"The #!@ing words are awfully strong." Stephen Sondheim

The Canadian political writer Mark Steyn, who has a background as a theatre critic, says Stephen Sondheim doesn’t fit into the great American songbook tradition, as it is impossible to sing his songs in any other way that the way he wrote them. And when you see singers doing Sondheim songs, they always do them with the same tempi and in the same style as he wrote them.  You rarely hear jazz singers toy with the melody and pace of a Sondheim song as they do with, say, a Cole Porter.

Sondheim I suspect would take this as a compliment. Whereas Porter, Berlin, the Gershwins were by and large writing for the hit parade, with the particular show the means of delivery, Sondheim is very much writing for the moment and the character in the show. This is as much because of his aesthetic as it is because of changing times and expectations. So if his songs are difficult to understand out of context, and difficult to ‘re-interpret’, Sondheim would say he is doing his job.

(While I’ve got you here, I do find the habit of jazz singers of taking a classic song that we all love and thinking ‘You know, I think this would be improved with a different melody and a different rhythm and hell, a few extra lyrics. What did Porter know?” a bit odd, to say the least. Perhaps I am yet to hear a superb jazz singer, which is entirely possible.)

While Sondheim is currently a gold standard of modern Broadway, he is, like the gold standard, getting on. There have just been celebrations for his 80^th birthday, and as someone said, one feature of old age is a tendency to reminisce, what has also been called our anecdotage. When someone like Sondheim starts to reminisce, the best thing to do is encourage him.

And so we have Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim. This covers Sondheim’s career up to ‘Merrily we roll along’. Each chapter begins with a short essay on the provenance and history of each show. Then we have the complete lyrics, often with deleted lines, cut songs, and alternate materials included. And this is all sprinkled with commentary and anecdotes about performers and collaborators, as the title suggests. A second volume, Look I made a hat, taking the story up to 2011, is in the pipeline.

The endpapers are decorated with Sondheim’s three great principles: less is more, God is in the details, and content dictates form. All of which he explores in the body of the book.

Lyrics, Sondheim insists, are not poetry. This will find disagreement in those who want to push the likes of Paul Kelly, or (God forbid) Jim Morrison as poets. But, as Sondheim discusses, poetry is read at one’s own leisure whereas lyrics work with music defining the timing, pace and time you have to take the words in. If your songs are part of a show, there are even more constrictions. Therefore, the demands on the words are very different. Putting poetry to music is fraught with peril, you either work against the rhythm of the poet, or are trapped by it. By the same token, lyrics without music can be a bit flat and uninvolving. It is the relationship between the words and the music that gives lyrics their power.

And he is very particular about what makes a good lyric. Whatever else Sondheim does with words, he does not mince them. In sidebars on other lyricists, he is not afraid to criticise the greats, from Ira Gershwin to Alan Jay Learner to even his own mentor, Oscar Hammerstein.  He believes his pastiche of W S Gilbert’s lyrics in ‘Pacific Overtures’ is better than Gilbert. He praises too, often the same writer. Sometimes these are an aesthetic judgement, other times technical, sometimes bordering on the pedantic, but always well-argued and based on principle. And he is not averse to bringing this judgement on his own work.

His dislike for his work on ‘West Side Story’ is fairly well known. “Somewhere” he recalls as the “a” song, as that’s the word given an entire bar on the highest point of the melody as if it meant something. “I feel pretty” has a Puerto Rican Girl making sub-Cowardian internal rhymes. (He doesn’t like Coward’s lyrics too much either, for that matter.) But his self-criticism lasts into later and more mature work. So if you’ve picked a flaw or two in a Sondheim lyric, I suspect he got there first.

If you’re interested in musicals or writing, this is definitely worth a look. It’s an expensive book (I bought mine online, again a LOT cheaper) but it’s a book I can see myself going into over and over. What can I say? God knows how fond I'm of Sondheim.