American Decades
Sondheim, Stephen 1930-
COMPOSER, LYRICIST
Musicals.
Young Stephen Sondheim's path was made clear when, at age twelve, he was befriended by a family friend, the esteemed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. Hammerstein taught him all he knew about songwriting, and by the late 1940s Sondheim was working as a production assistant on Broadway musicals such as South Pacific (1949) and The King and I (1951). He then won a two-year fellowship to study with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt, who helped him analyze popular songs and classics. In 1953 plans for Sondheim's first full-length musical composition, Saturday Nighty were cut short by the death of the producer, so Sondheim turned to scriptwriting for the television series Topper. A chance encounter with playwright Arthur Laurents led to Sondheim's meeting with Leonard Bernstein, who was composing the music to West Side Story. Impressed with the lyrics to...
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1970's The Arts
