Oxford University Press Blog
Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history. In the excerpt below we learn about how Hammerstein mentored Sondheim.
Sondheim, a native New Yorker whose father could play harmonized show tunes by ear after hearing them once or twice, was the beneficiary of a precocious, suitably specialized musical education. While still a teenager and shortly after the premiere of Carousel , Sondheim had the opportunity to be critiqued at length by the legendary Hammerstein, who, by a fortuitous coincidence that would be the envy of Show Boat’s second act, happened to be a neighbor and the father of Sondheim’s friend and contemporary, James Hammerstein. Sondheim’s unique apprenticeship with the first of his three great mentors, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd, one of the giants of the Broadway musical from the 1920s until long after his death in 1960, might serve as a Hegelian metaphor for Sondheim’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of modernism and traditionalism, high-brow and low-brow.
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Note the above Oxford University Press date. Also on that date —
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Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 AM
From Harper’s Magazine
for the Feast of
St. Michael and All Angels:
Note on a poem by Rilke
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"Is a puzzlement." — Oscar Hammerstein II
“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter.
All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles.
The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have
by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form
out of chaos. And I believe in form.”
— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff,
“Deconstructing Sondheim,”
The New Yorker, issue of March 8, 1993, p. 76