Stephen Sondheim, the elder statesman of American theater, is dead at 91.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born in New York City on March 22, 1930. An only child, Sondheim had a privileged, if emotionally vacuous childhood: “I grew up entirely, as one friend puts it, as an ‘institutionalized child,’”, “in that I was brought up either by a cook, a nanny or a boarding school or camp.” Yet at ten, he met the librettist Oscar Hammerstein II, a friend of his parents’, who soon assumed the role of both a surrogate father and a professional mentor.
In 1946, Sondheim matriculated to Williams College, where he studied music. “I had always imagined that writing music was all about sitting in your penthouse or your studio until this lady muse twitters around your head,” . “[Music professor] Robert Barrow was talking about leading tones and diatonic scales, and I fell in love. He took all the mystery out of music and taught craft.” In 1957, he had his first big break with, for which playwright Arthur Laurents hired Sondheim as a lyricist. Directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins with a score by Leonard Bernstein,ran for 732 performances and, in 1961, it was adapted to an Academy-Award winning film co-directed by Robbins and Robert Wise.
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