Sondheim: Talking Through His Hat (Part Two)

Oh, what's the use? You know and I know that Sondheim's opinion is nothing more than that--his opinion. I have just deleted a long and useless wrangle over his arguments. If you like Gilbert, you won't like his opinions on Gilbert; if you don't like Gilbert, you probably will.

Why should I worry about a modern lyricist using his mid-20th-century rules to demolish a master lyricist who was using Victorian rules (which he largely devised himself, because there were no effective models) to create lyrics which have lasted and are still enjoyed over a century after they were written?

As a matter of fact, I do admire Sondheim. At his best, he is brilliant. I object to his using local and slightly absurd assumptions about what a good lyric should be to demolish all his rivals and also himself. His ideals are too high to be followed. He insists that every aspect of a lyric should copy the speech patterns of the character, even though this is plainly arbitrary when dealing with a highly artificial convention like musical theatre. A music theatre song, it could be argued, is an expression of internal feeling, and it certainly makes no sense on realistic terms. People don't burst into original song with perfect rhymes in real life. Why object to poetic inversions in their lyrics, for instance, if you don't object to their faultless use of perfect rhyme when the character probably wouldn't recognise a perfect rhyme if it hit him on the head? Why should Maria not sing a "sophisticated" song like "I Feel Pretty", if that's what she feels like? Audiences recognise this; Sondheim does not.

Gilbert was more than a lyricist; in fact he was only a lyricist in his spare time, when he was not a leading dramatist, director, cartoonist, and so on. He wrote: "I have always held that English is (next to Italian) the very best of all Eurpoean languages for singing purposes, provided that the song-writer will take into consideration the requirements of the singer & reject words and phrases that involve a hard collocation of consonants & a succession of close vowels. I wrote two of the songs in 'The Yeomen of the Guard' ('Were I thy bride' & 'Is life a boon') for the express purpose of proving this."

A scandalous opinion, and one that many people will still object to today. But isn't it a fact that the history of popular song-writing in the past century (which more or less begins with Gilbert) bears it out?