Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

sharp distinctions between spoken dialogue and song. With few exceptions, and in marked contrast to his popular contemporary Lloyd Webber, Sondheim has followed this approach ever since. Hammerstein also never wavered from his conviction “that the song is the servant of the play” and “that it is wrong to write first what you think is an attractive song and then try to wedge it into a story.”10 His protégé would follow this advice as well, in fact unwaveringly for the next forty years.

Hammerstein goes on to share his ideas about the craft of lyric writing. Here are some of the highlights:

• Hammerstein on rhyming: “If one has fundamental things to say in a song, the rhyming becomes a question of deft balancing. A rhyme should be unassertive, never standing out too noticeably…. There should not be too many rhymes. In fact, a rhyme should appear only where it is absolutely demanded to keep the pattern of the music. If a listener is made rhymeconscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the song. If, on the other hand you keep him waiting for a rhyme, he is more likely to listen to the meaning of the words.”11 As an example of the latter technique, Hammerstein points out the delay of the “cotton” and “forgotten” rhyme in Show Boat’s “Ol’ Man River,” a delay that focuses the rhymes on the most crucial words when additional and possible rhymes would detract from their power. Interestingly, Hammerstein considers the exuberant mood of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific an opportunity for “interior rhymes, undemanded rhymes and light-hearted similes.” These were techniques that Sondheim became justly critically famous for, but would generally avoid in later years, especially when setting lyrics for less educated characters. Opting for character over craft (“song” as “servant of the play”), Sondheim criticized his own brilliant lyrics for Maria’s exuberant number in West Side Story, “I Feel Pretty,” for their lack of verisimilitude.12

• Hammerstein on phonetics: “The job of the poet is to find the right word in the right place, the word with the exact meaning and the highest quality of beauty or power. The lyric writer must find this word too, but it must be also a word that is clear when sung and not too difficult for the singer to sing on that note which he hits when he sings.”13 Although Hammerstein points out a number of successful song conclusions that follow this principle, most of which end on a vowel (e.g., “Oh, what a beautiful day”), the self-critical lyricist chose to dwell on what he felt was one failed ending, the consonant that concludes “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’” in Carousel (“all the rest is talk”).

• Hammerstein on sincerity: “The most important ingredient of a good song is sincerity. Let the song be yours and yours alone. However important, however trivial, believe it. Mean it from the bottom of your heart, and say what is on your mind as carefully, as clearly, as beautifully as you can.”14

A quarter of a century later Sondheim published some of his own thoughts about lyric writing adapted from a talk he simply called “Theater Lyrics” first given to the Dramatists Guild and then later published in a slightly altered form in the collection Playwrights, Lyricists, Composers, on Theatre. On the first page of this talk in its published form Sondheim informs his audience and readers that most of what he knows he learned from Hammerstein, his first mentor (although he also acknowledges the example of other lyricists, including Cole Porter). Sondheim recalls that the mentorship officially began when Hammerstein critiqued a draft of a musical called By George, a musical à clef about the preparatory school where the young protégé was then a junior.15

What Hammerstein taught the novice at their historic first session not only encompassed lyric writing but also addressed larger dramatic issues. This is how Sondheim recalled his lesson nearly thirty years later: “Detail by detail, he told me how to structure songs, how to build them with a beginning and a development and an ending, according to his own principles, how to introduce character, what relates a song to character, etc. etc. It was four hours of the most packed information. I dare say, at the risk of hyperbole, that I learned in that afternoon more than most people learn about song writing in a lifetime.”16 Some of what his teacher told him (e.g., the remarks on rhyming, phonetics, and sincerity quoted earlier) appeared a few years later in Hammerstein’s essay. Over the years Sondheim also often repeated Hammerstein’s anecdote about the importance of detail, which was inspired by his mentor’s astonishment when he learned that the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty carefully detailed the top of Lady Liberty’s head long before it was possible to anticipate the popularity of photographs of the iconic image from above.17

The first of the four apprentice musicals assigned by Hammerstein was to be a musical based on a play he admired, the second a musical based on a play he found flawed and felt he could improve, a third based on a novel or a short story, and for the finale an original musical. In the end only the first, Beggar on Horseback, based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, was completed and performed (at Williams College in March 1949 at the end of Sondheim’s junior year). Sondheim continued to work on the second, Climb High, based on Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, for several years after he graduated and made substantial progress on the third show, based on the Mary Poppins stories.18 At the end of his sophomore year a fifth non-pedagogical show, a spoof on Williams College life called Phinney’s Rainbow, was staged there and Hammerstein came up to Massachusetts to see it.19 The final original musical was the post-collegiate Saturday Night. Abandoned after the unexpected death of its producer Lemuel Ayers in 1955, shortly before Sondheim was asked to join the West