TT: Head of the Nice Guys Club

Like everybody else with a more than passing interest in musical comedy, I read Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat with the closest attention. I’m surprised that none of the book’s many reviewers, so far as I can tell, seems to have mentioned the obvious fact (obvious to me, anyway) that it was inspired by Ira Gershwin’s Lyrics on Several Occasions.
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I compare the two books. The differences between them are exceedingly revealing! Here’s an excerpt.
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One of the reasons why “Finishing the Hat,” Stephen Sondheim’s annotated volume of his song lyrics, has attracted so much attention is because he takes potshots at certain of his colleagues, most notably Noël Coward and Lorenz Hart, the second of whom he calls “the laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists.” Some people have been upset by his candor, but I confess to relishing it–though not because I necessarily agree with anything he has to say about the parties in question. Most creative artists of Mr. Sondheim’s stature, after all, have strong opinions about their peers, and such opinions, whether positive or negative, don’t have to be right to be interesting. To learn that Renoir believed Degas to be the only great sculptor since the 13th century, or that Benjamin Britten loathed the music of Beethoven and Brahms, is to learn something important about Renoir and Britten.
It may be, of course, that one of the things we learn from “Finishing the Hat” is that Mr. Sondheim isn’t a very nice person. I wouldn’t know–I’ve never met him–but I doubt that it matters much in the long run whether he’s nice or not. Still, I wouldn’t go nearly so far as Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for such classic films as “Citizen Kane” and “Psycho” and who once told an astonished interviewer that he had no use whatsoever for nice guys….
To which I need only respond with two words: Ira Gershwin.
George Gershwin’s older brother and longtime collaborator was known on Broadway and in Hollywood for being an unusually agreeable person. In “No Minor Chords,” his 1991 memoir, André Previn recalled that Gershwin was “so unfailingly kind-hearted and soft-spoken that his cronies dubbed him President of the Nice Guys Club.” He was also one of the very best lyricists in the business, and in 1959 he published his own annotated volume of his lyrics called “Lyrics on Several Occasions.”…
As the structure of “Finishing the Hat” suggests, Mr. Sondheim is closely familiar with “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” so much so that he uses the book as a stick with which to beat its author: “Gershwin talks about his lyrics with an ease I miss in most of the examples.” I know what Mr. Sondheim means–up to a point….
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Read the whole thing here.