The Highbrow Kid

Big Steve is 80 years young and to celebrate BBC Radio 3 has made him composer of the week. The downloadable highlights are a treat. It's always a pleasure to hear Sondheim talk about his work: he's honest and direct, bluntly correcting the assumptions of the interviewer; remarkably unpretentious (he practically snorts at the comparison between Wagner and Into the Woods); and genuinely funny as opposed to merely witty.

But the fact that he's on Radio 3 at all says something about his reputation. Aside from Bernstein he's the only musical theatre composer to get short-listed. The Radio 3 folks aren't the only ones to single him out. His songs are played in opera houses and the Proms. Actors and writers gush at the cleverness of the man. You hear a lot of this kind of sentiment: "Oh well, I'm not really a fan of musicals but I adore Sondheim". There is a sense in which Big Steve is a little too good for the average man. He's the artistically acceptable Broadway fella; a highbrow kid in a generally lowbrow world.

I think this is his major contribution to musical theatre, to take it upmarket. Yes, he did a lot of experimental stuff but so did a lot of other Broadway writers (and more successfully too). Yet no other Broadway writer has quite the whiff of cultured elitism that surrounds Sondheim. Why so?

1. He's not Andrew Lloyd Webber. In this country, at least, he's been seen as the antidote to the megamusical.

2. His lyrics are word games. A lot of theatre critics are basically wordy-lovers who judge theatre lyrics on the cleverness of the rhymes. Big Steve can certainly deliver on this count - "moustache/just ash" from A Little Night Music springs to mind. But theatre lyrics are more than just word play. Other qualities are equally if not more important such as sound, phrasing, singability not to mention little things like, er, truth and meaning. This is not to say that Sondheim's lyrics lack these qualities only that the cleverness of a good lyric is not always as obvious as it is in a Sondheim lyric.

3. His music is sophisticated. Again, for a Broadway composer absolutely true. But at the same time he ain't Wagner and grandiose talk about leitmotifs is stretching it somewhat (hence the derisive snort). For all the sophistication he's still essentially a Broadway baby and his music is essentially, undeniably, often gloriously Broadway. I don't think Big Steve would disagree. The best part of the Radio 3 piece was picturing the interviewer's face when Sondheim cheerily and categorically stated: "I hate opera". He much prefers musicals. Has anyone else ever said such a thing on Radio 3?

4. Compared to other writers' work, his songs tend to be more intellectually appealing. They are difficult and complex. The audience has to "work" a bit harder. Critics and academics get more to chew on with a Sondheim. (This last point is, I think, an argument about thoughts over feelings, that to express a thought is a greater artistic achievement than to express a feeling. If anything I'd say it's the other way round. Thoughts can indeed be difficult and complex but they're child's play compared to emotions.)

I've always found this elevation of Sondheim to High Art as curiously inappropriate. He strikes me as a very practical man of the theatre and one of a number of equally wonderful and practical Broadway songwriters who don't seem to get the same accolades. Jerry Herman on Radio 3? I could start a campaign.