Criticizing Sondheim

Books are reviewed by writers, the visual arts by disappointed, if knowledgeable, painters and art students, concert music by composers and would-be composers. Plays, at least in this country, are reviewed by people who don’t know de Montherlant from de Ghelderode and couldn’t care less, whose knowledge is comprised of what they read in Variety and gossip columns, and who know nothing, of course, about music.1 But Sondheim, it turns out, was himself a critic. Although he never committed to paper his various theses on de Montherlant and de Ghelderode, he did occasionally write criticism in the field of musical theatre: to be sure, his two books of collected lyrics were titled as containing ‘attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines’ as well as ‘amplifications, dogmas, [and] harangues.’ These various annotations focused principally on his own works, but he did include passages focusing on the work of other writers—at least of those who had passed away. He wrote that he would offer criticism only of ‘those who can no longer defend themselves—[and] who also cannot be upset by anything I have to say.’5 Now that Sondheim himself is sadly no longer with us, I have imagined his tacit permission to revisit his own work—to explore how his criticism reframes his own relationship to the genre. Sondheim’s most persistent criticism focused on moments when he felt that the lyricist—rather than the character—took centre stage. And in those terms, who wouldn’t resent self-aggrandizing lyrics and prefer instead the self-effacing ones advanced by a humbler writer? He complained, for example, that his lyric for ‘I Have a Love,’ from West Side Story, ‘sounds like the writer, not the character,’6 and that Company’s ‘The Little Things You Do Together’ ‘draw[s] attention to the lyricist rather than the lyrics.’7 For Sondheim, this general failure—a lyricist usurping the ostensibly rightful place of the character—could derive perhaps from creative poverty, as when a lyric writer simply cannot supply the character with the appropriate emotional expression; or it might be a case of artistic narcissism, as when a lyricist shoehorns a trunk lyric or lyrical device into a moment where it does not ‘belong,’ simply because the lyricist is infatuated with their own cleverness. Regardless of the cause, though, such moments make for a poor lyric—according to Sondheim. This surely echoes his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote that ‘there are few things in life of which I am certain, but I am sure of this one thing, that the song is the servant of the play, that it is wrong to write first what you think is an attractive song and then try to wedge it into a story.’8 However, even Hammerstein wasn’t spared his protégé’s red pen, as Sondheim rakes a South Pacific lyric—“I’m bromidic and bright/ As a moon-happy night/ Pouring light on the dew!”—over the critical coals, asking what Nellie is ‘doing even with a word such as “bromidic”?’9 “It’s alarming/ How charming/ I feel,” sings Maria, a lower-class Puerto Rican girl who has been brought up on street argot and whose brother is a gang leader, but who suddenly sings the smoothly rhymed and coyly elegant phrases of a character from a Noël Coward operetta because the lyricist wants to show off his rhyming skills.10 This emphasis on ‘character,’ while superficially attractive, reveals itself to be far more complex than it might first appear. Who is this ‘Maria’ who precedes and exists outside of her musical and terpsichorean life? If we grant that Maria wouldn’t have uttered the phrase ‘alarming how charming I feel,’ we must also concede that she wouldn’t have spoken in rhyme. Neither would she have spoken on pitch in a melodic line, held certain syllables longer than others, nor danced while she uttered such things. Musical theatre is a fantastical world in which characters are required to behave and express themselves in ways that would appear bizarre or even unhinged if one were to undertake such behaviours in actual deserted alleyways, pharmacies, or bridal shops, as the characters do in West Side Story. When Maria joyfully sings while twirling about on a theatrical stage, are we really concerned that her use of the word ‘stunning’ does not conform to the discursive standard one might expect in prose from someone with her socioeconomic, educational and linguistic profile? Noting, in a similar vein, that Alan Jay Lerner’s lyrics ‘are almost always smooth and tasteful,’ Sondheim argues that these are ‘virtues particularly inappropriate to Paint Your Wagon, his musical about miners and pioneers in the nineteenth century.’12 However, once we agree that nineteenth-century miners are going to break into song and dance, is it so self-evident how they should do so? Is it really more absurd for them to sing in clever rhymes than to sing in an awkward and palpitating meter? Moreover, any recourse to discourses of verisimilitude in musical theatre is necessarily ideological, given that the fragmented and multimodal nature of musical theatre structurally precludes the coherence of any unified ‘character.’13 Why, in other words, should any song or dance be judged by the standard of mundane speech? While we might counter that a lyric, in its use of language, is continuous with dialogue, the same could be said of movement and dance—yet do we expect characters to move ‘as they would’ in everyday life? Similarly, we expect a song lyric to differ from speech: the verbal dexterity of a character’s lyric—the rhyme, the meter, the wordplay—signifies that we have entered some alternate world unique to musical theatre, just as does the musical line and the kinetically active body. As characters are compelled to sing and dance, these heightened forms of articulation generate revelations about relationships and the self—in ways that exceed the banal constraints of everyday life and customary modes of expression. The stylization of language that marks all lyric writing enables characters to play with words, to access linguistic devices and vocabulary that return us to some oceanic world in which words are just as playful, just as plastic, and, in a sense, just as embodied as the dancing body. This is true of all musical theatre lyrics—including those by Sondheim—so why should a