At the passing of Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter argued to be Broadway’s finest, one must reflect on his legacy not solely as engineer of the American musical but as an artist with a career spanning over six decades. His noteworthy status had its beginnings in his childhood neighbourhood as growing up beside Oscar Hammerstein, the legendary Broadway lyricist and producer, formed the foundation on which Sondheim would receive both criticism and appraisal for early compositions.

Hammerstein’s influence at this early stage is an undeniable factor which ultimately resulted in the immense success of Sondheim, as it was Hammerstein who encouraged his love of Ravel. Sondheim’s later review of Ravel as the artist to whom most show music can be traced back to cannot therefore be seen as mere coincidence. Neither was it long before Sondheim’s work was plucked from a manuscript and placed on the stage as the book, words and lyrics of ‘All That Glitters’ served as a snippet of what was to come.

To narrow Sondheim’s vast array of works down to just a few pinnacle moments one would have to look at Side by Side, a work whose debut in 1976 at the Mermaid Theatre, London gave rise to anthologies basking in its inspiration. Its expansion of Sondheim as a composer illustrated his ability not only to intricately produce on-stage dialogue but to match it with a musical score of the same standard. If Side by Side acted as confirmation of his potential and won the hearts and minds of the British theatre-appreciating public, surely Sweeney Todd produced just three years later was representative of a well-versed master. As a dramatist, Sondheim has gifted us a tale of revenge accompanied by a theme still relevant in today’s social sphere: social inequality. Many critics have commented on the emotion Sondheim was able to exude by means of Sweeney Todd – a measure of greatness for any artist.

Aside from his career, Sondheim proved to be a figurehead for the LGBTQ+ community within the arts and entertainment industry. Fellow gay actors such as John Casey have described Sondheim’s influential presence as being in the pantheon of LGBTQ+ greats. The legacy of Sondheim simply pervaded gay bars in the late 20th century as Casey described wandering into one such bar in New York: he was instantly enveloped by a feeling of belonging as, thanks to Sondheim, belting out songs from musicals such as ‘Ladies who Lunch’ was seemingly commonplace. The confidence Casey gained from this experience is something which aided his own career in its progression.

But it was in the wake of a phone conversation to a conservatoire student based in London that Sondheim’s legacy was brought to life for me. Just days after his passing, Sondheim was described as “a man that would never bow to the whims of popular demand but would always remain true to his own personal style instead – he was, to put it in a few words, a true artist, and a genius one at that. Sondheim asked questions, pushed boundaries, disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.”

Claire Dickson is a Culture Reporter and Politics student at Queen’s University Belfast.

Stephen Sondheim: a legacy of artistic genius, LGBTQ+ community and revolutionary style