Master of the Musical ; Stephen Sondheim Applies a Relentless

When Stephen Sondheim was a freshman pursuing mathematics at Williams College, he enrolled in a music course. Most of the class, he recalls, loathed it. "The professor, Robert Barrow, was cold and dogmatic. I thought he was the best thing I had ever encountered, because he took all the romance away from art. Instead of the muse coming at midnight and humming Some Enchanted Evening into your ear, music was constructed. It wasn't what other people wanted to hear, but it turned me into a music major."

Art without romance. An odd-sounding phrase, perhaps, from the man who wrote the gushy words of head-over-heels devotion to Maria for West Side Story, the anthem to unrequited passion, Losing My Mind, for Follies and the rueful look at love out of synch, Send In the Clowns, for A Little Night Music. Each of the 14 shows for which he has been composer, lyricist or both has been shot through with emotion. His latest, Into the Woods, which opened last month and promptly became Broadway's newest musical hit, with advance sales climbing to $2.5 million, embraces every experience from birth to death, from delirious infatuation to parting regret. Yet to acerbic critics and ardent fans alike -- and Sondheim, at 57, is surely the most controversial major figure in the American theater -- his own dispassionate characterization evokes the distinctive flavor of the work that has brought him five Tonys, a record six New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best musical and a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George.

He brings to show business, customarily a craft of schmaltz and charm, one of the keenest analytic minds around. Sondheim was the kind of boy whose favorite school subject is Latin, and he grew into the sort of man who browses through dictionaries for entertainment. His love of concocting puzzles, scavenger hunts and murder-mystery games, legendary in theater circles, inspired the premise and central character of Anthony Shaffer's thriller, Sleuth, and led Sondheim and a longtime friend, Actor Anthony Perkins, to turn out their own Hollywood chiller, The Last of Sheila. Equally methodical for the stage, Sondheim does not simply write songs; he writes scores so intricately interconnected that he began Into the Woods by jotting down a musical motif for each character, as if planning a narrative symphony. He couples that architectural approach to music with a detached, almost anthropological look at his fellow man. He derives many of his lyrics from probing conversations with actors or friends. Yet even people who have been close to him for decades say he is hard to get to know. The only child of a couple who endured a venomous divorce, he is described by a friend as the "one person I know who truly hates his mother." Despite diverse infatuations, he has always lived alone, and says, a little sadly, he has "never" been in love.