NEW YORK – A treasure trove of materials from Stephen Sondheim, including manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks, and scrapbooks, has been gifted to the Library of Congress. This donation provides the public an exclusive glimpse into the genius of a musical theater icon.
The archive features around 5,000 pieces, containing not only drafts of songs that either failed to make the cut for his productions or never reached rehearsal stages but also a spiral music book called “Notes and Ideas” from his time at Williams College. Sondheim passed away in 2021.
“It’s staggering,” remarked Mark Horowitz, Senior Music Specialist, during an interview. “He’s incessantly refining and altering words or phrases. It’s as though he was always in pursuit of perfecting his work.”
The cache includes drafts of variations on the lyrics to “I’m Still Here” from “Follies” and “Putting It Together” from “Sunday in the Park with George” that Sondheim wrote for Barbra Streisand at her request. The collection arrived at the Library in March.
There also are lyrics for a reprise of “Side by Side by Side” that never made it into “Company” and 40 pages of lyric sketches for “A Little Priest” — “Is the politician so oily it’s served with a doily?” go one of the final lines — from “Sweeney Todd,” with lists of more than 150 possible professions and types of people who could have been baked into pies written in the margins.
“It seems like the older he gets, the more sketching there is,” says Horowitz. “For the early shows, there may be three boxes of materials or four boxes. By the later shows, it eight or nine boxes. I don’t know if it’s because it became harder for him or because he became more detail-oriented.”
Some surprises in Sondheim’s papers
The Library of Congress expects a surge in requests to view the collection when it becomes available this summer. Anyone over 16 with a driver’s license or a passport can ask for access to the original pages. It becomes available July 1.
Horowitz, the author of ” Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions ” and editor for The Sondheim Review, who has taught musical theater history at Georgetown, has been surprised by some of the items.
One of them was a song Sondheim wrote as part of a public TV contest in the early 1970s. The winner wanted the Broadway icon to write a song for his mother’s 50th birthday and Horowitz stumbled over their correspondences. “I had no idea that existed,” he said.
Horowitz convinced Sondheim to donate his papers to the Library of Congress in 1993 and the composer put it in his will. “I’d seen his manuscripts to some degree in his home before, but nothing like the kind of in-depth page after page after page that I’m doing now.”
Horowitz, who has been processing collections for 34 years, built a friendship with Sondheim and even found his own name a few times in the collection.
“For large collections that I spend a lot of time on, I tend to feel the ghost of that person over my shoulder. But with Sondheim, it’s the first time I can think of that I’m processing a collection of someone who I really knew.”
A fire and ‘a miracle’
Six of Sondheim’s musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday in the Park”), an Academy Award (for the song “Sooner or Later” from the film “Dick Tracy”), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
The fact that Sondheim had anything to donate to the Library at all is a miracle. He suffered a fire in 1995 that started in his office, just feet from where the collection rested on wooden shelves and in cardboard boxes. But somehow it survived, albeit with some papers suffering scorch marks.
“There’s absolutely no reason why the collection should not have gone up in flames. And it is truly the closest I’ve ever seen to a miracle, the fact that they didn’t,” said Horowitz.
The country’s oldest federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress was founded in 1800 under legislation by President John Adams and has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan backing.
It contains more than 100 million books, recordings, images and other artifacts and offers a vast online archive, and its contents span three buildings on Capitol Hill. It’s not a traditional circulating library but is instead a research library.
In his second term, President Donald Trump fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, amid criticism from conservatives that she was advancing a “woke” agenda.
The Library of Congress is already home to the collections of several Broadway icons, including Neil Simon, Arthur Laurents, Marvin Hamlisch, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
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