Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021)
Auteur de Romeo and Juliet: West Side Story
A propos de l'auteur
Stephen Sondheim was born in New York and studied music at Williams College, where he wrote the lyrics and music for two college shows. Sondheim also studied at Princeton University with Milton Babbit. He received recognition for writing lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957) and afficher plus success as a lyricist-composer with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). However, his next musical, Anyone Can Whistle (1964), was unsuccessful. The production of Company (1970) again established Sondheim as a major composer and lyricist on Broadway. Sondheim's other productions include Follies (1971); A Little Night Music (1973), wherein its leading song, "Send in the Clowns," was awarded a Grammy in 1976; and Sunday in the Park with George (1983), a musical inspired by George Seurat's famous painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." He has won him three Tony Awards, a Grammy Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Best Musical Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. (Bowker Author Biography) afficher moins
Crédit image: Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery (image use requires permission from the New York Public Library)
Séries
Œuvres de Stephen Sondheim
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Applause Musical Library) (1979) — Compositeur — 438 exemplaires
Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues,… (2011) 256 exemplaires
Four by Sondheim (A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way… (2000) 58 exemplaires
Leonard Bernstein Conducts West Side Story [1985 Studio Recording] (1985) — Lyricist — 43 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Original 1979 Broadway Cast Recording (2007) — Compositeur — 25 exemplaires
Sunday in the Park with George: Original 1984 Broadway Cast Recording (2007) — Compositeur — 22 exemplaires
Assassins: Original 1991 Broadway Cast Recording — Compositeur — 22 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: The 2007 Motion Picture Soundtrack (2007) — Compositeur — 17 exemplaires
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Original 1996 Broadway Revival Cast Recording (1996) 11 exemplaires
Pacific Overtures: Original 1976 Broadway Cast Recording — Compositeur — 11 exemplaires
Company: Original 2006 Broadway Revival Cast Recording 9 exemplaires
The Frogs / Evening Primrose (2001 Studio Cast) 8 exemplaires
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Original 1962 Broadway Cast Recording (1992) — Compositeur — 8 exemplaires
Merrily We Roll Along: Original 1981 Broadway Cast Recording — Compositeur — 8 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Original 2005 Broadway Cast Recording (2006) — Compositeur — 8 exemplaires
Company (Vocal Score) 8 exemplaires
RCA 100 Years of Music: Broadway Divas — Compositeur — 7 exemplaires
Into the Woods: 1991 Original London Cast Recording 7 exemplaires
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1966) 4 exemplaires
A Collector's Sonheim 4 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd [Original Cast Recording] 4 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd Live at the New York Philharmonic 4 exemplaires
Ute Lemper - City of Strangers 4 exemplaires
Sondheim Evening: A Musical Tribute (1973 Concert Cast) 3 exemplaires
Tonight from West side story [vocal score] : for three-part chorus of women's voices (2000) 3 exemplaires
The Almost Unknown Stephen Sondheim: 39 Previously Unpublished Songs from 17 Shows and Films - Piano, Vocal and Guitar… (2016) 3 exemplaires
Our Time (from Merrily We Roll Along) 2 exemplaires
Another Hundred People (from Company) 2 exemplaires
Not a Day Goes By (from Merrily We Roll Along) 2 exemplaires
Sondheim: a musical tribute [sound recording] 2 exemplaires
Sondheim sings. Volume I, 1962-72 2 exemplaires
Sondheim: A Celebration At Carnegie Hall 2 exemplaires
No One is Alone 2 exemplaires
Gee, Officer Krupke — Lyricist — 2 exemplaires
Sondheim Sings, Vol. 1: 1962-1972 2 exemplaires
West Side Story: National Symphony Orchestra / Leicester Haymarket Theatre Cast [audio recording] — Lyrics — 2 exemplaires
Highlights from Sweeney Todd 2 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Original 2023 Broadway Cast Recording — Compositeur — 1 exemplaire
Follies (Playbill) [Vol 9 No 5] 1 exemplaire
