A few short months ago I would have absolutely agreed with the article linked below. I might have said, and have before in moments of pique, that Sondheim is quite simply the greatest American artist of the 20th century; the only artist whom for his entire career successfully bridged the gaps between high and low, popular and classical, tragedy and comedy, form and content. Until recently, I would say about theater as a whole 'there is Shakespeare, Mozart, and Sondheim.' But as I begin to age, some things become a little clearer, like the fact that Sondheim wrote from the ultra-sophisticated perspective of some of the most enormous privileges known to man, born to wealth and culture and good luck which lasted him 91 absurdly well-documented years while Mozart died a pauper and Shakespeare lived his life in politically fraught London with complete concealment of all but the barest outline of his identity (which many believe is itself a fabricaiton).
Perhaps it's my own 'classical self-hatred' that makes so many of us in the classical and 'long-hair' fields (especially Americans) look yearningly at the attention given to popular culture and endlessly ponder what we lack that we have so little appeal to the masses. Compared to so many more popular artists, Sondheim is as technically thorny as Schoenberg. But then one begins to recall, most of the most revelatory artists didn't arrive at their enlightenment through privilege, they arrived at it through wisdom acquired in a process of agony.
Sondheim lived a somewhat unfortunate childhood with a rich but absentee father and a mother left behind who was clearly abusive in some ways, but since then, his life has been charm itself. This in itself should not at all matter, and yet Adam Kirsch (a generally quite astute critic) says that Sondheim true contemporaries are his American generation's great writers: Didion, Updike, Bellow, Vonnegut, Barth.... and therein lies exactly the problem. These are all people of such immense advantages and celebrity, how can they possibly observe American life objectively when America treats them as the subject itself? While all these writers worked in lighter versions of Norman Mailerdom, John Kennedy Toole and Sylvia Plath committed suicide basically unknowns, Isaac Bashevis Singer just barely missed the Shoah and Nabokov barely missed the Gulags, Philip K. Dick battled lifelong insanity and addiction after getting thrown out of Berkeley, Henry Roth worked odd jobs until his 80s, Faulkner and Welty barely left their counties, Cormac McCarthy rarely leaves the desert, Sherwood Anderson came to writing after being a businessman lead to a nervous breakdown, Melville died a basically unknown sailor, Octavia Butler and Flannery O'Connor lived much of their lives in lethally terrible health, Carver couldn't stay in the same place for more than two minutes, Edward Whittemore died in poverty while working in his 60s as an office clerk, and Pynchon went to every length to avoid celebrity altogether. There are plenty of self-evidently great artists who are insiders and lead charmed lives, but like the Heissenberg uncertainty principle: celebrity compromises perspective, and it is much harder to see the real detritus of existence when thousands of people go to absurd lengths to conceal it from the rich and famous. Just as in music, the untutored genius of outsiders like Cowell and Ives and Nancarrow and Joplin is forced to come up with solutions to artistic problems of which no one else could conceive, there is only so much that overachievers sitting through life at the front of the bus are able to do to advance our knowledge without obscuring the best qualities of the rebels and jokesters and poor kids and loners and struggling kids sitting at the back.
Perhaps I'm sentimentalizing failure and success is no true mark of frivolity. The great strengths of Sondheim are utterly real, and often there seems no human sentiment alien to him. But the darkness of the human experience is fundamentally tamed and merely alluded to rather than experienced. Even Into the Woods, his fairy tale musical which necessarily expresses life with all its irrational emotions and terrifying brutality, is, let's face it, cuter than its topics deserve. And as for Sweeney Todd, well... come on, it's great but the horror in it is about as serious as a Friday night slasher. Perhaps Assassins, which takes us through the deranged minds of America's would-be Presidential assassins, leaves a sufficiently sour taste that it turns away anybody who sees the world as a comforting place, and perhaps that, rather than his better known more successful shows, is his true masterpiece and such a climax to his career that his career never quite recovered from its failure.
The fact is that like so many celebrated artists in all eras and all forms and genres, Sondheim was far too 'in', far too establishment, far too comfortable, to give us the entirety of life's essence. Great he certainly is, but 'greatest' anything, I begin to have my doubts. Though maybe by Tuesday this will seem like an absurd heresy again.
https://apple.news/AYHAakrEdS-ykcSdIztxOdQ?fbclid=IwAR3_WUtbMO4ZSjo6vQDcXj3r96CbFPJPLyux_mTN-Vz9Pr1X7j5b-eSA7K0
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