Stephen Sondheim: collaborator and auteur
Friday 25th to Sunday 27th November 2005
Acknowledged by critics and scholars as the most important composer and lyricist since the 1960s, Sondheim is the only major contemporary writer of musical theatre to have been regarded as an auteur. It is surprising that since A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) - the first show for which he wrote both music and lyrics - an artist equally renowned for both these skills has invariably relied on the contribution of another writer to produce the libretto. Paradoxically, although he has regularly expressed his enthusiasm for the process of collaboration that is crucial in creating musical theatre, his work as composer-lyricist has always been more highly regarded than that of his librettists, and the shows for which he has contributed both music and lyrics are treated by critics and public alike as 'Sondheim musicals'.
In celebration of Sondheim’s seventy-fifth year, the conference aims to bring together literary and theatre scholars, musicologists, sociologists, musical theatre practitioners and critics for the first major interdisciplinary conference in the UK devoted to his oeuvre. Sondheim’s paradoxical status as both collaborator and auteur will provide the starting point for an exploration of his brilliant integration of music and lyrics with libretto, choreography and the various elements of staging and scenography to create a corpus of masterpieces unrivalled in twentieth-century musical theatre.
The proceedings will be video-taped and the aim is for selected papers to be edited for publication as a book.
[ Schedule ]
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