A music librarian brought Stephen Sondheim to tears — and got him to bequeath his life's work

Mark Horowitz is quite proud that he made Stephen Sondheim cry.

He's even more proud that, in doing so, he convinced the late musical theatre legend to bequeath his vast archive of manuscripts, sheet music, recordings, notebooks and more to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for generations of Americans to peruse.

"He's the entire reason I got into this profession, so this was a dream come true, really," Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "To be able to affect him in that way was thrilling and gratifying."

The Library announced this week that it has acquired more than 5,000 items from Sondheim's collection, which will be available to the public on July 1.

The American composer and lyricist, widely hailed as one of the most influential figures in musical theatre history, died in 2021, and left his collection to the Library in his will.

Horowitz started working on the acquisition in 1993, when he invited Sondheim to the Library to view a collection of musical ephemera he had personally curated to impress him.

Horowitz — author of Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions and editor for The Sondheim Review — was well-versed on Sondheim's interests and inspirations. The personalized tour included original manuscripts from composers Béla Bartók, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky and Johannes Brahms.

But it was American composer George Gershwin's manuscript for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess that moved Sondheim to tears, Horowitz said.

"That was the thing that truly was the most emotionally moving to him," Horowitz said. "Watching him cry was thrilling. If you make somebody cry, you've won the game."

After that meeting, Horowitz says, Sondheim changed his will to leave his papers to the Library. The pair remained in touch over the years, and Horowitz conducted a series of interviews with the legendary composer at his home in New York in 1997.

In a press release, the Library's music division chief Susan Vita called the collection "a treasured addition" that will "honour and preserve Sondheim's legacy."

It ranges from drafts of songs that never made it to first rehearsal, as well as a spiral music book titled Notes and Ideas that document some of his musical efforts while a student at Williams College.

There are even compositions Horowitz never knew about — and he was pretty he'd known them all.

Scrawled in the margins on the lyrics to A Little Priest from the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd Horowitz counted 158 examples of different types of people who could be baked into meat pies, the grisly fate of the murderous protagonist's victims. The vast majority never made it to the final cut

"He was very good at killing his darlings," Horowitz said. "He never fell in love, I think, with something to the degree where he wasn't willing to excise it, if it would make the song better for any reason."

Horowitz says it's a miracle the collection ever made its way to the Library. In 1995, a fire broke out in the office where Sondheim kept his papers.

"I'd seen some of the manuscripts before the fire, and when I went back afterwards, if you lifted the manuscripts out of these cardboard boxes that they were sitting in, there were singe marks outlining where the manuscripts sat," Horowitz said.

Beyond a small amount of smoke damage around edges, the papers survived largely unscathed.

"You had paper in cardboard on wooden shelves, inches from a fire. And it's truly the closest thing I've ever seen to a miracle in my life that they did not go up in flames," Horowitz said.

"It makes me believe in a higher power."

Sondheim's work, Horowitz says, made him believe in a lot of things, including the transformative power of musicals.

"It wasn't just entertainment; it was life-changing and life-affecting in a way that I don't think I'd experienced in other musicals," he said.

He thinks often of the lyrics from Move On from 1984's Sunday In The Park With George: "I chose, and my world was shaken / So what? / The choice may have been mistaken / The choosing was not / You have to move on."

"I've known people who quit jobs, taken jobs, gotten married, gotten divorced after listening to that. It gave them the courage to make life choices," Horowitz said. "It's extraordinary."

Horowitz says the Sondheim collection will inevitably draw academics studying the composer's legacy, and musicians looking to perform his pieces.

"But I think my secret desire is that there will be young composers who come and want to learn from the master how to go about writing a song," he said.

"I hope it will influence generations of songwriters to come."