Stephen Sondheim: The Story So Far... 1 exemplaire
The Essential Stephen Sondheim 1 exemplaire
Follies (Playbill) [Vol 8 No 11] 1 exemplaire
Sondheim on Sondheim 1 exemplaire
Old Friends 1 exemplaire
Company of Sondheim, Stephen, Furth, George 25th (twenty-fifth) Edition on 01 August 1996 1 exemplaire
Merrily We Roll Along [2012 cast recording] 1 exemplaire
Follies - Original Broadway Cast (1971) - LP 1 exemplaire
Merrily We Roll Along, Broadway Revival 1 exemplaire
Anyone Can Whistle - Original Broadway Cast - LP 1 exemplaire
Company - Original Broadway Cast - LP 1 exemplaire
Side by side by Sondheim (performance of Oct. 2004) 1 exemplaire
The Worst Pies in London (Sweeney Todd) 1 exemplaire
Being Alive from "Company" 1 exemplaire
Here We Are (New York - The Shed - ) Playbill 1 exemplaire
Into the Woods Libretto 1 exemplaire
Sondheim Celebration 1 exemplaire
Bounce : original cast recording 1 exemplaire
Getting Married Today (from Company) 1 exemplaire
Barcelona (from Company) 1 exemplaire
Pretty Women from "Sweeney Todd" 1 exemplaire
Take me to the World from "Evening Primrose" 1 exemplaire
BBC Proms 2020 : Prom 16 : Last Night of the Proms [video recording] (2020) — Compositeur — 1 exemplaire
BBC Proms 2020 : Prom 16 : Last Night of the Proms [sound recording] (2020) — Compositeur — 1 exemplaire
The Frogs: A Musical 1 exemplaire
Small World (from Gypsy) — Lyricist — 1 exemplaire
Everything's Coming Up Roses (from Gypsy) — Lyricist — 1 exemplaire
The Boy from . . . from "Side by Side" 1 exemplaire
Children Will Listen from "Into the Woods" 1 exemplaire
VIII Prêmio Eldorado de Música [sound recording] 1 exemplaire
A Weekend in the Country 1 exemplaire
Happiness (Passion) - Solo version 1 exemplaire
Passion [CD] 1 exemplaire
Into the Woods [piano conductor score] 1 exemplaire
Saturday Night [CD] 1 exemplaire
Pacific overtures (performance of Apr. 15, 1976) 1 exemplaire
Company (performance of Feb. 2014) 1 exemplaire
Sondheim putting it together 1 exemplaire
Company (Playbill) [Vol 8 No 11] 1 exemplaire
Pacific Overtures (1987 English National Opera Cast) 1 exemplaire
Too Many Mornings (from FOLLIES) 1 exemplaire
Sweeney Todd: The Deamon Barber of Fleet Street - A Musical Thriller (Book Club Edition) 1 exemplaire
Not While I'm Around (from Sweeney Todd) 1 exemplaire
Sondheim!: The Birthday Concert 1 exemplaire
Company (Gielgud Theatre Progam) 1 exemplaire
A Little Night Music [programme book] 1 exemplaire
Sunday Song Set (1984) 1 exemplaire
Merrily we roll along (performance of March 1990) 1 exemplaire
Playbill - Do I Hear a Waltz? 1 exemplaire
Gypsy - Vocal Score 1 exemplaire
Songs From the Musicals: West Side Story — Compositeur — 1 exemplaire
Sondheim: The Stephen Sondheim Album 1 exemplaire
Follies [programme] 1 exemplaire
Follies: Opéra de Toulon Cast Recording 1 exemplaire
The Stephen Sondheim album 1 exemplaire
Into the woods (performance of Feb. 2002) 1 exemplaire
Company // Promptbok 1 exemplaire
A little Sondheim music [sound recording] 1 exemplaire
Selections from Into the Woods 1 exemplaire
Everything's Coming Up Roses ; S.S.A. ; Accompanied with Optional Bass, Guitar, and Drums 1 exemplaire
America ; From the Broadway Musical, "West Side Story" ; For Three-Part Chorus of Women's voices with Piano… 1 exemplaire
Into The Woods: Théâtre du Châtelet 1 exemplaire
Into the Woods (Medley) - SATB 1 exemplaire
Sondheim Unplugged - The NYC Sessions Volume 3 1 exemplaire
Unsung Sondheim 1 exemplaire
Sondheim sings. Volume II, 1946-60 1 exemplaire
Merrily we roll along (performance of Dec. 18, 2016) 1 exemplaire
Vocal Selections "Company" 1 exemplaire
Sondheim: The Birthday Concert — Compositeur — 1 exemplaire
Merrily we roll along (performance of Feb. 2000) 1 exemplaire
Vocal selections : Follies 1 exemplaire
Losing My Mind 1 exemplaire
Not a Day Goes By 1 exemplaire
Sondheim! The Birthday Concert [Blu-ray] 1 exemplaire
Something's Coming/Tonight 1 exemplaire
Sweeney Todd: a choral medley : [vocal score] 1 exemplaire
Agony & Agony Reprise (from INTO THE WOODS) 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Sweeney Todd, le diabolique barbier de Fleet Street (Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) (2007) — Compositeur — 523 exemplaires
Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach (2003) — Contributeur — 202 exemplaires
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street [1982 TV movie] (1982) — Compositeur — 72 exemplaires
