A Look Back at Stephen Sondheim Through the Years

Stephen Sondheim, the award-winning composer-lyricist who was said to have reinvented the American musical, has died at the age of 91 at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. 

A giant of musical theater, Sondheim reinvented the Broadway show for his own generation. As a teenager, he had learned to compose music and lyrics at the knee of his mentor, Broadway great Oscar Hammerstein II. When Sondheim was hired by Leonard Bernstein to write the lyrics for the classic West Side Story, he was barely 25. by the time he was twenty-seven, he had already had his first show on Broadway.

In a career that lasted more than five decades, Sondheim created some of the greatest musicals of his time, including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987).

Sondheim’s accolades include eight Tony Awards, an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has a theater named for him both on Broadway and in the West End of London. Widely acknowledged as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theatre, Sondheim was praised for having “reinvented the American musical” with shows that addressed “darker, more harrowing elements of the human experience” with “music and lyrics of unprecedented complexity and sophistication”.

Take a look back at the titan of the American musical through these 21 pictures: