He stayed, but I think he remained uncomfortable. And if he left, we would not have a show.
I did my best to explain what his music meant to me and how I hated to make him uncomfortable. So when he found out the interview was going to be about his music, he wanted to leave - literally. Apparently, he thought the interview would be about that university series. The first time I interviewed him in 1988, he came to our Philadelphia radio studio because he was giving a lecture as part of a series at the University of Pennsylvania. If he didn't approve of the way I phrased the question or if a word I used struck him as imprecise or inaccurate, he let me know. Yet when people ask me who I was most nervous to interview, I usually say Sondheim because he's my musical hero, but I always got the impression he didn't like being interviewed.
I was fortunate in having interviewed Sondheim several times. It will include two long interviews with him and interviews with people who worked with him, like James Lapine, who wrote the books for three Sondheim musicals and Stephen Colbert and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who performed in Sondheim shows. If you're a regular FRESH AIR listener, you probably know that I, along with many others on our FRESH AIR team, love his music, so we've prepared a three-day tribute to Sondheim.
But some of his great works were flops when they opened, including one of my favorites, "Merrily We Roll Along." Sondheim won Tonys, an Oscar, Grammys and a Pulitzer and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. If the groundbreaking nature of his work sounds familiar now, it's in part because so many composers have emulated him. Some of his musicals, like "Sweeney Todd," were sung through like operas, although Sondheim was adamantly opposed to calling them operas. Some of his songs had inventive structures that didn't adhere to familiar song forms and were built on harmonies resembling the classical avant-garde. But Sondheim opened the door to something new on Broadway. His mentor and father figure was lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. He started his Broadway career writing lyrics for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy" and went on to write music and lyrics for such shows as "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum," "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," "Sweeney Todd," "Sunday In The Park With George," "Into The Woods" and "Passion." It's hard to overestimate his influence on American musical theater. An era ended last Friday with the death of the brilliant composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
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