A music librarian brought Stephen Sondheim to tears — and got him to bequeath his life’s work

Mark Horowitz is very proud to have made Stephen Sondheim’s cry.

He is even more proud than, in doing so, he convinced the late legend of the musical theater to bequeath his vast archives of manuscripts, partitions, recordings, notebooks and more at the Congress Library in Washington, DC, for generations of Americans to penetrate.

“It is the reason why I entered this profession, so it was a dream come true,” Horowitz, a specialist in senior music in the library, said In this case Nile Köksal host. “Being able to affect it in this way was exciting and rewarding.”

The library announced this week that it had acquired more than 5,000 articles from the Sondheim collection, which will be available to the public on July 1.

The American composer and lyricist, widely praised as one of the most influential figures in the history of the musical theater, Died in 2021And left his collection to the library in his will.

Play long game

Horowitz began working on acquisition in 1993, when he invited Sondheim to the library to see a collection of musical ephemers whom he had personally organized to impress him.

Horowitz – Author of Sondheim on music: minor details and major decisions And the editor -in -chief of the SONDHEIM Review – was well paid on the interests and inspirations of SONDHEIM. The personalized tour included the original manuscripts of Béla Bartók composers, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky and Johannes Brahms.

But it was the manuscript of the American composer George Gershwin for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess It pushed Sondheim to tears, said Horowitz.

“This is the thing that was really the most emotionally emotional towards him,” said Horowitz. “Watching him cry was exciting. If you are crying someone, you won the match.”

After this meeting, says Horowitz, Sondheim changed his will to leave his papers at the library. The pair has remained in contact over the years, and Horowitz has led A series of interviews with the legendary composer At his home in New York in 1997.

Marginalia and unknown compositions

In a press releaseThe head of the music division of the library, Susan Vita, described the collection as “precious addition” which “will honor and preserve the inheritance of Sondheim”.

It goes from drafts of songs that have never reached the first rehearsal, as well as a spiral music book entitled Notes and ideas This documents some of his musical efforts when he was a student at Williams College.

There are even compositions that Horowitz never knew – and it was pretty that he had known them all.

Struggled in the margins on the words of A small priest from the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd Horowitz counted 158 examples of different types of people who could be cooked in meat pies, the macabre fate of the victims of the murderous protagonist. The vast majority have never reached the final cup

“He was very good at killing his darlings,” said Horowitz. “He never fell in love, I think, with something insofar as he was not willing to increase him, if it would make the song better for any reason.”

Horowitz says it is a miracle that the collection has ever made its way to the library. In 1995, a fire broke out in the office where Sondheim kept his papers.

“I had seen some of the manuscripts before the fire, and when I returned afterwards, if you removed the manuscripts from these cardboard boxes in which they were seated, there were song marks describing where the manuscripts were seated,” said Horowitz.

Beyond a small amount of smoke damage around the edges, the papers survived largely unscathed.

“You had cardboard paper on wooden shelves, a few centimeters from a fire. And it is really the closest thing I have ever seen a miracle of my life that they have not taken on flames,” said Horowitz.

“It makes me believe in superior power.”

Musicals “that change life”

Sondheim’s work, said Horowitz, made him believe in many things, including the transformative power of musicals.

“It was not only entertainment; it changed life and assignment of life in a way that I do not think that I had lived in other musicals,” he said.

He often thinks of the words of Pass from 1984 Sunday in the park with George: “I chose, and my world was shaken / So what? / The choice may have been confused / The choice was not / You have to move on.”

“I have known people who left jobs, taken jobs, got married, divorced after listening to this. It gave them the courage to make life choices,” said Horowitz. “It’s extraordinary.”

Horowitz says that the Sondheim collection will inevitably attract academics studying the heritage of the composer and musicians who seek to interpret his pieces.

“But I think my secret desire is that there will be young composers who will come and want to learn from the master how to write a song,” he said.

“I hope this will influence the generations of future songwriters.”