Send in the Genius: Stephen Sondheim Remembered by Song and Successor

It was late in rehearsals for “A Little Night Music,” and Stephen Sondheim had yet to write the show’s penultimate song. The male lead was to sing it during a scene with an ex-lover, explaining why he couldn’t leave his still-virginal wife and rekindle his relationship with her. But director Hal Prince determined the song should instead be for her.

Sondheim attended a rehearsal of the scene, directed to reveal the change in focus. He was convinced. Afterward, Sondheim and Prince retired to a bar to discuss it; Sondheim took notes, then went home to write the first chorus. The next day, he played it for his collaborators and with their blessing completed the song that night — possibly the fastest Sondheim ever wrote a song.

By this time, he knew the show intimately and, more relevantly, the strengths and weaknesses of actress Glynis Johns, who would sing the new song. She had a light, silvery voice but couldn’t sustain long notes.

This led to a song of short phrases that suggested a series of questions: “Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?” And because the character Johns played is an actress, the song included lines like “Making my entrance again with my usual flair/Sure of my lines.”

Sondheim sketched out an early draft of “Send in the Clowns” lyrics in longhand, trying different lines and words. The pattern of short questions is developing on the right hand side.

“Send in the Clowns,” written in about 24 hours, ironically became Sondheim’s most famous and oft-recorded song, with well over 400 covers. Judy Collins’ recording of it won a Grammy, as did Sondheim for song of the year. Since then, it has been performed and recorded in almost every style imaginable (including a disco version by Grace Jones).

Because of the speed with which it was written, Sondheim made far fewer sketches for the song than for almost any other song. But what is there is deep and rich, including three dense pages comprising an interior monologue — the characters’ subtext — and two pages of monologue with the character expressing her reasons and arguments to him.

Four Years After Sondheim’s Death, Adam Guettel Remembers the Man Behind the Legend

Posted by: Neely Tucker

This is a guest post by Adam Guettel, the Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist of “The Light in the Piazza,” “Floyd Collins” and “Days of Wine and Roses.” It also appears in the September-October issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, which was primarily devoted to the arrival of Sondheim’s collection at the Library. 

Stephen Sondheim died on November 26, 2021, relaxing into the arms of his husband, Jeff. What a triumph of a life, and what an exit.

The thing is, I hadn’t realized Steve was gone until just now. Maybe that’s because he’s not gone. He’s still here. And let me say right off, he wasn’t my mentor or advisor in a consistent way. His advice was sporadic, but indelible. I think I remember everything he ever said to me about music or writing for the theater.

One of Steve’s great inventions, among many, was his phrasing. He broke from the long, lyrical lines of Kern, Rodgers, Gershwin and Porter. He divided melody into conversational clauses, as Stravinsky divided folk melodies into cells in “L’Histoire du Soldat,” “Les Noces” and “Le Sacre du Printemps.”

Fifty years apart, they shocked and insulted music and theater conservatives in Europe and New York with the same profound insight: that melody could be pixelated and recombined into something original and dynamic. What a blessing that this migration can be charted in the Sondheim Collection and the rich collection of Stravinsky manuscripts in the Library.

And there is the Steve I knew as a person. (So much has been thoughtfully written about his work.) Many were intimidated by him. But for a man at the pinnacle of the arts, he was a social journeyman; rumpled, shy, easily embarrassed, warm, generous, easily offended and quick to forgive. Doing his best. People probably thought Beethoven was grouchy, too.

Once, I brought Steve to Wempe, an elegant watch boutique on 5th Avenue, thinking he might be drawn to a beautiful watch, where less was more, and content dictated form, and God was in the details. He politely turned them all down. On the way to lunch, he said he didn’t understand spending so much on something that did so little. Sort of like the opposite of clarity.

On my piano rests one of Steve’s planetary watches, an orrery. It’s made of metal, beautiful and precise. That’s his level of interest, way up there, his level of endeavor, and now he circles around us, a giant in the sky. He’ll always be a giant here, too, thanks to the Library of Congress. He will never be gone. We can know him, and ask him and have him forever.