Happy Ever After

Did Sondheim Destroy the American Musical?

It’s the other national anthem, saying,
If you want to hear -
It says, “Bullshit!”…
It says: Listen
To the tune that keeps sounding
In the distance, on the outside,
Coming through the ground…
We’re the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can’t get in
To the ball park.
(Assassins)

Sandy Wilson, composer and lyricist, famously declared that Stephen Sondheim “destroyed the American musical almost singlehandedly. He’s turned it into a semi-operatic disquisition rather than an entertainment.” A brief survey of Sondheim’s catalogue, from the first concept musical Company (1970) with its lean view of marriage and flattened chronology, to Assassins (1990), a prickly but sympathetic account of eight American hit men (and women), suggests the composer and lyricist has indeed enacted a radical break with the unabashed good cheer of Oklahoma!’s “O what a beautiful mornin’’. More serious still, to challenge the form of that most American of theatrical celebrations—the Broadway musical—is apparently to challenge America itself. Yet a closer look at the so-called 1940s Golden Age of the musical comedy reveals Broadway’s tangled relationship with the American dream and a complex project of Jewish assimilation through the on-stage depiction of ‘outsiders’. Sondheim has been reticent about his heritage in interviews and commentaries on his work, but has noted an affinity with the outsider, stating “it’s obviously something I feel, belonging to two minorities”(being Jewish and gay). While Sondheim’s works often depict fragmented worlds that seem a far cry from the American creed, peopled as they are by the incompatible, dispossessed or unruly, his musicals do not perhaps disconnect with the musical’s Golden Age as much as Wilson feared: the Broadway “disquisition”on the outsider has been around for longer than might be expected. Just as the American musical of the 1940s began to redraw the boundaries of social inclusion, so Sondheim scores an alternative national anthem, for “the ones that can’t get in to the ball park.” Read more

Said, Barenboim and the West-East Divan Orchestra

Since its formation in 1999, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has prompted an energetic mix of rapture and hostility. Founded by conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and scholar and writer Edward Said, the organisation has provoked considerable debate through its much-lauded aim to bring together young Israeli and Arab musicians to engage in a ‘constructive musical dialogue’. Said and Barenboim’s many statements on the Western classical canon’s power to enable personal and collective transformation have further piqued discussion. In turn, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has become a site (albeit a rocky one) for broader questions as to what the orchestral experience can or cannot accomplish. More recently, a number of scholarly critiques of the orchestra have emerged, unpicking Said and Barenboim’s claims as to Western music’s unique power to transfigure social experience. Does the orchestra stand as a living ‘utopian republic’, as suggested by Barenboim? Or is the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra only a fantasy of social harmony, doing more to gratify its liberal concert audiences than to address the complexity and hardship of the political landscape in which it operates?

Read more