Look, I Made a Hat By Stephen Sondheim Book Review

Martha Swope

Artist during work: a stage from "Sunday in a Park With George" during Playwrights Horizon in 1983.

Stephen Sondheim claims to be vexed most opera, as well as we theory we hold it. He additionally says he avoids serious fiction, as well as we suppose we hold this, too, even if his brand brand new book, "Look, we Made a Hat," which collects his lyrics for a low-pitched drama created from 1981 to 2011, does conclude with a quotation from James Joyce's "Ulysses."

LOOK, we MADE A HAT

Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes as well as Miscellany

By Stephen Sondheim

Illustrated. 453 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $ 45.

• Times Topic: Stephen Sondheim

He makes it formidable to take his denials altogether seriously. Ever since he wrote a lyrics for "West Side Story" (in a mid-'50s, when he was only in his mid-20s), Sondheim has been pushing a essentially bright as well as slap-happy American low-pitched toward tragic opera's darker as well as some-more astringent terrain. And he seems to retain a born novelist's passion for delineating dense though believable motivation. "What lasts in a drama is character," he once celebrated a self-assurance underpinning most of a outflung reflections in "Look, we Made a Hat."

His brand brand new book is a follow-up to final year's "Finishing a Hat," which assembled lyrics from 1954 to 1981. Both books lift prolonged subtitles. "Finishing a Hat" betrothed "Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines as well as Anecdotes," while "Look, we Made a Hat" offers "Attendant Comments, Am! plificat ions, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes as well as Miscellany." These have been overlapping lists with exegetic differences. The "grudges" of "Finishing a Hat" often concerned score-settling, often with critics though additionally with a few unfit colleagues. By contrast, "Look, we Made a Hat" feels reduction bristly than resignedly rueful ("The enterprise for disaster emanating from people who presumably love musicals is persistently baffling to me"). Sondheim once briefly served as a upon vacation drama highbrow during Oxford, as well as "Look, we Made a Hat" exhibits a donnish palliate while consistent amusement with edification.

In introducing "Look, we Made a Hat," Sondheim notes which his prior book's privacy disappointed a little reviewers. Their budding censure was which "I didn't speak enough about my personal life, 'personal' being a substitution for 'intimate,' which is a substitution for 'sexual.' . . . If I'd wanted to write a memoir, we would have, though we don't, as well as we didn't. Caveat to a general: This book is going to be no some-more gratifying to a severely disagreeable than a prior one."

What we have instead is an outstanding reconstruction of rethinking as well as revision by an outstanding lyricist-composer: a wholesome chronicling of a complexities which can arise in shaping even a sparest strain lyric. Some of Sondheim's artistic forebears have left profitable accounts, both grave as well as anecdotal, about their struggles in fusing melody with American speech: Hoagy Carmichael, Oscar Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Ira Gershwin. (Sondheim's dual volumes have been probably closest in suggestion to Gershwin's "Lyrics upon Several Occasions," whose unconstrained subtitle betrothed "informative annotations as well as disquisitions"; Gershwin, similar to Sondheim, shifted uniformly from crass practicalities similar to melodramatic deadlines to a lyricist's undying art of contrast syllable opposite syllable.) But nothing of these other practitioners can match ! Sondheim for depth of analysis, for a clarity as well as calm he shows, over hundreds of pages, in scrutinizing a all though ineffable process by which difference upon a page have been translated in to an effective staged performance.

Sondheim's career is notable for a sweeping forays. He has wandered far afield. He has created a low-pitched about Commodore Perry's attainment as well as a "opening" of Japan ("Pacific Overtures"), Georges Seurat as well as a origination of "La Grande Jatte" ("Sunday in a Park With George"), America's prolonged story of political violence ("Assassins"), a fairy-tale timberland ("Into a Woods"), attempted murder as well as unwitting cannibalism ("Sweeney Todd"). Yet what is perhaps most impressive about his dual books of lyrics is how unsweeping, how determinedly close-focused as well as minute, they are.

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