Stephen Sondheim
How, I asked, could a man whose lyrics were trickier, deeper and more full of joy than even the most subversive puzzles — which he’d written plenty of in his youth — find pleasure in those drudgy Sunday morning time sucks?
“No, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. We did them out loud. No pens. No paper.” Which was like saying you could do needlepoint blindfolded.
And of course that’s essentially what he did: prick holes in the dark to form patterns of light. As he wrote of the painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday in the Park With George,” he taught us “how to see.”
I want to make things that count
Things that will be new…
Move on…
Stop worrying where you’re going
Move on
If you can know where you’re going
You’ve gone
Just keep moving on
I chose, and my world was shaken
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken
The choosing was not
You have to move on
Look at what you want
Not at where you are
Not at what you’ll be
Look at all the things you’ve done for me
Opened up my eyes
Taught me how to see
Notice every tree
Understand the light…
Concentrate on now
I want to move on
I want to explore the light
I want to know how to get through
Through to something new
Something of my own
Just keep moving on
Anything you do
Let it come from you
Then it will be new
Give us more to see
Mr. Sondheim never stopped being a student, starting at the very beginning, each time he wrote, with sounds and letters and words. He discovered what he needed to make his characters come to life beneath the previously unexplored trapdoors of the musical scale, in the secret seams of the dictionary. He remained in that sense childlike, with an nearly magical belief in discovery. (That’s why he was also a great teacher.) The joy he must have felt in finding that he could make Armfeldt (a name he did not choose) rhyme with “charm felt” — and thus define a character in a couplet — was the same joy he gave us. People might remain surprising forever, his life’s work showed us, as long as words and music did too.
