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Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber: The New Musical (The ^AGreat Songwriters) Hardcover – September 13, 2001
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Here in the third volume of Stephen Citron's distinguished series The Great Songwriters--in depth studies that illuminated the musical contributions, careers, and lives of Noel Coward and Cole Porter (Noel & Cole: The Sophisticates), and Oscar Hammerstein 2nd and Alan Jay Lerner, (The Wordsmiths)--this eminent musicologist has taken on our two leading contemporary contributors to the lyric stage. His aim has not been to compare or judge one's merits over the other, but to make the reader discover through their works and those of their contemporaries, the changes and path of that glorious artform we call Musical Theater.
In his quest, Citron offers unique insight into each artist's working methods, analyzing their scores--including their early works and works-in-progress. As in Citron's previously critically acclaimed books in this series, great significance is given to the impact their youthful training and private lives have had upon their amazing creative output. Beginning with Sondheim's lyrics-only works, West Side Story, Gypsy, Do I Hear A Waltz? through his scores for Saturday Night, Company, Anyone Can Whistle, Follies, Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday In the Park, Into the Woods, Assassins, and Passion, all these milestones of musical theater have been explored. Lloyd-Webber's musical contribution from his early works, The Likes of Us and Joseph to Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, By Jeeves, The Phantom of the Opera, Song & Dance, Mass, Sunset Boulevard to Whistle Down the Wind are also thoroughly analyzed.
The works of these two splendid artists are clarified for the casual or professional reader in context with their contemporaries. Complete with a quadruple chronology (Sondheim, Lloyd-Webber, US Theater, British Theater), copious quotations from their works, and many never before published illustrations, the future of the artform that is the crowning achievement of the 20th century is made eminently clear in this book. Sondheim & Lloyd-Webber is a must-read for anyone interested in the contemporary theater.
- Print length464 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateSeptember 13, 2001
- Dimensions9.5 x 1.5 x 7.04 inches
- ISBN-109780195096019
- ISBN-13978-0195096019
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Acclaim for the first two volumes of
Stephen Citron's distinguished series The Great Songwriters
Noel and Cole
The Sophisticates
"A must for the theater buff."
--Performance Magazine
"A courageous and highly successful chronicle of two great legends of the theater, music, and film worlds during the first half of the 20th century."
--Library Journal
"For would-be songwriters, the book seems priceless. For the rest of us, it is well worth reading."
--New York Newsday
The Wordsmiths
Oscar Hammerstein 2nd and Alan Jay Lerner
"Highly entertaining and admirably comprehensive."
--The Chicago Tribune
"Told with loving detail by that musical sleuth Stephen Citron, this is a great book about two great men."
--Don Black, lyricist of Sunset Boulevard and Song and Dance
"His book time-travels the reader into the world and words of two masters creating for a musical theater whose moment will not be seen again."
--Dory Previn
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Product details
- ASIN : 0195096010
- Publisher : Oxford University Press (September 13, 2001)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780195096019
- ISBN-13 : 978-0195096019
- Item Weight : 1.89 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.5 x 1.5 x 7.04 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,736,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,421 in Musicals (Books)
- #2,327 in Theatre Biographies
- #9,558 in Music History & Criticism (Books)
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Just like most of the concepts in this book. There is virtually no legitimate research here and neither composer was directly interviewed by the author; one has to wonder how he was able to get his book into the hands of an agent in the first place;.
As for Sondheim, every single show he has ever written- even those for which he was "only" lyricist, has remained strongly on the revival list- something that only Loyd Weber's "Jesus Christ Superstar" has done (again, folks, thanks goes to Tim Rice) but rather than discussing the merits of "Night Music" and "Passion" in regard to winning best musical (A catagory that is indeed eronius and largely political for it's ability to finance a road company tour) Let's pass over that and look at theTony Awards for 1984 which Stephen Citron failed to discuss at all. "Cats" won Best Musical that year and "Sunday In The Park With George" did not. It is true that Cats is a show that has little substance- if any at all- and is "cool" for it's lighting and sets where "Sunday" is a brilliant work that requires a great deal of intelligent listening from it's audience. But to add to the humiliation of Lloyd Weber (who really no longer excists- anyone else notice?) came six months later when "Sunday In The Park With George" became the fourth musical in history to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. (since then, "Rent" became the fifth.) This Pulitzer made a fool of the Antoinette Perry Committee, all supporters of "Cats" and sadly, Andrew Loyd Weber, who's sucess is based on commercailism and not art
in three hundred years, People will still be flocking to the theatres to see the works of Stephen Somndheim (including the musical here is currently writing at the age orf 82) where Loyd Weber will have been forgotten and not even remembered as much as Antonio Salieri.
