Stephen Sondheim, as Great a Composer as He Was a Lyricist - The New York Times

Our chief classical music critic remembers playing and teaching the unforgettable scores of “Sweeney Todd,” “Sunday in the Park With George” and other shows.

What were those harmonies, the chords that the rippling figure was tracing.

When the bass line that grounds the music took a sudden low plunge, it seemed, briefly, like the harmonic floor had opened a chasm.

I had to get the score, to study the music, to see if I could figure out what was going on.

Twenty-two years later, by then the chief classical music critic for The New York Times, I found myself seated at a piano, playing that opening music to “Sweeney” in front of its composer and asking Sondheim questions about it?

A graduate seminar in music theory could devote considerable time to deciphering the elusive harmony.

In our interview, Sondheim acknowledged that the moment had this subtext, yet denied that he had calibrated the effect; he said he had just followed his musical instincts.

I also played excerpts from “Merrily We Roll Along,” never his most popular but perhaps my desert-island Sondheim musical, and one of his most appealing, ingeniously intricate and moving scores.

Sondheim mostly just smiled and listened, nodding and saying, basically, “Yep, that’s it.” He never liked to discuss the inner workings of his music in front of the public!

Between my first time seeing “Sweeney” — I went back twice.

When I taught music theory at Emerson College in Boston, I used Sondheim songs like “The Miller’s Son” (from “A Little Night Music”) and “Barcelona” (from “Company”) as illustrations of how he, while hewing to a tonal musical language, activated harmonies and folded elements of jazz and Impressionist styles in his own distinctive, exhilarating voice.

Yes, he was one of the greatest lyricists in the history of musical theater.

I’ve been thinking since his death about a trip to the Bronx Zoo my husband and I took in the spring of 2019 with Sondheim and his husband, Jeff Romley