It seemed immortal, but Stephen Sondheim is no longer among us. After celebrating Thanksgiving Day with friends in their Roxbury mansion (8 kilometers south of Chicago), the ineffable composer has slowly died at 91 years. The friend of him and lawyer of him F. Richard Pappas has confirmed him to the media. The king of musicals was an introverted person, fond of puzzles, barely saw television, collected old board games and not communicated by email.
No doubt he was the most influential composer and lyricist of the second half of the twentieth century at the same time than one of the most popular since among his most outstanding works listed West Side Story or Sweeney Todd. The name of it is comparable to that of other legends of the carving of Irving Berlin or Cole Porter. Throughout the trajectory of him won 8 Tony, 8 Grammy, 1 Pulitzer and 1 Oscar. Sondheim always said that some of him's favorite actresses in his musicals were Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, Ethel Merman in Gypsy and Bernadette Peters in Sunday in The Park, for which he won the Pulitzer.
His childhood passed in the exclusive building The San Remo-some of his famous tenants were Rita Hayworth, Dodi Al Fayed or Bruce Willis - in front of New York Central Park until her father abandoned them when she was 10 years old. While growing up without a paternal figure, his mother abused him flirting sexually and, at the same time, belittled sympathically. As if that had not been enough, with forty-and forties he read a manuscript letter that his mother had given him shortly before undergoing a heart operation: "The only thing I regret in life is giving birth" . From the beginning, the service staff tried to protect him and pamper him so that he did not feel helpless but it was quite unhappy.
Even though he was not interested in poetry, neither art, nor music, 7 years old began studying piano and in 1950, twenty years old, he graduated from music with a magna cum laude at Williams College. He was lucky enough to meet producer Harold Prince, who changed his life forever. Next to him he created the most famous Broadway shows of the second half of the last century, West Side Story, Funny Thing Happened on the Way To The Forum, Company, Follies, A Litte Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeeny Todd.
Without them, they would know, they would become the decent successors of Rodgers & Hammerstein, considered the greatest in the history of the musical and authors of Oklaholma, the king and me or smiles and tears. In fact, Oscar Hammerstein II was Stephen's mentor since, for once, he did something good because she was intimate friend Dorothy, Oscar's wife.
Before savoring the success on the east coast of the United States, Sondheim spent some time in Hollywood at the beginning of the fifties he had worked in the Topper series and had several love quotes, among them, with the daughter of the Head of Production of Studies MGM; With the daughter of the founder of the powerful MCA agency and with Grace Kelly, who was about to be a star: "It was amazingly lovely, but unfortunately myopus. When we sat down to look at the menu, he literated it literally two inches from his nose , So that was not my idea of glamor, "the composer admitted in his biography Stephen Sondheim: A Life, by Meryle Seng.
But no matter how hard he insisted, there was nothing to do because he had not yet publicly confessed his homosexuality. Upon his return, Leonard Bernstein gave him the opportunity to put a letter to the musical led by the Choreographer Jerome Robbins, which was a resounding success in his premiere in 1957. Two years later, the already consecrated Ethel Merman accepted that he wrote The lyrics of the musical comedy Gypsy, but refused to write music because it was not yet a consecrated composer. From that moment, Sondheim began to make history.
Venerated and consecrated, the creator of the desperate women series demonstrated his admiration when he entitled most episodes with the names of his songs and shows.
In New York also had a spectacular residence, the typical urban mansion of several floors in the Turtle Bay neighborhood in Manhattan, where his neighbor was Katherine Hepburn. She until 61 she lived alone, but the nineties she lived eight years with the playwright Peter Jones and in 2017 she married Jeffrey Scott Romley, almost fifty years younger about her. She is said that she has left a fortune of 20 million dollars.
Date Of Update: 26 November 2021, 19:04
