Jamie Bernstein (b. 1952) is Leonard Bernstein’s eldest daughter. Nowadays she describes herself as an “author, narrator and filmmaker” but she started out with ambitions to be a singer-songwriter. It was an arduous choice for someone whose father was such a towering presence in American music. But Leonard was famously open to musical genres beyond the classical (even if the ‘rock’ elements he introduced into his 1971 Mass sound distinctly embarrassing now), so her path wasn’t the route of teenage rebellion that it might have been for others. More surprising is another ally she found in the older generation:
…I was so bossy, so excitable and loud. Still, I had my fans. Steve Sondheim was, incredibly, one of them. We obsessed together over the genius of singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. I learned so much about songwriting by listening to Steve describing what made Nyro’s songs so terrific: how she’d tweak a phrase so it was different the second time it came around; or how, in the closing section, just when you thought nothing new was going to happen, she’d suddenly shift to a new melody in a new key, and make you gasp as if you’d opened the door onto a bright windy day.
(This is from her 2018 memoir Famous Father Girl. She follows up with an anecdote about attending a recording session for Nyro’s New York Tendaberry album, which implies that we’re in autumn 1969 here, when Jamie was seventeen.)
Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) and Laura Nyro (1947-1997) are two of my favourite American musical creators. They worked in very different genres, but I was always on the look-out for any connections between them. How satisfying that would be! And how frustratingly contradictory the evidence is when you put it together. I made a first attempt in my book on Laura Nyro, but here is a fuller picture…
These two musical giants only met on one occasion, in 1969, captured in memorable photos by Stephen Paley, a friend of Sondheim’s. Paley had arranged for Nyro to meet soul-gospel singer Lorraine Ellison. Nyro joined Paley while he photographed Ellison for an album cover in the garden of Sondheim’s Manhattan home. Speaking years later to Michele Kort for her Nyro biography, Paley looked back on that afternoon as “a big love fest”; Sondheim, as he recalls, admired ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’, one of Nyro’s best-known songs, particularly the “surry on down” part.
William Kloman’s profile of Nyro in the New York Times (6 October 1968) had this line about ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’: “Stephen Sondheim says the song’s complexity, economy and spontaneity sum up for him what music is all about.” (This seems to be a reported remark; it is not in quotation marks in the original article.) “A genius, pure and simple, a genius,” Sondheim called her in an interview with the Boston Globe on 8 March 1970. Likewise, speaking to the Los Angeles Times on 10 October 1971, he opined: “Most rock I find boring: simple in the wrong way – meaning dull. I’ve enjoyed a lot of the Beatles’ stuff and some really brilliant things by Laura Nyro.”
Sheila Weller’s study of Laura’s female songwriter contemporaries, Girls Like Us, includes another Sondheim quote about ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ (unsourced, alas): “In economy, lyricism and melody, it is a masterpiece.” In 2015 I had an opportunity to ask the great man about Nyro:
(ME) I’d like to ask you, please, about Laura Nyro, whom I believe you knew? You were once quoted as saying that her song ‘Stoned Soul Picnic’ is a “masterpiece”. What do you think is so special about her music? And what are your memories of her as a person?
(SONDHEIM) I never said any such thing. “Masterpiece” is a word I use very rarely. Where did you read that? As for knowing her, it was a very slight acquaintance: one afternoon and one dinner.
I detected a retreat from the enthusiasm he’d expressed 45 years earlier.
On 2 May 1971 Sondheim was a guest speaker at the 92nd Street Y in New York. His subject was ‘Lyrics and Lyricists’. After a rambling introduction by Lehman Engel, he began his talk by saying: “I mean, I would like to talk for two hours on Laura Nyro, but I can’t. This is all about theatre lyrics” (around 8m55s on the archived recording). What did he mean by this? That he could talk for two hours about her lyrics, and he’d like to, but his brief was to talk about theatre lyrics? Or that he wishes he was competent to talk about Nyro’s lyrics, but his specialism was theatre lyrics. Some Nyro fans like to think he meant the first; I’m strongly inclined to the second. David Benedict, who is working on a new biography of Sondheim, concurred with my opinion. This is from an email to me in March 2019:
I think you’re right about your interpretation of Sondheim’s remark at the 92nd Street Y as being closer to: “I’d like to be someone who could talk to you for two hours about Laura Nyro's lyrics, but that’s not my genre, and I can only talk about what I know about.”
A year or so ago I asked him about Nyro but he said it was not really his field of interest. Obviously, he has always been aware of music that surrounded him, like the singer-songwriter movement of the 1960 and ‘70s, but he was and always has been a theatre writer. He’s really not interested in songs disconnected from drama. He listens to orchestral/classical music on a daily basis – the more arcane, the better since his knowledge of the standard classical repertoire is genuinely encyclopaedic – but next to no contemporary ‘pop’ (for want of a better term) music, unless occasionally persuaded by others.
In 2010-11 Sondheim published his collected lyrics in two volumes, with annotations and many fascinating sidelines on aspects of his craft and sharp observations on fellow practitioners of musical theatre. Sondheim-worshippers jokily refer to these volumes, the closest he came to writing an autobiography, as the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments. In neither testament does he express an opinion about Nyro, or indeed any other figure from rock or pop music. (A passing reference to The Beatles is actually in the context of music on film, where he praises Richard Lester’s editing skills on A Hard Day’s Night; a reference to Elvis Presley concerns the “faintly ridiculous” plots of his movies.)
In an essay I published on ‘Sondheim at 90’ I rationalised his preferences as follows:
Sondheim must be the only significant figure still active in musical theatre to have come of age before the rock’n’roll revolution. His musical sensibilities were formed in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. It was an age of professional songwriters and of performers beholden to them. In later decades these separate roles would fuse: artists, generally unversed in musical staff notation, would originate, record and perform their own material, often working it up in the studio (as The Beatles did after their retreat from public performance in 1966). These developments largely passed Sondheim by. Pop or rock has only ever featured in a ‘diegetic’ sense in his shows. For example, in ‘Unworthy of Your Love’ (from Assassins, 1990), he creates a soppy Carpenters-like ballad to characterize ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, would-be assassin of President Ford, because that’s the sort of music she would have listened to.
The elderly titan may have downplayed his enthusiasm in retrospect but it’s clear that the young Sondheim responded to the inherent theatricality and inventiveness in Nyro’s work. It always seemed a surprising departure from his habitual line of interest – albeit a welcome one. In old age he seems to have erased all this from memory. I’m glad if we can set the record straight and put these two figures, Sondheim and Nyro, back together.
Sources
Jamie Bernstein, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein (2018)
Michele Kort, Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro (2002)
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics 1954-1981… (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics 1981-2011… (2011)
Philip Ward, On Track…Laura Nyro: Every Album, Every Song (2022)
Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation (2008)
‘Sondheim at 90’ in Philip Ward, Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten (2022)
(with thanks to Stephen J Grilli for the Bernstein reference)
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