For years I corresponded with Stephen Sondheim, who was helpful, encouraging, and influential in my career as a composer. Some of his responses to my letters appear in my autobiography, The Wrong Side of the Room: A Life in Music Theater. However, one response, which I believe was the most interesting, never made it into the book. I wrote him a letter to commend him on his book, Finishing the Hat, which served as a master class for me on lyric writing.

In my letter, I decided to ask him a question that, to my knowledge, no one had ever asked him: “When you were writing lyrics for Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story), Jule Styne (Gypsy), and Richard Rodgers ( Do I Hear a Waltz?), what were your thoughts about the music?” I said that as a composer, you must have had some idea about the sort of melody you were hearing in your head for these words. Also I asked, “When you heard what they had written, were you surprised, delighted, disappointed, or exasperated?” Here is his response:

Dear Mr. Mathews —

Thanks for the letter and the compliments. As for your question: when I write lyrics before music, I often don’t have a particular melodic figure in mind but I do have a sense of the direction of the melody and the duration of the notes. I sometimes write it out at the top of the lyric sheet with no staff, merely as a diagram.

As for my collaborations: with Lenny, the only lyric I wrote in advance of the music was “A Boy Like That” and his setting indeed surprised me very much. With Jule and Dick, whenever I sketched the lyric in advance of the music, I also sketched the music, as I do for myself, so there were few surprises.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Sondheim