So once again, why collect these lyrics and make this book? Because a publisher asked me to; because it offered me the opportunity to append these comments on a craft I know a great deal about; because most of the lyrics are conversational and therefore stand the chance of being an entertaining read; but mostly because I think the explication of any craft, when articulated by an experienced practitioner, can be not only intriguing but also valuable, no matter what particularity the reader may be attracted to. For example, I don't cook, nor do I want to, but I read cooking columns with intense and explicit interest. The technical details echo those which challenge a songwriter: timing, balance, form, surface versus substance, and all the rest of it. They resonate for me even though I have no desire to braise, parboil or sauté. Similarly, I hope, the specific techniques of lyric-writing will enlighten the cook who reads these pages. Choices, decisions and mistakes in every attempt to make something that wasn't there before are essentially the same, and exploring one set of them, I like to believe, may cast light on another.
Since most of the lyrics which follow belong in the mouths of particular characters in particular situations, characters who are only partly knowable without the context of the dialogue and actions in their stories, I've included synopses to introduce each show and each song. These are shadows, however, not substance. With few exceptions, every lyric in this collection is prompted by the beginning, middle or end of a culmination of incidents before it, incidents of which the reader is likely to be unaware. For example, "In Buddy's Eyes" (from Follies) loses much of its tone and all of its subtext when disconnected from the placid surface of its music and the scenes and dialogue which have preceded it. How can we know what Sally means or what she's trying not to say, without knowing Sally? It's as if we were asked to know Hamlet from his soliloquies alone, for what are solo songs but musicalized soliloquies, encapsulated moments even when addressed to other characters? Lyrics without the scenes from which they sprout, at least the ones in this book, are just as incomplete as lyrics without music.
Some songs, of course, are small scenes in themselves. I've been asked many times why I don't write the books for my own musicals, since I treat lyrics as short plays whenever I can. The key word in that sentence is "short." I'm by nature a playwright, but without the necessary basic skill: the ability to tell a story that holds an audience's attention for more than a few minutes. Writing plays is, in my view, the most difficult of the literary arts. A play has to be as packed and formally controlled as a sonnet, but roomy enough to let the actors and the stagecraft in. Packed but loose, like a good lyric. Poets rarely have to deal with plot; novelists never have to deal with actors. A playwright has to deal with both and still make the result immediate enough to grip an audience for, on the average, two and a half hours. (That usually includes an intermission, where he loses them for fifteen minutes and has to woo them back.) I like to think I can hold their interest with short forms: playlets which are called songs. The longest I've written is the opening number of Into the Woods, a mere twelve-minute sequence, and that includes a good deal of dialogue. I'm in awe of good playwrights, even when I don't like the plays, and ever since the day I started working with my first professional collaborator and learned what went into the craft of playwriting, I have never tried to do it alone.
Actually, I've wanted to set these observations in print for years. I like to pontificate as much as anyone who thinks he knows what he's talking about, but I've done it only when being interviewed or when arguing with other songwriters. My reluctance to write them down, apart from the universal writer's reluctance to write anything down, is two- pronged. To begin with, lyrics are such a small and specialized art form that they hardly seem worth lengthy public comment. Moreover, why not let them speak (sing) for themselves? Examining songs like the ones in these pages in light of how swiftly stencils change in popular art is not only a stroll down Memory Lane, it smacks of archeology. The counterargument in both cases is the same: any art, no matter how small, is a form of teaching, and for me teaching is a sacred profession. My intellectual life, and to some extent my personal one as well, was guided and changed by teachers: Lucille Pollock, a Latin teacher in ninth grade; Robert Barrow, professor of music at Williams College; and Milton Babbitt, with whom I studied composition after graduating from college. Not to mention my immediate mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, and every other collaborator I've worked with. Reading about how someone else practices a craft, no matter how individual or arcane -- designing roller coasters, managing hedge funds, harvesting salt -- if it's detailed, clear and the writer is passionate about his pursuit, can be not just mesmerizing but enlightening. It is the best kind of teaching. In my case, writing lyrics for the theater is such a craft and I would like to pass my knowledge of it on, just as Oscar passed his on to me.
There is, however, a third reluctance: How can you comment critically on someone's work without hurting the writer whose work you're dissecting? My answer is cowardly but simple: criticize only the dead. I have never believed in "de mortuis nil nisi bonum"; speaking ill exclusively of the dead seems to me the gentlemanly thing to do. The subject cannot be personally hurt, and his reputation is unlikely to be affected by anything you say, whereas publicly passing judgment on living writers is both hurtful and stifling -- I speak from experience, as someone who has been disdained both by journalists and by many of my songwriting elders and contemporaries as well. Don't look in these pages for critical opinions of the work of anybody but myself and those who can no longer defend themselves -- but who also cannot be upset by anything I have to say. As for my own lyrics, I hope to be able to point out their virtues as well as their flaws. Self-deprecation is easy, self-praise has a bad reputation and is hard for a nice upper-middle-class boy like me who was brought up not to boast.
What you can look for, when helpful, are plot, scene and character descriptions, mixed in with a few anecdotes, to help place each lyric in its appropriate setting, both theatrical and real. They're no substitute for the music, but they may give the lyric a bit more life. What you shouldn't look for is much gossip -- I can promise a little, but not a cornucopia. Gossip depends on memory, and now that I've waited so long to set things down on paper, I don't trust it. Fully aware of the distortions that even yesterday's memory can engender, I've checked the anecdotes and histories accompanying the songs with whoever is alive and still compos mentis. So now, as Portnoy's psychiatrist said, vee may perhaps to begin, yes?
Excerpted from Finishing The Hat; Collective Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines And Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim. Copyright 2010 by Stephen Sondheim. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday.
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