Lyrics tend to fall into one of three categories, depending on their function. Some are written for the closet; some to be performed by singers; and some to be performed by actors who sing their roles as well as speak them. The lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II and Stephen Sondheim belong overwhelmingly to the last of these three. The trouble with attempts to present such lyrics in books, however, is a tendency to treat them as if they belonged to the first.
Overlaps abound, yet the differences persist: they speak to the nature of the lyric types involved. Closet lyrics haunt the cracks between light verse, poetry, and doggerel. Their words are self-sufficient and meant to be read, as literature, silently or aloud. At times they may even be set to music. But they don't require it. Song lyrics, by contrast, do. Far from being self-sufficient, they depend on the interplay of their words with music to make their point. Theater lyrics, in turn, amount to song lyrics plus. They rely on the interplay of their words with both music and a dramatic context: situation, character, diction, action, staging, and the like. Hammerstein took these distinctions for granted. In 1938 he wrote to co-lyricist Otto Harbach of his work on a song for an upcoming show: “It is really too good to spoil by just mailing the lyric to you. [Kern and I] will have to sing it and explain how it is to be sung when you get here” (The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, 230). Simply to read a theater lyric without music and a dramatic context, in other words, is to risk misunderstanding it.
The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II spoils too many of Hammerstein's lyrics in just this way. The book is truly a major achievement in its own right. But one has no idea from reading it how the lyrics are supposed to sound—unless one already knows the songs—and it can offer little to set the situation to rights. Print is, alas, a silent medium; and the volume lacks even the musical notation that might hint at something more. Then, too, unless one already understands why in a production the songs go where they go, one rarely gets a sense of what the lyrics are supposed to do. Here, however, print can come to the rescue; sometimes it does. Amy Asch, the volume's editor and annotator, has combed through draft scripts, letters, interviews, and essays to include relevant comments on his lyrics that Hammerstein committed to writing. These provide some of the book's most telling insights into the life (e.g., his indebtedness to Harbach, 23) and work (e.g., his reasons for “Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?” in The King and I, 350) of the man who once disarmingly described himself as “a minor poet of Tin Pan Alley” (255).
The book contains some 850 lyrics in all, however, and there just aren't enough of Hammerstein's comments to go around. Editorial explanations are in order for the rest, therefore, though these are not generally forthcoming—and only in some cases justifiably so. Such explanations would be especially useful for lyrics prone to lose something in translation from the stage to the page. For example, that “Climb Ev'ry Mountain” (398) revisits its original meaning without changing a word in The Sound of Music tends to get lost out of context. A metaphor for simply facing life's challenges in Act 1, it refers to the real thing when reprised at the Act 2 curtain as the show's protagonists actually head into the Alps. Then, too, a subtext may subvert a text's meaning entirely, as when Laurey sings “Many a New Day” (282) to her girlfriends in Oklahoma!, and, very much the spurned lover who's still in love, doesn't mean a word of it. Commentary of this sort (missing from the cited pages) would shed light not only on what such theater-based lyrics mean and how they work, but also on the art of the lyricist-dramatist who crafted them. Understanding Hammerstein's lyrics is not this volume's long suit, however. Assembling them is. “I was so intent on the hunt,” said the editor in a radio interview about the book, “and less about the character of what I found” (Playbill Radio, 25 November 2008).
The hunt—the curiosity, the diligence, the passion for detail—certainly distinguishes this book throughout. It is not the first book, however, to compile and publish Hammerstein's lyrics—at least some of them—or those of any of the major “minor poets” of the Tin Pan Alley trade, for that matter. Editors have long included broad samplings of such work in anthologies of song lyrics and of light verse.Footnote 1 Moreover, separate volumes each with choice siftings from the output of a single lyricist have also appeared in print,Footnote 2 and on occasion individual lyricists themselves have published books of selections from their work during their lifetimes, Hammerstein among them.Footnote 3 Publishing selections of such lyrics is nothing new.
Publishing complete collections of them is another matter, however, one with a history of its own. In 1983 Robert Gottlieb, then editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, and Robert Kimball, artistic advisor to the Cole Porter estate, joined resources and wits to publish The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, a landmark in scholarly achievement and a breakthrough in cultural prestige for what was viewed in some quarters at the time as fun surely, but of questionable worth. When it came to publishing a “complete works,” after all, Porter, however clever his wordsmithery, was hardly in a league with Shakespeare. Years earlier, moreover, songwriter Noël Coward had opted to publish only an anthology of his lyrics instead of the book of complete lyrics originally proposed to him, which he dismissed as “a waste of print, paper and time. I know of no professional writer who would not recoil in horror from the suggestion that everything he had ever written since his childhood should be published . . . merely for the dubious reason that [he] happened to have written it.”Footnote 4 Against this backdrop, Kimball sought to justify the Porter undertaking as both editor and annotator of the first such book of its kind: “A ‘gems only’ or ‘greatest hits’ approach encourages superficial and incomplete understanding of an artist's output. To know the best of Porter, even if we cannot agree on what it is, we must know all of Porter.”Footnote 5 Thus had the cultural tables turned. Publishing the oeuvres complètes of Porter, the artist, was now intended to promote understanding of his art—and only then perhaps to proffer pleasure. In this spirit Knopf went on over the years to publish six more volumes, each containing the complete lyrics of another key contributor to the American Songbook, and each taking its place in what by now amounts to a whole series of books that, reflecting a new self-consciousness over America's popular culture of the past, aims to be both scholarly and coffee table–accessible at once.Footnote 6
Elegantly designed, lavishly illustrated, and tellingly oversized, The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II is the last book but one in this series so far, and the first without Kimball's name on it as editor or coeditor. It is also the first to focus on a Tin Pan Alley poet whose work, even as it enriched the American Songbook, emphatically served dramatic ends. Other lyricists in the series also wrote for stage and film productions, to be sure, but Hammerstein alone among them worked consistently throughout his career as both a lyricist and a librettist, even when only writing lyrics.