West Side Story [2021 film] — Lyricist — 65 exemplaires
I'm Breathless: Music from and Inspired by the Film Dick Tracy (1990) — Compositeur — 42 exemplaires
In Person — Songwriter — 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Sondheim, Stephen
- Nom légal
- Sondheim, Stephen Joshua
- Date de naissance
- 1930-03-22
- Date de décès
- 2021-11-26
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- New York, New York, USA
- Lieu du décès
- Roxbury, Connecticut, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- New York, New York, USA
Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA - Études
- Williams College (1950)
- Professions
- composer
lyricist - Organisations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Music, 1983)
- Prix et distinctions
- National Medal of Arts (1996)
Kennedy Center Honors (1993)
Gold Medal, American Academy of Arts and Letters (Music | 2006)
Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2008)
Presidential Medal of Freedom (2015)
Carl Sandburg Literary Award (2015)
Membres
Discussions
155. Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim à Backlisted Book Club (Mars 2022)
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
Into the Woods: Original 1987 Broadway Cast Recording (Gagnant – Best Musical Cast Show Album – 1989)
Follies in Concert: Original 1985 Concert Cast Recording (Gagnant – Best Musical Cast Show Album – 1987)
Leonard Bernstein Conducts West Side Story [1985 Studio Recording] (Gagnant – Best Cast Show Album – 1986)
Sunday in the Park with George: Original 1984 Broadway Cast Recording (Gagnant – Best Cast Show Album – 1985)
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Original 1979 Broadway Cast Recording (Gagnant – Best Cast Show Album, Best Engineered Recording, Classical – 1980)
A Little Night Music: Original 1973 Broadway Cast Recording (Gagnant – Best Score From the Original Cast Show Album – 1974)
Company: Original 1970 Broadway Cast Recording (Gagnant – Best Score From an Original Cast Show Album – 1971)
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 284
- Aussi par
- 18
- Membres
- 6,017
- Popularité
- #4,092
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 86
- ISBN
- 208
- Langues
- 6
- Favoris
- 10
I'm so lucky to own a copy of Sondheim's famous but rarely-seen crossword puzzles. This is my "one book to save in a house fire". I don't have an interest in rare books or first editions. Nor, in all but a few special cases, do I particularly care which edition or cover of a particular work I possess. This is the exception - and that's because, as far as I can tell, there are literally no copies available for sale (new or used) anywhere in the world! I discovered an unused copy online for about $200 in my early 20s - an eye-watering sum of money for a youthful student, and still the most I've paid for a single book. In 2017, a copy did the rounds for about $3,000; someone eventually snapped that up. Pristine copies of this thing must be very thin on the ground.
Between April 1968 and July 1969, legendary Broadway composer and lyricist [a:Stephen Sondheim|85858|Stephen Sondheim|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] contributed 42 cryptic crosswords to New York magazine. Sondheim's reputation at this stage rested on his Tony-winning musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the lyrics for two big hits - West Side Story and Gypsy. He was already a notable among the theatre world, but his apotheosis as an artist in the public eye was just around the corner. Sondheim had a lifelong love of games and puzzles, and - with his good friend, Psycho actor Anthony Perkins - was well-known for organising complex treasure hunts across New York City for their society friends. He would later go on to write the screenplay for a clever Hollywood murder mystery, The Last of Sheila, and a short-lived Broadway murder mystery, Getting Away with Murder
Dense crosswords, then, were right up Mr. Sondheim's alley. From April to July 1968, the puzzles were published weekly. This subsequently became fortnightly through to January 1969, and then increasingly intermittent until the schedule fell away completely. And with good reason: the composer was consumed with writing not one but two groundbreaking works. 1970's Company and 1971's Follies, which would define him as a master of the artform, and pave the way for the many masterpieces to follow.
