Good news, theatre nerds! Time to refresh that library card because approximately 5,000 items from the personal archives of late Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim have found a home at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Included in the collection are everything from music and lyric sketches, to cut songs, unproduced work, scrapbooks, recordings, and more.
See the library's Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz give a guided tour through some of the collection in the video above.
Highlights of the acquisition include a one-page inner monologue Sondheim wrote as subtext for Desir茅e while singing "Send in the Clowns" from A Little Night Music, lyrics to a never-before-heard reprise of "Side by Side by Side" from Company, 40 pages of lyric sketches for Sweeney Todd wordplay showcase "A Little Priest," drafts of lyric variations to "I'm Still Here" and "Putting it Together" made for Barbra Streisand, a spiral music book of musical ideas penned while a student at Williams College, three boxes of never-recorded speciality songs including personal birthday songs for friends like Leonard Bernstein and Harold Prince, and manuscripts for what would become Here We Are, the master's final musical.
鈥淪tephen Sondheim has been credited with reinventing American musical theatre, and his papers support that claim,鈥� says Music Division Chief Susan Vita in a statement. 鈥淭he wit, intelligence, and theatrical daring of his work has succeeded in the way most great art does鈥攊t illuminates our shared human condition. This incredible collection now enjoys a permanent home at the nation鈥檚 library, which celebrates creativity in all its forms. As a treasured addition to our performing arts collection, it serves to honor and preserve Sondheim鈥檚 legacy.鈥�
The acquisition has been in the works for more than three decades鈥擲ondheim decided that they would house his archives following a visit to the facility in 1992 (where some time with Gershwin's Porgy and Bess manuscripts moved him to tears). Though it was reported at the time of his 2021 death that his papers would go to the D.C. institution, that process took a little longer than expected. The library wanted to wait until the material would be available to researchers before making an official announcement.
That long-made plan allowed for Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz to do some incredible work to accompany the collection, interviewing Sondheim about much of the archives years before his death. Those interviews, which Horowitz says were intended to serve as answering everything researchers would want to ask while looking at his manuscripts, resulted in Horowitz's seminal 2010 book Sondheim On Music.
"There were things that I had no idea would be there," Horowitz tells 半岛体育 of finally getting the complete collection to the library, about three months ago. "There is a lot of juvenilia that I didn't expect, like his music notebooks from when he was in college. I didn't expect to see a piano sonata he wrote when he was 19 or 20. There's a lot of writings I didn't know existed, either short stories or teleplays and things like that."
Though Sondheim himself invited fans into his writing process with his books Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, Horowitz says his papers will offer researchers a better look at the extent of Sondheim's toiling on his musicals. "There can be 40 or 50 pages of lyric sketches," he shares. "There'll be 40, let's say, pages of lyrics sketches, really dense, throughful lyric sketches. He'll have a final version of the song, his piano-vocal fair copy of the song. But then there'll be another 20 typescripts of the lyrics with constant annotations and notes that he's still continuing to refine and polish, even after he's got what seems like a perfect, great song. And I don't think that anyone has really done a serious analysis of his music sketching, which is quite extraordinary."
Horowitz says of all the surprises, the speciality songs might be the biggest shock. "Apparently in the '70s, the public television station in New York auctioned off that he would custom write a song for somebody. And this young guy was the high bidder, and got Sondheim to write a song for his mother's 50th birthday. I never had any inkling of that song before. It was quite a trip seeing that and the letters from the son, explaining what his mother was like and who she was, and seeing how he turned that into the song."
What the collection lacks, Horowitz admits, is correspondence. But that doesn't mean the library doesn't have researchers covered there. "We have a lot of correspondence from him in our other collections鈥攐ur Bernstein Collection and the Arthur Laurents Collection and the Hal Prince Collection. There's even two letters from him in our Ethel Merman Collection. We have a fair amount of the correspondence that he wrote."
Horowitz says the collection is available in-person in Washington, D.C. Though things could change in the future, he says not to expect much to make it online. The library owns the collection, but doesn't control the materials' copyrights.
Sondheim, who died in 2021 at the age of 91, was a true titan of the musical theatre, re-defining the genre with a string of musicals in the 1970s (all directed by Harold Prince) that included Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd. His legendary body of work also includes West Side Story, Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park With George, Into the Woods, Passion, Assassins, Road Show, and Here We Are.
His manuscripts join a collection that also includes the work of Sondheim's friends, collaborators, and mentors, including Oscar Hammerstein II, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, Mary Rodgers, Arthur Laurents, Harold Prince, and Milton Babbitt. They also join a previous Sondheim donation, his collection of records, which came to the library in 1995.
Visit .
The first page of Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 manuscript for 鈥淪end in the Clowns鈥� from A Little Night Music (1973). Sondheim鈥檚 biggest hit, with more than 400 recordings, may have been the song he wrote more quickly than any other鈥攚ithin 24 hours.
A page from Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 lyric sketches for 鈥淎 Little Priest鈥� from Sweeney Todd (1979). This is one of approximately 40 pages. Marginalia include types of people and professions that might be baked into meat pies; Sondheim considered more than 150, based on other lyric sketches.
A page of Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 manuscript piano-vocal score for 鈥淎 Little Priest鈥� from Sweeney Todd (1979), the show鈥檚 act one closing number.
Stephen Sondheim would sometimes rewrite and adapt songs for specific performers or events. Here are manuscripts and sketches as he rewrote 鈥淚鈥檓 Still Here,鈥� originally written for Follies (1971), and personalized it for Barbra Streisand to perform in 1993.
Stephen Sondheim wrote the song 鈥淧utting It Together鈥� for Sunday in the Park with George (1984), describing the efforts of a visual artist. At the request of Barbra Streisand, he refashioned the lyrics for a recording artist, and the new version became the opening track of her acclaimed Broadway Album (1985). Shown here is a page from Sondheim鈥檚 score atop a page of his lyric sketches.
The first page of the manuscript for 鈥淎gony,鈥� the witty song of sibling rivalry for the princes in Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 musical of reimagined and imaginatively intertwined fairy tales, Into the Woods (1987).
鈥淥ut of My Reach鈥� was the working title (or underlying notion) for what would become the song "Agony鈥� in Into the Woods (1987), in which sibling princes try to outdo each other in the throes of self-pity. On this page from Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 lyric sketches, a string of word choices fills the left margin.
The first page of the manuscript for Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 鈥淣ot a Day Goes By,鈥� the haunting ballad from Merrily We Roll Along (1981). The song is heard in three iterations鈥攁s a love song, a song of unrequited love, and a torch song.
The cover of one of several music notebooks likely from Stephen Sondheim鈥檚 college days. This one is titled 鈥淪ongs + Ideas鈥� and signed faintly at the bottom left.
Collage of items from the Library of Congress鈥� Stephen Sondheim Collection.
Collage of items from the Library of Congress鈥� Stephen Sondheim Collection.
-Evan-Zimmerman-for-MurphyMade.jpg)
