ultimately pathetic Benjamin Stone (described by Sondheim as “ripped to shreds internally”), about how her husband, the devoted but philandering Buddy, sees what Sally herself cannot see:

  In Buddy’s eyes,

  I’m young, I’m beautiful.

  In Buddy’s arms,

  On Buddy’s shoulder,

  I won’t get older.

  Nothing dies.

  In contrast to a sophisticated and pyrotechnically verbal character such as the lawyer Fredrik Egerman in A Little Night Music, the emotionally transparent Sally sings deliberately, repeats words, and utters mostly simple one-syllable rhymes. Like her husband, Buddy, who is fated to love a woman who cannot return his love, Sally continues to carry the torch—and sing torch songs—for the unhappily married and emotionally unattainable Ben, who discarded her thirty years ago and will take advantage of her vulnerabilities at their reunion. Sondheim’s words have often been celebrated for intellect and intricacy. Here is a clear example of his own early preference for simplicity and emotional directness in lyrics and, as we will soon see, music as well.

  In the central chorus of her song, Sondheim gives Sally an identical four-note melodic figure each of the six times she sings “in Buddy’s eyes” (the last up an octave) and the one time she sings “in Buddy’s arms.” The music sets the lyrics simply and syllabically (rather than melismatically, with more than one note per syllable). The figure turns on itself, down from and back to F via D and E, above a static harmony that reflects Sally’s sincere simplicity, Buddy’s stoic solidity, and perhaps also Sally’s boredom with Buddy’s constant admiration. Significantly, the music Sondheim gives Sally to sing for this mantra, “in Buddy’s eyes” (or “arms”), is the only music that fits the underlying static harmony. It is also significant, perhaps a sign of her lack of self-awareness and desire to avoid the psychological root of her problems (symbolically represented as the harmonic root of her song), that when Sally moves from the third to the fifth of the tonic triad, she conspicuously avoids singing the root note of this chord, so relentlessly repeated in the bass.

  In “Theater Lyrics” Sondheim describes this song as a “woman’s lie to her former lover” (Ben), but it may also be interpreted as her lie to the man she married (Buddy), a man who loves her deeply and who provides a steady but boring static grounding, both psychological and harmonic. For Sondheim, the song’s subtext is Sally’s anger at being rejected by Ben many years ago, a subtext that is not found explicitly in either the lyrics or implied by the melody or harmony. Sondheim credits and praises Jonathan Tunick, his principal orchestrator for more than the thirty years between Company and Road Show, who demonstrated his understanding of the subtext of this song by assigning the “dry” woodwinds to Sally’s wry references about Buddy, and warm strings for the self-referential parts of the text, Sondheim perhaps gives too much credit to Tunick. Even without this orchestral subtlety, which Sondheim describes as analogous to the details in the head of the Statue of Liberty that so impressed Hammerstein, it is arguable that Sondheim’s own subtle musical distinctions between the harmonically synchronized repetitive rhythmic pattern that accompanies the melodic mantra “in Buddy’s eyes” and the more varied contrasting musical phrases when she refers to herself (but still in Buddy’s eyes) would emerge with comparable clarity even in a piano-vocal reduction.

  One last mentor, one not cited in “Theater Lyrics,” needs to be mentioned: the composer and mathematician Milton Babbitt. Babbitt’s mentoring began sever
al years after Hammerstein’s initial tutelage when Sondheim, who had majored in mathematics as well as music at Williams College, elected to use his Hutchinson Prize money to study principles of composition and analyze popular songs such as Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” with the illustrious Princeton music theory and composition professor and avant-garde composer, who also was knowledgeable about jazz and loved musicals (he even tried his hand at writing a musical score once and published some of the resulting theater songs).26 At the same time he was teaching Sondheim traditional classical and popular musical forms, Babbitt was pioneering a new composition technique widely known as “total serialization” as well as complex electronic works. Babbitt has stated that he did not ask Sondheim to work within this modernist idiom because he did not consider it appropriate to his student’s aesthetic aims. But is it not possible that Sondheim chose Babbitt as a postgraduate compositional mentor at least partly because of his gathering reputation as a mathematically adept modernist? While thirty years earlier Schoenberg systematically arranged pitch according to various permutations of a twelve-tone series in his quest to systematically avoid a tonal center, Babbitt less systemically serialized other parameters as well, including rhythm and tone color.