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Composer and lyricist
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- Stephen Sondheim (born March 22, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 26, 2021, Roxbury, Connecticut) was an American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theater.
www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Sondheim
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6 days ago · Stephen Sondheim (born March 22, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.—died November 26, 2021, Roxbury, Connecticut) was an American composer and lyricist whose brilliance in matching words and music in dramatic situations broke new ground for Broadway musical theater.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Stephen Joshua Sondheim (/ ˈ s ɒ n d h aɪ m /; March 22, 1930 – November 26, 2021) was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical.
- Who Was Stephen Sondheim?
- Early Life and Musical Interests
- Learning from Oscar Hammerstein
- Theater Beginnings: 'West Side Story' and 'A Funny Thing Happened'
- Broadway Hits: 'Company' and 'Sweeney Todd'
- More Successes: 'Sunday in The Park' and 'Into The Woods'
- Later Works and Revivals: 'Passion' to 'Follies'
- Awards
After early practice at songwriting, Stephen Sondheim's knowledge of musical theater was influenced by master lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who served as a mentor. Sondheim's contributions to West Side Story and Gypsy in the 1950s brought him recognition as a rising star of Broadway. Known for the startling complexity of his lyricism and music, hi...
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in New York City. His parents, Herbert and Janet (née Fox) Sondheim, worked in New York's garment industry; his father was a dress manufacturer and his mother was a designer. They divorced in 1942 and Sondheim moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, with his mother. He began studying piano and organ at...
In Pennsylvania, Sondheim became friends with the son of Broadway lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave the young Sondheim advice and tutelage in musical theater, and served as a surrogate father during a time of tumult. In his teens, Sondheim had penned a satire about his school, the musical By George!, which he thought his mentor w...
In the early 1950s, Stephen Sondheim moved to Los Angeles, California, and wrote scripts for the television series Topper and The Last Word. Returning to New York, he composed background music for the play The Girls of Summer in 1956. An acquaintance with director Arthur Laurents brought Sondheim into contact with composer Leonard Bernstein and cho...
Sondheim won several more Tony Awards in the 1970s for his collaborations with producer/director Harold Prince, including the musicals Company (1970), a meditation on contemporary marriage and commitment; Follies (1971), an homage to the Ziegfeld Follies and early Broadway; A Little Night Music (1973), a period comedy-drama that included the hit so...
In the 1980s, Sondheim collaborated several times with playwright/director James Lapine. Their Sunday in the Park with George, which opened in 1984, was inspired by the iconic painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, and 1987's Into the Woods was a collage of plots from classic fairy tales. (The latter was eventually made into a 20...
Sondheim continued to combine various musical genres with sharp lyrical writing and unexpected subject matter in the 1990s, though some of his work of that decade received less critical and popular acclaim. Assassins (1990) told the tales of nine presidential assassins in American history; and Passion, a 1994 collaboration with Lapine, was a melodr...
Sondheim claimed eight Tony Awards, a record for a composer, as well as eight Grammy Awards. He shared the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Lapine for Sunday in the Park with George, and won an Academy Award for the song "Sooner or Later," one of five tracks written for the 1990 film Dick Tracy, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. Sondheim was ho...
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Jun 4, 2019 · Musical Lists. Musicals by Sondheim – A Full List of Shows. June 4, 2019. Stephen Sondheim was a legendary composer and lyricist in the world of American musical theatre.
3 days ago · Stephen Sondheim was born in New York on 22 March 1930, and is widely acknowledged as the most innovative, most influential and most important composer and lyricist in modern Broadway history. For more than 50 years, Stephen Sondheim set an unsurpassed standard of brilliance and artistic integrity in the musical theatre.
Nov 26, 2021 · The American composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim has died at his home in Connecticut aged 91, according to the New York Times. He was a titan of musical theatre who turned the unlikeliest...
Nov 26, 2021 · 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...