Born into a theatrical family, Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) first made his mark in the 1920s writing hit musical comedies and operettas with various composers—Vincent Youmans (Wildflower), Rudolf Friml (Rose-Marie), Sigmund Romberg (The Desert Song), Jerome Kern (Show Boat)—then reached the height of his career in the 1940s and 1950s writing a series of historically pivotal shows with only one, Richard Rodgers (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I).
The book prints the texts of Hammerstein's entire known lyric output, starting with a student effort for a Columbia University show in 1916 and ending in 1959 with the near effortless “Edelweiss” for The Sound of Music. Thus it contains, along with miscellaneous lyrics, the lyrics for every song—used and unused, published and previously unpublished—in all fifty of his professional musical productions: some forty for the stage, the rest for films and TV. The book is chronologically organized according to the original productions of these musicals. In each production all the song lyrics originally used appear in their running order, followed by songs added for subsequent incarnations (on stage and screen), and by songs cut from or never used in the original (though sometimes used in later productions). An index also locates each song both by title and by first line for those seeking a lyric without referring to any production. All this follows the format established by Kimball in the first complete lyrics volume a quarter-century before. Here it is splendidly handled once again, this time by Asch, who further provides a cornucopia of ancillary facts and information, including a few nuggets for researchers such as primary sources of the lyrics. The book succeeds on two levels. As a coffee-table item, it serves fans of now-classic show songs who care to browse among the lyrics of one of the masters of the genre. As a work of reference and scholarship, it serves students of popular culture who care to trace the painstaking growth, lyric by lyric, of one of the seminal figures in the development of the American musical of the early and mid-twentieth century.
Publishing the collected lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) a few years after the Hammerstein compilation seems fitting: as Sondheim acknowledges, “Oscar taught me virtually everything I know about lyric writing” (Finishing the Hat, 36). If it also seems like the next installment in the complete-lyrics series—though issued by Knopf in two volumes now instead of one—rest assured it isn't, and for several reasons. For one, “collected” does not mean “complete,” a nicety that goes beyond quibbling here since the author whose work is the subject of these books is still alive. He even cautions readers that the lyrics as published “can be considered definitive. Until I change my mind” (Finishing the Hat, ix). For another reason, the editors of these books get no mention on the title pages, as Kimball and Asch do on theirs.Footnote 7 Whatever work they do here they do behind the scenes (one has to look in the back of the books even to find their names). Nor do they provide the books’ annotations, as the author supplies all such “attendant comments” himself—an anomaly that opens a Pandora's Box of idiosyncrasies on which a firmer editorial hand might have shut the lid from time to time. Together, then, the two books form a retrospective of, by, and about Stephen Sondheim, and one that is also comprehensive. They contain almost his entire lyric output, from a song he wrote in his teens in 1948 (Look, I Made a Hat, 427) to one he wrote in 2010 in time for his eightieth birthday (Look, I Made a Hat, 333–35). That makes this the first such massive compilation ever undertaken by a living member of what Sondheim calls “the Pantheon of Great Lyricists in the English-speaking musical theater” (Finishing the Hat, ix). The pantheon metaphor is apt, though it may not suit some who feel he deserves a temple of his own—a view he is not above spoofing in the newest song of the whole collection, “God” (Look, I Made a Hat, 332–35).
Questions of divinity notwithstanding, Sondheim has been an originative force in reconceptualizing the American musical—what it is, what it can be—in the second half of the twentieth century. After first gaining recognition in the 1950s as the lyricist for West Side Story and Gypsy, he established himself by writing both lyrics and music for almost all his later shows. In the 1970s he created a series of landmark productions with director Harold Prince that pushed the parameters of the post-Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in form and content (Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd); and since the break-up of the Prince partnership in 1981, he has collaborated with others in continuing to probe the possibilities for musicals in ever new ways (Sunday in the Park with George, Assassins, Passion).
