Master of reinvention

It is four months since Stephen Sondheim died at the unshocking age of 91. Yet the profound sense of shock, of a gaping hole that nothing but his own work can fill, still permeates the entwining worlds of music and theatre. ‘I equate him to my hero, Gustav Mahler,’ says conductor Andrew Litton. ‘I’ve worked with many brilliant living composers, but none of those has had the same kind of impact on the world as Sondheim.’ Others, including Bernadette Peters – who unforgettably took on leading roles in his Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods – still sound stunned. ‘It’s so hard to understand that he’s not on the planet anymore; it’s just…strange,’ she says.

Truly great creative artists inevitably alter their art forms. A rare few do so several times over, and a still smaller number do it in more than one discipline. Sondheim was a master composer, a master lyricist and a master show-creator. While linked, those three crafts are not the same and he changed all three of them. In his hands, musicals became shifting – sometimes abstractly so – pieces of complex drama, to be sifted