Stephen Sondheim, the composer, lyricist, and Broadway icon who U.S. President Barack Obama said "reinvented the American musical," has died at the age of 91.
As reported by The New York Times, Sondheim's lawyer and friend F. Richard Pappas announced the news of his death and shared that he passed away at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He also noted that he "had not been known to be ill and that death was sudden. The day before, Mr. Sondheim had celebrated Thanksgiving with a dinner with friends."
Sondheim's impressive line of work includes Saturday Night, West Side Story, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, Passion, and many more.
Over the course of his career, he received an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George, the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barack Obama, and was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors.
Speaking of Obama, in the speech he gave when he awarded Sondheim with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he summed up Sondheim's contributions to Broadway and theater as a whole.
"As a composer and a lyricist, and a genre unto himself, Sondheim challenges his audiences," Obama said. "His greatest hits aren’t tunes you can hum; they’re reflections on roads we didn’t take, and wishes gone wrong, relationships so frayed and fractured there’s nothing left to do but send in the clowns.
"Yet Stephen’s music is so beautiful, his lyrics so precise, that even as he exposes the imperfections of everyday life, he transcends them. We transcend them. Put simply, Stephen reinvented the American musical. He’s loomed large over more than six decades in the theater."
What Obama said about Sondheim not creating "tunes you can hum," was an oversimplified explanation of his style and why his words meant so much to so many. His lyrics were "by and large character-driven, often probing explorations into a psyche that expressed emotional ambivalence, anguish, or deeply felt conflict."
Sondheim was born in New York City on March 22, 1930, and found a love for theater early on. He wrote his first musical – By George – when he was around 14 years old. He would continue to hone his craft and would graduate from Williams College magna cum laude and win the Hutchinson Prize that allowed him to continue his study of music.
In his early 20s, he wrote his first professional musical – Saturday Night – that was itself an adaptation of Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein's Front Porch in Flatbrush. While it was set to premiere in 1955, its producer Lemuel Ayers died before he had raised enough money to see it to completion. The show would not make it to New York until 2000 when it opened Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.
From there, he would write the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy and, shortly thereafter, his "greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director." Together, they would help create five of Sondheim's most classical musicals in the 1970s – Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd.
Following 1981's Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim and Prince paused their creative partnership for over 20 years, and this change led to Sondheim working closely with James Lapine. Together, they created the "most cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim's career," including Into the Woods, Passion, and Sunday in the Park with George.
The last major work he completed was 2008's Road Show, a show he wrote the music and lyrics for. He had many projects in progress, including a new musical called Square One that he was working on with David Ives.
Sondheim is survived by his husband Jeffrey Scott Romley. The two got married in 2017.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.