The Library of Congress has acquired Stephen Sondheim’s vast collection of manuscripts, drafts and ephemera, the library announced on Wednesday. The material could be a valuable resource for academics and artists alike.
Sondheim, who died at 91 in 2021, left the library more than 5,000 items from his long career as a musical theater composer and lyricist, including sketches, scrapbooks and more from shows like “Sweeney Todd,” “Sunday in the Park With George” and even “Here We Are,” the musical he was writing at the time of his death.
“There’s no question he was brilliant, a genius,” said Mark Horowitz, a senior music specialist in the library’s music division. “But here, you’re really seeing the perspiration behind it all. The amount he put behind each song is staggering.”
In 1993, Sondheim visited the Library of Congress and saw the manuscript of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” He was moved to tears and, Horowitz said, made the decision to leave the library his own archive, and later persuaded his collaborators Arthur Laurents and Harold Prince to do the same. (Sondheim previously donated a collection of manuscripts to the Wisconsin Historical Society in the 1960s; copies of those are available in Washington.)
Unlike memorabilia sold last year in a blockbuster Sondheim auction at Doyle, the items at the Library of Congress are limited to those with research value. But they are treasures nevertheless: a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the song “Send in the Clowns”; opening-night telegrams from the likes of Prince and Leonard Bernstein; and a notebook of ideas going back to his early days as a student at Williams College.
Horowitz was struck, he said, by how much more lyric and musical sketches there are over time. There are three boxes worth of drafts for “Company” (1970), for example, but nine for “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984).
“I’ve never seen a composer who has so many music sketches, trying out different melodic lines, different harmonies, rhythms, chord progressions,” Horowitz said. “Even with classical collections, I’ve never seen this.”
The song “A Little Priest,” from “Sweeney,” has 40 pages of lyric sketches. In that comic Act I finale, Todd and Mrs. Lovett trade punny hypotheticals of what type of people could be baked into meat pies, a little more than 30 in all. Those were just a sampling of a much longer list.
“He does lists in the margins: rhymes, synonyms, emotions of things,” Horowitz said of Sondheim.
Sketches like that will be helpful for researchers looking to add to the existing wealth of academic work on Sondheim’s life and career, but Horowitz has other hopes for the collection’s future, too.
“One of my fantasies is that young songwriters will come for inspiration for how to write a song,” he said. “You can really see how one approaches songwriting at this kind of level.”
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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