character’s quotidian speech be understood as the ‘real’ ground from which fantastic musical numbers must humbly emerge? Significantly, more rides on this question than whether lyrics are straightforward or floral; or whether they adhere to everyday ‘reality’ or deviate from it. What is at stake is actually the cultivation of an entirely different subjectivity, an entirely different mode of characterization, in musical theatre. When Maria sings that it’s ‘alarming how charming I feel,’ her joyous wordplay is an index of how she has been transformed by her love. We understand this joy as emanating from her innermost being—a development in musical theatre directly connected to Freud’s influence on American popular culture more generally.14 This matured around 1940 with Lady in the Dark, the brilliant masterpiece by Moss Hart, Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin. The show follows Liza Elliott, a magazine editor undergoing professional and personal turmoil, as she submits to psychoanalysis in an attempt to resolve the turbulence in her work and romance. The show’s inventive structure imagines Liza’s dreams as elaborate musical sequences; as these musical numbers give voice to Liza’s subconscious, they extend into a realm that is less about earnestness and more about revelation. In other words, the musical episodes exceed the conscious intention of the character. Though Lady in the Dark explicitly engages the idea of the subconscious, it actually points towards a much broader hermeneutic demand of modern musical theatre: to understand that the otherworldly musical numbers are generated by the desires of a character, in ways quite different from what the conscious mind would permit. This is in a sense true not just of soliloquy-style numbers that cultivate an effect of interiority, but indeed of every number in modern musical theatre. The elevation into any song or dance signals the necessary insufficiency of dialogue to articulate the needs and desires of the character at that moment. Indeed, in all numbers, the verbal dexterity of the lyricist and the kinetic power of the moving body are catalysed precisely by a desire to exceed the quotidian world of speech. If I had rhymed the lines in the patter, it would have implied an organized control of Amy’s thought processes, when in fact disorder is the essence of hysteria. Simply avoiding rhymes, however, would not have been a satisfying solution … a completely unrhymed song would have been monotonous and shapeless, which is why Amy suddenly starts to rhyme with a vengeance in short, sharp, machine-gun rapidity, bespeaking another kind of dementia.15 This understanding of lyrics as manifestations of desire helps to clarify Sondheim’s complaint that a lyric ‘sounds like the writer, not the character’: the appearance of the lyricist—that which Sondheim disdains—must be understood as the intrusion of the lyricist’s desire. This is quite obvious in cases in which the narrative demands are subordinated to the lyricist’s desire to be seen as clever, for instance. However, it is true on a much broader scale: a lyric always reveals the lyricist’s desire, insofar as lyrics are necessarily a product of the author’s own unconscious, of an artistic force beyond the author’s conscious control. Lyrics are especially complex—doubly unconscious—as they ask a lyricist’s unconscious to generate the unconscious of a dramatic character. Nor can this entire argument be dismissed as arbitrarily psychoanalytic speculation: Sondheim’s own rhetoric acknowledges the degree to which the lyricist’s desire and unconscious are self-evidently a part of the creative process as well—perhaps most explicitly in his metaphorical declaration that ‘I love wordplay, but when there’s nothing behind it, […] it becomes masturbatory.’16 It is present as well in comments like his regret that Maria’s lyrics are so inappropriate ‘because the lyricist wants to show off his rhyming skills.’ And when he discusses the creative benefits of sleep, it’s hard not to hear an acknowledgement of the work of the unconscious: “I write on a yellow note pad, while lying down. It’s not good for my posture. But if you’re lying down, you can more easily fall asleep. I find that so many problems are solved after a bit of a nap. I often wake up and have an idea.”17 Given Sondheim’s implicit acknowledgements of desire and the unconscious, his eagerly stated principle that a lyric should minimize the presence of the lyricist reveals itself to be about control. His demonstrative emphasis on the ostensible coherence of a “character” can thus be seen not merely as a dramaturgical principle, but also as a rhetorical strategy for obscuring the engagement of the lyricist’s unconscious in the production of the lyric. By insistently linking lyrics to a character’s conscious life and speech, Sondheim attempts to introduce a mediating presence between the lyricist and the lyric – that this is certainly Maria rhyming – and implicitly deflects the centrality of the lyricist’s unconscious in generating the lyric. Close up, Leona seems even more attractive. She wants so much to be liked and is by everyone almost at once. She is warm, she is generous, she is funny and bright. She is also lonely and, despite her many friends, always has been. But Leona’s pattern is to hide this, both from herself and the world, always with a joke and often with a drink … There is something comforting and understanding and gay about Leona that makes people glad to see her. Later, there is something else that makes them wonder why they do not cry.19 I know very well what you wish. You come here, you ride in gondola, and you sigh: Ah Venice!