You have to dust off your Shakespeare, polish it up and learn it by heart word for word - then the world of girls is at your feet.

The advice from "Kiss Me, Kate" is a joke in the original Broadway self-referential manner, because the whole of Cole Porter's musical, premiered in 1948, is a rewrite of a Shakespearean play.

A decade later, an even more famous Shakespeare story saw its much more radical modernization on Broadway: Romeo and Juliet on the rooftops of New York.

Four men, who were all sons or grandsons of Jewish immigrants, had come up with the "West Side Story": the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the playwright Arthur Laurents, the composer Leonard Bernstein - and Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for the songs.

The antagonism of the big city produces natural talents

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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The old Veronese arguing clans are celebrating their renaissance as youth gangs. A twofold transition situation helped the song material's chances of getting hit by the hit: the heroes of the street fighting are firstly youngsters and secondly newcomers or parking lot stags whose fathers were still newcomers. You impress each other with tricks and pretend you never had to learn them: the antagonism of the big city produces natural talents. What is catchy is the fusion of the formulaic and the thrown out, the well-trained and the spontaneous, the role-based and the liberated. The political variety of this elastic habitus is the marriage of optimism and cynicism, a patriotism,who, in the hymn of the Puerto Rican girls to their adoptive nation, is ahead of all disillusionment through the perfect flush of sarcastic exuberance: "Life is all right in America, / if you're all-white in America."

Sondheim, who was 27 years old when the "West Side Story" premiered in 1957, grew up on the western side of Manhattan, albeit on the eastern edge, where it is even richer than the East Side. His surrogate father was Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote musicals such as "Carousel" and "The Sound of Music" with the composer Richard Rodgers. After “West Side Story” and “Gypsy” (1959, book Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styn), Sondheim attached great importance to working as a composer and lyricist in personal union - although he only wrote the verses, not the dialogues. He said that once you found the words, composing was the easier part of the exercise. Only one of his songs went into the great American songbook of the so-called standards,which you - detached from its dramatic context - recognize immediately when the accompaniment is played: "Send in the Clowns" from "A Little Night Music" (1977).

Sondheim's admirers celebrate him as the finisher of a genre in which the songs shouldn't have a life of their own because they advance the plot and reveal the characters. From his mentor Hammerstein he took over the ambition that there should be no feeling that cannot be expressed through a song. One can assume that the monstrous parent figures in the Grimm musical “Into the Woods” (1987) were processed from childhood memories. Only the first part ends with “Happily Ever After”. After the break, the second follows. A few days before his death, Sondheim witnessed the New York staging of his “Assassins” (1990), a revue of the presidential killers in which the actor John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's murderer, had to be told: “They say you killed a country, John, / because of bad reviews.“That couldn't have happened to Sondheim: He was a favorite of the critics, but not of the big public.

Master of an essentially commercial genre

For half a century he was considered the master of what was essentially a commercial genre, although hardly any of his pieces made a profit.

He owed his canonical rank to his colleagues who recognized their aspirations in his work and who adored the technician, the unsurpassed word smith.

The fact that so much depends on the wording is already a joke of the poet at his own expense in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”.

Porter rhymed "quote with ease" with "Euripides" apparently without any effort.

Sondheim, the man of artistic bravura pieces, also mastered the triple Reimberger: "But no one dared to query her / superior / exterior."

The critic Daniel Mendelsohn now called Sondheim the Euripides of American music theater: at the end of a genre tradition, he expanded its possibilities in a time of cynical wars.

When the actors march in the farce "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962), an actress is said to be playing Medea the next evening.

In the intermediate realm sketched in this way, Stephen Sondheim was the king.

He died in Connecticut on Friday at the age of 91.