This morning, I saw that another titan has left us - Stephen Sondheim has died. It's one of those moments where you imagine the world stops, at least for a moment, and listens to some incredibly clever lyrics and music to go with it.
I first came across his work in the way I imagine many do, via the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's melodies in
West Side Story, and then via (some of) his own musicals -
A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum,
Assassins,
Sweeney Todd,
Into the Wood,
Passion,
Sunday in the Park with George. I know some songs from the other ones but haven't listened to them in their entirety yet - that joy is still ahead of me. Because he was a master of both words and music, the two interact in his songs in the way they do for few others. For example: John Wilkes Booth in
Assassins gets an engaging ballad, emotive rethoric, and it builds up...right until the point where he bursts into an racial expletitive, and you see the hateful motivation behind the rethorical veneer. Or, in the positive: the act 1 finale from
Sunday in the Park with George - "Sunday" - which recreates a painting in front of you via sound and visuals, words, music, all merging and bulding up.
There are so many songs which are darkly funny -
A little Priest from "Sweeney Todd", of course, or
That's how I saved Roosevelt from
Assassins, but also, far earlier,
Gee, Officer Kruppke - and they never let the audience off the hook. And the music can be persuasive of everything. For example, when I think about it in theory, of course I get all the objections to
Passion. A woman stalks a man who at first only feels a mixture of horror and pity for her long enough for him to finally fall in love with her for real - what kind of story is this? (A Gothic one with reversed traditional genders.) But when I saw it on stage, I did believe it was happening. (Not least because Fosca is that compelling, but also because Sondheim doesn't make her Hollywood ugly, needing only to remove her glasses to reveal the beauty within. She's sick, she's bitter, she's obsessed.)
In these recent pandemic years, Sondheim melodies also provided me with direly needed moments of joy, never more than in this version of
Ladies Who Lunch:
I'll end with an early early work, the Invocation and Instruction to the Audience from Sondheim's version of
The Frogs, because what more can be said:
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bimo tells me, but I just blew my alloted for Amazon budget by acquiring the remastered B5 seasons (on streaming) for my planned rewatch (I still have the dvds, but the quality isn't best, so I thought, why not?), and so I think I'll use Pluto for a while. 
