Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history’s songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday November 26 2021 at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 91. His lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, announced the death. Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his mother, the former Etta Janet Fox, known as Foxy, worked for her husband as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10. He was sent for a time to military school, and later to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 Stephen, her only child, lived mostly with his mother. His father remarried and had two more sons. His mother was responsible for the most formative relationship of her son’s life. She was a friend of Dorothy Hammerstein, whose husband was the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; their son Jamie became friends with young Steve. Stephen was so often at the Hammersteins’ that he was thought of as a family member. Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor. Hammerstein laid out a path of writing exercises for him: This the young Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts. In the 1970s and 1980s, his most productive period, he turned out a series of strikingly original and varied works, Sondheim was loath to take either of his first Broadway gigs, “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” because he felt he was a composer, not only a lyricist. The period of Mr. Sondheim’s greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director. The period of Mr. Sondheim’s greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director. Sondheim also teamed up with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the most cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim’s career. These included “Into the Woods,” which reimagined familiar children’s fairy tales into darker adult fables; “Passion,” a nearly operatic meditation on the nature of love; and “Sunday in the Park With George.”