Stephen Sondheim, one of the greats of American musical theater, died at the age of 91.

The lyricist and composer wrote the lyrics for "West Side Story", among other things, he also created musicals such as "Gypsy", "Into the Woods", "Sweeney Tood", "Assassins" and "A Little Night Music".

Sondheim apparently died unexpectedly on Friday, the day after a Thanksgiving celebration with friends at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

As many noticed, Sondheim wrote only seemingly easy pieces with often complex undertones, such as “If Momma was Married” from “Gypsy”, a song from the perspective of a child of divorce, or the thoughtful “Anyone Can Whistle”, which many call Sondheim's wrestling interpreted with his intellect.  

The New York Times once described him as an artist who gave the musical a "new, bulky, adult" form. His work has won an Oscar (for Madonna's "Sooner or Later" from the 1991 film "Dick Tracy"), a Pulitzer Prize for best drama (for "Sunday in the Park with George" 1985) and nine Tonys. President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. But although he was considered a darling critic, he was not exactly a catchy producer. A Broadway revue with his songs in 1999 lasted just three months on the stage. "There are musicals, and then there are Sondheim musicals," wrote the Guardian in 2014 about his complex work.

The fact that the musical is often viewed as a lesser, more banal form of theater made Sondheim an eccentric in his field.

He was just not part of the mainstream, he told the New York Times in an interview on his seventieth birthday, because musicals are now off the shelf and have become mere money machines.

He despised the revivals and “always the same spectacles”, which had nothing to do with theater, but only lived off of presenting the well-known to the audience.

He is less interested in being different than in pursuing a vision.

Of presidential assassins, mass murderers and Grimm fairy tales

Sondheim discovered his love for musicals, who grew up as the son of clothing manufacturers, first in New York and after their parents divorced on a farm in Pennsylvania, as a ten-year-old under the influence of Oscar Hammerstein (part of the famous music theater duo Hammerstein and Rogers) whose son James he was friends. An early musical that he wrote as a schoolboy, "By George", impressed his friends, but fell through with Hammerstein. Hammerstein's criticism of the play, however, taught him more about music theater - "how to structure a song, what a character and a scene is, how to tell a story and how not" - than others learned about it in a lifetime, Sondheim said later .

After studying music at Williams College, from which he graduated magna cum laude, he found his breakthrough with the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story". In the course of his career he should tell very different stories, including about the painter George Seurrat ("Sunday in the Park with George"), about Grimm fairy tales ("Into the Woods"), about mass murderers ("Sweeney Todd") and presidents - Assassins, and about the arrival of the Americans in Japan in the 19th century ("Pacific Overtures").

His pieces were often melancholy, but hardly melodramatic. The feelgood scheme of successful musicals like “My Fair Lady” or later “Cats” and the Disney productions was alien to him, even if he confessed that he loved the theater as much as the music. "I'm interested in connecting with the audience," he said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “The thought of making the audience laugh and cry - to get them to feel - is of the highest importance to me.” At the same time, he described himself as a “mathematician by nature”; if he hadn't dedicated himself to the musical, he would like to have studied Fermat's theorem, he told the Times.

His song "Send in the Clowns" from "A Little Night Music" may be his best known;

well-known artists such as Elaine Stritch, Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury and Bernadette Peters interpreted his pieces.

The latter conjured up Sondheim's work with the words: "It goes much deeper than anyone imagined."   

Sondheim was married to Jeff Romley since 2017.

Last year, on his ninetieth birthday, there was a virtual review of his work for the benefit of people in poverty.

Sondheim found the hype a bit much, as he confessed to NPR.

"But it's great to know that people like my stuff."