1930-
Composer, Lyricist

Musicals.

Young Stephen Sondheim's path was made clear when, at age twelve, he was befriended by a family friend, the esteemed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. Hammerstein taught him all he knew about songwriting, and by the late 1940s Sondheim was working as a production assistant on Broadway musicals such as South Pacific (1949) and The King and I (1951). He then won a two-year fellowship to study with avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt, who helped him analyze popular songs and classics. In 1953 plans for Sondheim's first full-length musical composition, Saturday Night, were cut short by the death of the producer, so Sondheim turned to scriptwriting for the television series Topper. A chance encounter with playwright Arthur Laurents led to Sondheim's meeting with Leonard Bernstein, who was composing the music to West Side Story. Impressed with the lyrics to Saturday Night, Bernstein asked Sondheim to collaborate on...