Stephen Sondheim, one of Broadway history’s songwriting titans, whose music and lyrics raised and reset the artistic standard for the American stage musical, died early Friday at his home in Roxbury, Conn.
He said he did not know the cause but added that Mr. Sondheim had not been known to be ill and that the death was sudden.
His work melded words and music in a way that enhanced them both.
In the history of the theater, only a handful could call Mr. Sondheim peer.
He chose collaborators — notably the producer and director Hal Prince, the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick and later the writer and director James Lapine — who shared his ambition to stretch the musical form beyond the bounds of only entertainment.
He wrote speechifying soliloquies, conversational duets and chattery trios and quartets.
Over all, he wrote both the music and the lyrics for a dozen Broadway shows — not including compendium revues like “Side by Side by Sondheim,” “Putting It Together” and the autobiographical “Sondheim on Sondheim.” Five of them won Tony Awards for best musical, and six won for best original score.
In 1993, Mr. Sondheim received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement, and in 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
For his 90th birthday in March 2020, a Broadway revival of “Company” was planned, with a woman in the central role of Bobby, but it was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
14, for the opening night of “Assassins,” at the Classic Stage Company in Lower Manhattan, and the next night for the long-delayed first preview, since Broadway reopened, of “Company,” also starring Patti LuPone, at the Bernard B.
In addition to his theater work, Mr. Sondheim wrote occasional music for films, including the score for “Stavisky,” Alain Renais’s 1974 movie about a French financier and embezzler, and his song “Sooner or Later ” for Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” won an Academy Award in 1991.
“The Frogs,” which was first performed in the Yale University swimming pool in 1974 before it was revised for Broadway in 2004, blended the Greek comedy of Aristophanes with present-day political commentary.
He was a world-class rhyming gymnast, not just at the ends of lines but within them — one of the baked dishes on the ghoulish menu in “Sweeney Todd” was “shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd” — and he upheld the highest standards for acceptable wordplay, or at least tried to.
His 2010 artistic memoir, “Finishing the Hat” , was in many ways a primer on the craft of lyric writing.
For some of the same reasons, not all performers were suited to his shows, though over the years several well-known singers became his stalwart interpreters, among them Elaine Stritch, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Cook and Bernadette Peters.
Mr. Sondheim rarely gave audiences the fizzy, feel-good musical experience or the happily resolved narrative that the shows of his predecessors conditioned them to expect.
Of the shows for which Mr. Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, his first, “Forum,” had the longest Broadway run at 964 performances; his second, “Anyone Can Whistle,” lasted nine.
“I have always conscientiously tried not to do the same thing twice,” Mr. Sondheim said, reflecting on his career in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2000, when he turned 70.
He was sent for a time to military school, and later to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 Stephen, her only child, lived mostly with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life.
In the years following his parents’ separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his mother treated him precisely as she had her husband: flirting with him sexually on the one hand, belittling him on the other.
His mother was, nonetheless, responsible for the most formative relationship of her son’s life.
Hammerstein himself became a surrogate father and mentor — “It was because of my teenage admiration for him that I became a songwriter,” Mr. Sondheim wrote in “Finishing the Hat,” although he later assessed Hammerstein as a lyricist of soaring ability but often flawed work.
This the young Mr. Sondheim did, a project that carried him through his graduation from Williams College in Massachusetts, where he complemented his theater work with serious composition study under Robert Barrow, an intellectually rigorous specialist in harmony, from whom Mr. Sondheim gleaned the lesson, as he put it, “that art is work and not inspiration, that invention comes with craft.” Mr. Sondheim would later study independently with Milton Babbitt, the avant-garde composer.
Mr. Sondheim’s first professional show business job was not in the theater at all; through the agency representing Hammerstein, he was hired to write for a 1950s television comedy, “Topper,” about a fussbudget banker haunted by a pair of urbane ghosts.
The show was not presented until 1997, by a small company in London; it subsequently appeared in Chicago and finally had its New York premiere in 2000, Off Broadway at the Second Stage Theater.
Mr. Sondheim was asked to take the job by Laurents and by Mary Rodgers, Richard’s elder daughter, whom he had met as a teenager at the Hammersteins’ and for whom he had complicated feelings over many years.
The period of Mr. Sondheim’s greatest work began when Harold Prince became his director.
Mr. Prince would direct five Sondheim musicals in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd’’ — and though not all were commercially successful, they were all innovative, the product of two supremely talented artists whose individually authoritative visions were, for the most part, complementary.
During Mr. Prince’s absence from his creative life, Mr. Sondheim teamed up with a younger collaborator, James Lapine, and together they created the most cerebral works of Mr. Sondheim’s career.
With no dancing and a slim plot, there was little of musical theater convention in the show, but, as Frank Rich wrote in The Times, it was startlingly original and deeply satisfying.
In the show’s signature song, “Finishing the Hat,” faced with the loss of the woman he loves because his devotion to painting has superseded his devotion to her, Seurat offers a sad but forceful paean to the joy of bringing original beauty into the world.