His book titles come respectively from the opening and closing lines of a song about the creative act (Look, I Made a Hat, 27), a signature moment for the character who sings it in Sunday in the Park with George, and for Sondheim himself: “the only song I've written which is an immediate expression of a personal internal experience” (Finishing the Hat, 408). Volume one, Finishing the Hat, covers the thirteen musical stage productions for which Sondheim wrote all the lyrics as it moves chronologically through its time frame, from the start of his professional career through the series of musicals with Prince (1954–81). For every show the songs appear in running order of the original production. Interrupting this sequence when appropriate, however, are alternatives (cut songs, expanded versions, etc.), most of them previously unpublished, which appear directly after the songs to which they correspond. “One of the pleasures of writing this book,” Sondheim admits, “is having the opportunity to show off and share these things that would otherwise never have seen the light of day” (Look, I Made a Hat, 27). The second volume, Look, I Made a Hat, starts by continuing the previous volume's trajectory through his five remaining stage musicals. Then it plays havoc with its chronological frame (1981–2011) as it shifts its organization from time to type so as to include his lesser-known work almost as an afterthought: it groups the book's remaining lyrics into sections devoted to “other musicals” (shows unproduced or to which he contributed only partially, 1956–2010), movies (1969–96), TV (1952–66), miscellanea (1954–98), and juvenilia (presented backwards, 1953–48). As it turns out, a year separated the publication of the two volumes and it accounts in part for the inconsistencies between them. It provided time enough in this case too, apparently, for Sondheim to change his mind.
In addition to publishing his lyrics, Sondheim comments on them copiously and throughout. Some of his remarks take the form of anecdotes about the lyrics, which are always instructive and often funny as well, even when the humor is misplaced or unintended. In writing “Beautiful Girls” for Follies, for example, Sondheim inadvertently put cleverness before clarity (“Beauty celestial / the best you'll agree”), then attributed to “willful bitchery or natural stupidity” the expression of anger from a female reviewer who, ludicrously but not entirely without reason, heard the “celestial” rhyme as “bestial” and took him to task for it (Finishing the Hat, 202). Other remarks clarify the meanings of the lyrics themselves. He explains unfamiliar references in texts (“Ten Years Old,” Look, I Made a Hat, 384–85), fleshes out contexts (“Pretty Little Picture,” Finishing the Hat, 99–100), and raises subtexts to the surface (“The Road You Didn't Take,” Finishing the Hat, 217). Still other remarks reveal the workings of his craft as he runs the gamut from rationalizing the old postulates of rhyme (Finishing the Hat, xxv–xxvii) to imagining new functions for theater songs altogether—e.g., as actions over time rather than reactions of the moment (Pacific Overture's “Chrysanthemum Tea,” Finishing the Hat, 311); as the exceptions rather than the rule in the score to a show (Passion's “I Wish I Could Forget You,” Look, I Made a Hat, 162). Understanding Sondheim's lyrics from multiple perspectives is indeed the long suit of these volumes.
Beyond the concerns of publishing and annotating the complete or near-complete lyrics of any one writer, however, these books ultimately focus on the process of making lyrics as such—on finishing hats more than just finished ones—and on theater lyrics above all. That lifts them out of the complete lyrics category into a realm of their own. They surpass Sondheim's earlier writings on the subject and possibly those of the self-reflective theater lyricists who preceded him into print.Footnote 8 Sondheim has much to say about the English-speaking musical theater of the past, especially its notable lyric writers, from W. S. Gilbert, whom he dismisses as “the master of prattle” (Finishing the Hat, 324), to DuBose Heyward, whose lyrics for Porgy and Bess he praises as “the high-water mark in musical theater” (Finishing the Hat, xx). His assessments, however incisive, are best taken with a grain of salt for he clearly relishes playing the provocateur as he delivers what he calls “seismic shocks” of criticism and analysis. “Oscar Hammerstein II is not my idol,” he proclaims. In his shows “the characters are not much more than collections of characteristics” (Finishing the Hat, xix). Yet Hammerstein remains ever his moral compass. When Sondheim raises the inevitable question, “Why collect these lyrics and make this book?” in the first place, his answer points due north: “Writing lyrics for the theater is . . . a craft and I would like to pass my knowledge of it on, just as Oscar passed his on to me” (Finishing the Hat, xxi–xxii).
In sum, Sondheim's two Hat books comprise both a distillation of the knowledge and a presentation of the life's work of the preeminent lyricist over the last half-century in the American musical theater. They amount to a compilation, a memoir, a history, a critique, and a vade mecum all rolled into one. The entanglement of so many discourses, however, is one of two main reasons why scholars may not find it easy to study any one of these threads without studying them all. Inconsistency is the other. Because theater lyrics are Sondheim's central concern—not song lyrics, and especially not closet lyrics—he starts volume one by disparaging the very undertaking of publishing his own lyrics as “a dubious proposition,” even “a contradiction in terms” (Finishing the Hat, xvii). Then at the end of volume two, more than 800 pages later, he changes his mind just in the nick of time before closing the cover. “Contrary to what I said at the beginning of volume one, assembling all these lyrics on paper wasn't such a bad idea after all” (Look, I Made a Hat, 427). Logistically exasperating, the move is also strategically exhilarating. Along with humor and the humility of self-criticism that shine through the pages of these books, the inconsistencies serve to humanize and so render more approachable what might otherwise be almost too much for a reader to digest: the sheer richness of Stephen Sondheim's art, insight, and legacy. For all of it, hats off.