These puzzles are not your typical crosswords. First, the clues are cryptic, and in a modified style from those who are more familiar with those found in the London or New York Times. Second, the puzzle itself is often a mental torture chamber that requires several logical leaps. For instance, one may have to solve the clue (e.g. "Do you want to hear? Sing, then see 'The Sound of Music'.") and then encode one's answer using a code found elsewhere in the puzzle and then, once you have found the decoded word, follow instructions in the puzzle to convert that word into the 'light' (the word to be entered into the diagram). Sometimes, even once the diagram is complete, there may be a further task, such as rearranging sections of the grid or picking out a hidden message therein.
It all sounds daunting...and it is. But at heart, these are just twists on standard cryptic crosswords, and Mr. Sondheim has a lovely introduction to help you on your way. It should be noted that, as Sondheim was an "early adopter" among Americans of these sorts of puzzles, many of the concepts were borrowed - one assumes with permission - from The Listener, the most famous British cryptic of its day. Acknowledgements are listed throughout the text.
This book is as much a time capsule as anything else. For those of us who didn't live in the US in the 1960s (or who didn't exist at all!), plenty of the material is nearly impossible, assuming as it does knowledge of politicians or media figures, geography or pop culture. And even at his best, the clues are darned obscure. Still, as Sondheim says in his introduction, there is nothing like the pleasure of holding a clue in your mind for minutes, or even hours or days, while the cogs start to turn in your mind. More to the point, as we enter a world that is painfully bereft of Sondheim's physical being, it is a pleasure to wallow in his mind. To grasp at how the cogs turned, and understand the way that his brain would construct a problem. It's no doubt similar to the way he was able to hammer out complex, apt lyrics and musical notes. This is the real legacy of these riddles.
This 1980 first edition is also the only edition, and it came spiral-bound, which was no doubt helpful for New York magazine's profit margin, but perhaps not great for the volume's longevity. Mine is in remarkably good shape - and of course I will only ever complete the puzzles on photocopied sheets! The smart introduction helped introduce the idea of cryptics to Americans who were largely unfamiliar with them, but they now provide helpful tools to get us started on puzzles that are historically out of our reach. 41 of the 42 original puzzles are included here, along with the answer key. The provision of the answers is truly a blessing; sometimes just quickly flipping over to squint at one single answer can bust through fifty years of dust and shadow. Some of the answers include notes as to how to arrive at the solutions. One single puzzle, entitled Un-American, is missing. This is apparently because its specific (baseball-related) theme became outdated between 1969 magazine publication and this volume in 1980. In the pre-computer age, of course, 'gremlins' were tougher to catch, whether because the compiler was transmitting them by fax or some other technology, or just because of the vagaries of printing. Either way, there were unfortunate misprints in a small number of the original puzzles which made it difficult for solvers; these all appear to have been corrected for this collection.
The complete list of puzzles and dates is included below. If you're interested, the wonderful Galen Fott has provided this neat blog post which links to online versions of some of the puzzles on Google Books. (Several are unavailable outside of owning the volume itself.)
1968
April 8: Puzzle #1
April 15: Dedicated Dodecahedron
April 22: 3 Downs
April 29: One Shy
May 6: Diametricode
May 13: Woodbabes
May 20: Misprints
June 3: Vicious Circles
June 17: Chop Logic
June 24: News Clippings
July 1: Code Format
July 8: Sixes and Sevens
July 15: A (K)night at the Philharmonic
July 29: Clicks…
August 5: Assemblage Line
August 19: Printer’s Devilry
September 9: Playfair Square
September 16: Word Games
September 23: 1 Across
September 30: Alphabetical Inserts
October 7: New Directions
October 14: Winners First
October 21: Intermediaries
October 28: Head-Hunting
November 4: Safe-Cracking
November 11: Murder Mystery
November 18: That Is To Say…
November 25: Interlocks
December 2: Bookworm
December 9: Treasure Hunt
December 16: Perspectives
December 23: Christmas Competition
1969
January 6: Un-American (not included in this volume, and sadly not available online
January 27: Vicious Circles II
February 17: Faces
March 10: Battleships
March 31: Alphabet Soup
April 21: Chessman
May 12: Code I
June 2: Poker Game
June 23: Critical Birds
July 14: Sixes and Sevens II… (plus d'informations)