Reviewed by Rob Kendt

In a chapter on Stephen Sondheim in his opinionated new Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History, critic David H. Lewis pointedly questions the composer/lyricist's preeminence in the American musical theatre of the past 30 years, dismissing his acolytes as "Sondheimaniacs," conflating his aesthetic failures with his box-office losers, shamelessly dredging up the usual complaints about Sondheim's low "hummability" quotient and unsympathetic characters, even blaming the lyrical ambition of a work like Sweeney Todd on Sondheim's fans somehow "pushing" him to write ever denser verse.

I don't expect that such misconceptions are going to disappear with the publication of this super-specialized but brilliantly illuminating new book, which is half Q&A with the composer by music scholar Mark Eden Horowitz, and half minutiae-filled appendices (does anyone ever read these exhaustive discographies?). Indeed, there's plenty of fodder in the book for the naysayers: Sondheim's candid admission that he avoids "square" harmonic and metrical choices whenever he can help it, that he can "get away with murder" melodically by using tonically ambiguous "pedal" tones, that he apparently builds his musical scores with the kind of architectural precision only fellow professionals and scholars may ever notice. But however readers feel about Sondheim's seat in the pantheon, any with a curiosity about the musical theatre of the past half century or a passing interest in the creative process behind it will find gems here.

Readers will have to do a little digging for them--and overcome a sense of intimidation if they're not musicologists themselves. The ostensible purpose of the book, published in association with the Library of Congress, is to clarify for future generations the notations and lacunae of Sondheim's original hand-written scores, which he's donated to the library. Horowitz is admirably thorough on these points, and there are some interesting details revealed and demonstrated, but, generous as Sondheim tries to be, he often doesn't recall what his markings mean, and only the scores from Pacific Overtures to Passion are explicitly covered in detail. The real meat of the book is in free-ranging discussions of Sondheim's choices, tastes, and reflections on music and theatre throughout and beyond his own career. I started to fold the edges of pages that had something juicy on them--an anecdote about Leonard Bernstein, a statement of artistic principle, an offhanded critique of another writer or composer--and soon found I was folding nearly every page.

What emerges most strongly is that Sondheim thinks of himself, and works best, as a musical dramatist. He learned from Jerome Robbins that he should "stage" every moment of a song, down to props, business, and acting beats--not so that directors and actors were circumscribed but so that there was a reason for every note and word. One chapter ends with Sondheim mentioning that after the interview, he'll go off and work on Wise Guys (since retitled Bounce), a long-awaited musical with John Weidman, and he gives a revealing description of a process that shouldn't sound too alien to any tunesmith or writer: "I've discovered over a period of years that essentially I'm a playwright who writes with song, and that playwrights are actors. And what I do is act. So what I'll do is, I'll go upstairs, and I'll get back into the character. . . and I'll start singing to myself."

Scarecrow Press, 2003, $39.95.