So What's Wrong With Sondheim, Then?

So asks Comedy Thos of Sage Tim on a previous episode of MusicalTalk. It's a question worth asking if only because it's so rarely asked. There's so much to love with Sondheim's work, it seems a bit perverse to dwell on the negative.

But I enjoy a challenge, so here goes.

The best place to go for an answer is Sondheim himself. He is his own most observant critic. This is unusual. Good criticism requires a certain distance and most writers are too close to their work to assess it properly.

Fortunately Big Steve has been doing some assessing in his recently published collection of lyrics Finishing the Hat (or Fin-i-sh-ing-the-Hat, as I like to think of it). I'm only half way through but already there's plenty of good stuff to chew over. Of course he picks up a lot of lyrical sins in his early work: verbosity, redundancy, inconsistent characterisation, lazy rhyme schemes. But these are technical aspects. I think there is something deeper.

When it was publicised the book was trailed as Sondhiem dumping on the Pantheon of Great Broadway Lyricists including his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein. But this just isn't true. His notes on Hammerstein are much more revealing.

Big Steve quite rightly has a few digs: the redundancy and plodding didacticism ("You've got to be taught before it's too late/Before you are six or seven or eight"); the flowery operetta hangovers ("Softer than starlight, are you"); the sentimental bird imagery ("like a lark that is learning to pray").

Easy targets, all. But this is missing the woods for the trees. Here's how he concludes his appraisal (p.37):

"Hammerstein rarely has the colloquial ease of Berlin, the sophistication of Porter, the humour of Hart and Gershwin, the inventiveness of Harburg or the grace of Fields, but his lyrics are sui generis, and when they are at their best they are more than heartfelt and passionate, they are monumental...The flaws in Oscar's lyrics are more apparent than those of the others because he is speaking deeply from himself through his characters and therefore has no persona to hide behind. He is exposed, sentimental warts and all, every minute and in every word...In the end, it's not the sentimentality but the monumentality that matters"

This, remember, is Big Steve's assessment of Hammerstein as a lyricist. He's almost always considered as a significant book writer and theatrical innovator, probably the most significant figure in the development of the Broadway musical. But as a lyricist he is sometimes overlooked. Not so for Big Steve: Hammerstein's lyrics are monumental and it's the monumentality that matters.

In this praise of Hammerstein, I think there's also criticism of Sondheim. For me, Sondheim's lyrics are not monumental in the same way. They don't speak deeply from Sondheim himself. They can, at times, be cold and distant, as if something is being held back. He isn't exposed, warts and all, in every minute and every word.

In answer to the original question, Sage Tim suggested an occassional smugness in Sondheim's work. This may be true. But I think there's a more significant criticism, that he sometimes struggles to speak deeply with the same exposed, courageous simplicity of his mentor.

However carfeful you are, some things just can't be taught.