Stephen Sondheim's papers go to Library of Congress, offering a look
into a Broadway genius
[June 26, 2025]
By MARK KENNEDY
NEW YORK (AP) — Manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings,
notebooks and scrapbooks from Stephen Sondheim have been donated to the
Library of Congress, offering the public a chance to see firsthand the
creativity of one of musical theater's giants.
The collection includes about 5,000 items, ranging from drafts of songs
that were cut from shows or 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. He died in 2021.
“It’s staggering,” said Senior Music Specialist Mark Horowitz in an
interview. “He’s constantly refining, changing words or phrases here and
there. It’s like he never gives up on trying to perfect the things.”
The cache includes drafts of variations on the lyrics to “I’m Still
Here” from “Follies” and “Putting It Together” from “Sunday in the Park
with George” that Sondheim wrote for Barbra Streisand at her request.
The collection arrived at the Library in March.
There also are lyrics for a reprise of “Side by Side by Side” that never
made it into “Company” and 40 pages of lyric sketches for “A Little
Priest” — “Is the politician so oily it’s served with a doily?” go one
of the final lines — from “Sweeney Todd,” with lists of more than 150
possible professions and types of people who could have been baked into
pies written in the margins.
“It seems like the older he gets, the more sketching there is,” says
Horowitz. “For the early shows, there may be three boxes of materials or
four boxes. By the later shows, it eight or nine boxes. I don’t know if
it’s because it became harder for him or because he became more
detail-oriented.”
Some surprises in Sondheim's papers
The Library of Congress expects a surge in requests to view the
collection when it becomes available this summer. Anyone over 16 with a
driver's license or a passport can ask for access to the original pages.
It becomes available July 1.
Horowitz, the author of " Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major
Decisions " and editor for The Sondheim Review, who has taught musical
theater history at Georgetown, has been surprised by some of the items.
One of them was a song Sondheim wrote as part of a public TV contest in
the early 1970s. The winner wanted the Broadway icon to write a song for
his mother's 50th birthday and Horowitz stumbled over their
correspondences. “I had no idea that existed,” he said.
Horowitz convinced Sondheim to donate his papers to the Library of
Congress in 1993 and the composer put it in his will. “I’d seen his
manuscripts to some degree in his home before, but nothing like the kind
of in-depth page after page after page that I’m doing now.”
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This image released by the Library of Congress shows lyrics and
notes for "I'm Still Here" from the musical "Follies" by Stephen
Sondheim, personalized for Barbra Streisand in 1993. (Elaina
Finkelstein/Library of Congress via AP)
 Horowitz, who has been processing
collections for 34 years, built a friendship with Sondheim and even
found his own name a few times in the collection.
"For large collections that I spend a lot of time on, I tend to feel
the ghost of that person over my shoulder. But with Sondheim, it’s
the first time I can think of that I’m processing a collection of
someone who I really knew."
A fire and ‘a miracle’
Six of Sondheim’s musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he
also received a Pulitzer Prize (“Sunday in the Park”), an Academy
Award (for the song “Sooner or Later” from the film “Dick Tracy”),
five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he
received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
The fact that Sondheim had anything to donate to the Library at all
is a miracle. He suffered a fire in 1995 that started in his office,
just feet from where the collection rested on wooden shelves and in
cardboard boxes. But somehow it survived, albeit with some papers
suffering scorch marks.
“There’s absolutely no reason why the collection should not have
gone up in flames. And it is truly the closest I’ve ever seen to a
miracle, the fact that they didn’t,” said Horowitz.
The country’s oldest federal cultural institution, the Library of
Congress was founded in 1800 under legislation by President John
Adams and has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan backing.
It contains more than 100 million books, recordings, images and
other artifacts and offers a vast online archive, and its contents
span three buildings on Capitol Hill. It's not a traditional
circulating library but is instead a research library.
In his second term, President Donald Trump fired the Librarian of
Congress, Carla Hayden, amid criticism from conservatives that she
was advancing a “woke” agenda.
The Library of Congress is already home to the collections of
several Broadway icons, including Neil Simon, Arthur Laurents,
Marvin Hamlisch, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon.
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