Sadly, Stephen Citron's book is not likely to go into a second printing. Had this book been a Master's Thesis we'd have another 30 credit Bachelor's plus out there. Don;t bother with this book. The author doesn;t even know the difference been duple and triple time, doesn;t understand myusical or character devlopment and never once4 used the word "motif."
Other reviewers on this page have carped about Lloyd Webber's name. If they're referring to the hyphen, they should have read a little more carefully. He explains his use of the hyphen in a footnote on the bottom of page 49.
On the positive side, Citron solves the task of the dual biography pretty well. One of the big problems in writing a book comparing two composers born 18 years apart is the use of time. Obviously, you have to tell the stories chronologically, you can't spend too much time on one of them without switching to the other, and then at some point, the issue of what each of them is working on simultaneously becomes interesting, so a constant 18 year delay would be off-putting. Somehow Citron manages to bring their narratives together around Harold Prince, and chronologically ties the two stories around the time when Prince went from Sondheim's Sweeney to Lloyd Webber's Evita. Before that, we're hearing about the shows on a weird time warp, and after that, it's fairly chronological. This is a neat touch, and Hal Prince is actually the main thing the two have in common.
I found a pretty egregious example of plagiarism in the book, around a topic that gets short shrift in the book; musical analysis. On page 360, Citron cribs an 88 word passage from Joseph Swain's book The Broadway Musical, A Critical And Musical Survey (Oxford, 1990) Incredibly, even though the book he's borrowing from is by the same publisher, Citron doesn't credit the idea to its originator, nor does Swain's book even appear in the Bibliography. It's an unlikely and original idea he's stealing; comparing Lloyd Webber's dramatically random repeats of melody to Renaissance Contrafacta, which he wrongly pluralizes contrafactums later in the chapter. It doesn't call into question Citron's research, which appears to be fairly exhaustive, but it makes one wonder whether the book isn't just a collection of anecdotes, ideas and stories from other sources, hepfully cobbled into a collection for the curious.
Theatre fans have often put these two giants of music theatre against one another, a position neither has publicly taken. The conventional wisdom about the two is that Lloyd Webber is the consummate melodist, and that his detractors really only envy his popularity from the comfort of their ivory towers, and that Sondheim is an abstruse intellectual whose music is mired in boring repetitive structures that are incomprehensible to the public, but which are feted and admired by pointy heads who want to feel smart. Citron falls into these old cliches time and time again, missing the far more interesting issues to be probed.
For example, the portrait Citron paints of Lloyd Webber is one of a man utterly at the mercy of his lyricists and librettists for what happens on the stage, and there are a number of swipes (deservedly) taken at Sir Andrew's compositional technique, his supposed plagiarism (which is ironic, considering the source), and his orchestrational deficiencies. Any examination of Lloyd Webber's work must ask questions of how these qualities play into his work as a whole. The best Citron can come up with is to compare him to Richard Rodgers, which is an attractive thought until one remembers that Rodgers was not at the mercy of any lyricist or librettist, although he could usually command the best. In fact, Rodgers wrote music and lyrics for No Strings. And Rodgers knew harmony, melody, and the power of a reprise to do dramatic work, not just to sell a tune. It would be foolish to say that Lloyd Webber doesn't know what he's doing, but a full picture needs to address his foibles as craft issues, not merely as the carping of the intellectuals. Can you be a great musical theatre composer without caring which lyrics your tune gets assigned to? Maybe so.
Sondheim doesn't fare much better. Citron says at the end of the book that Sondheim started in the Hammerstein "heart-on-the-sleeve tradition", then abandoned it for the "honesty of ambivalence" I'm not sure what he means by "heart-on-the-sleeve" Is he referring to West Side? or Gypsy? or Saturday Night? None of those seem sentimental. (except for lyrics that Lenny probably wrote) What Sondheim got from Hammerstein was not treacly Americana, but the integration of material and story, and he learned it so well that he wrote what the story and his methodology demanded, whether the audience liked it or not. This question of whether the structural and dramatic integrity is enough to make a masterpiece without popularity is an important issue Citron isn't bothering with.
This reader would like to see somebody tackle the Sondheim/Lloyd Webber duality along more serious lines, because the answer to the questions these men pose writes the next 25 years of musical theatre. Sadly, we won't find it here.