…And you dream: he is young, handsome, rich, witty, brilliant. A gondola of his own. A duke, or a count at the very least. And – unmarried. Well, I am a shopkeeper. Not handsome. Not rich, not young, not witty, not brilliant. No title; no gondola. And not unmarried. But, Miss Samish, I am a man, and I want you. But you? “It’s wrong, it’s wicked, it’s this, it's that.” You are a hungry child to whom someone brings—ravioli. “But I don’t want ravioli, I want beefsteak!” You are hungry, Miss Samish! Eat the ravioli!22 Wouldn’t it make emotional sense and be dramatically interesting, I thought, if throughout the evening the Italians sang (juicy) and she spoke (arid), and not until she had come out of her emotional confinement at the end of the story would she be able to sing. The leading lady would have only one song, but it would be a glorious aria of emotional release.26 Significantly, Sondheim argued that the ‘theatrically right’ approach to musicalizing Laurents’ play was largely to avoid musicalization. In other words, the ‘emotional sense’ of the play would be best served by the silence of the heroine. Rather than understanding songs as giving voice to the sources and effects of Leona’s aching loneliness, Sondheim finds silence to be the appropriate musical approach to emotional paralysis. A largely silent musical heroine? Arthur Laurents—at least in retrospect—agreed with Sondheim, writing in his memoir that ‘sometimes a character sings before he should,’ citing Leona Samish as his example. Laurents writes that ‘she herself says that when she falls in love, she’ll hear a waltz—i.e., music. That, then, is when she should have sung, but she was trilling away long before that. I should have known it was a mistake … But I was too eager to get the show on and checked my musical brains.’ ‘Singing too early,’ he concluded, ‘muddied the character and weakened the show.27 (We might also note that the metaphorical significance of the waltz could have been utilized without resorting to silence; the could have for example, the only moment in But the question How can a musical be weakened by the fact that its It the of what a a on a that has no for … come from and are by the of the how easily it could how it might be which would be for the leading never question the to the The never ask themselves what music do for the story that been by the Given his to cultivate the silence of his we must the musical most be also its This is one of the of Sondheim’s of that any of Sondheim must the of an of than he that a musical would be as a the of Arthur Laurents’ characters in he wrote that as Laurents to I given their might be more satisfying as a after no how songs with the same that dialogue Sondheim and an and an emotional and but is more than and and are more and in than they are in However, Sondheim’s Leona was not to be entirely he did for her to sing at the so there a which this of lyrical silence could How then, that this towards silence would its in Sondheim’s the We a by We was on two by The of the and The In the first a of people at only to be then, they end up at an where they are As the in her a of like the have to make Significantly, the in which the characters are to the is without The in other words, are This was the in the development of this In on the long that Sondheim had songs for the the characters until the moment when they are to the he was with was that he that Sondheim are these people when in this Sondheim out that the whose served as the for We had for The that must have felt that there was nothing that music could to this because he not to have a I thought, on the The story is about the of The of we had to find a to the theatrical demands of the while at it from a different of what I to I “I that this is and I could make an case why the is What asking for is permission to in and present an a of this that you writing any more I very to it. Sondheim’s becomes an of the show’s production there was some about whether the was actually The of a titled Sondheim’s is by its first said before his in that he did not know when it would be but the We However, like were eager to to the of the the development of a for the characters not it It makes sense that these once they sing any It is to hear as an elaborate for with a production when the was But I would that Sondheim was surely to only because it his artistic but because it is with the silent he had throughout his entire Indeed, only in We did he his of a musical that in lyrical For the Sondheim’s musical presence is to his and a one of his that the characters they try to This of course, and other of We occasionally that for the to have the like and in the first while the like and only of is at a Sondheim musical with so many not as this of silence though, it is that Sondheim other of and to the presence of his own desire. For example, despite his about Maria and her Sondheim is of precisely for so many complex In this his for writing lyrics in the of he did in another rhetorical for his lyrical while the who the songs in Sondheim writes that these was that most of them had a of show they were writing … of them to make the into the that the theatre after but no how hard they the that was always that of the that Sondheim thus whose voice was that of the And he a number of Alan Jay and what he in the were who are but have no of or this what ostensibly with this of or enables Sondheim to joyfully of that mode of to his own desire and to explore other modes of himself from any personal in those if the idea of a unified musical theatre silence and as of the lyricist’s desire, there even more mode of the of criticism Indeed, Sondheim himself from the appearance of his desire precisely by writing his dramatic which himself less as an and more as a for whom lyric writing is a of and If we songs as not just of emotional but of we can understand why this would a to make lyrics and the of When Sondheim a of his and its it rhyme a comforting sense of and how many lyrics can such beyond the of a few and Sondheim’s criticism the that his to the demands of lyric writing into a In musical lyrics into a a body of criticism the the the But no how much we these are always present in musical theatre. Indeed, when Sondheim how he to and musical he a most and are more and in than they are in Lady I to is one of the most I This he how critical are to some degree in with the that can be the genre. And this is the most in all of Sondheim’s the of of critical and And so it is that to sing when he might have his attempt to the in West Side Story, Sondheim that an advanced of I the lyric to make it and more in with the Maria and the themselves in the of the but my would have of liked it the it And And I have Sondheim have but have for And as it is the of criticism in the art of musical theatre. not to this as no were generated or the is in Musical at of He is the of The Is Musical and the of into and which was for the and the