Art & Creativity Quote by Stephen Sondheim

Great lyrics, Sondheim argues, should feel like they were born inside the melody, not bolted onto it by a clever mind. That paradox is the point: songwriting is obsessive craft in the service of apparent effortlessness. The listener is meant to experience inevitability, the sensation that the words could only fall this way, in this rhythm, on these notes. If you notice the writer, you’re yanked out of the scene and into the workshop.

The subtext carries Sondheim's quiet rebellion against the “lyrics as decoration” tradition. In musical theater, especially, words aren’t just meaning; they’re action, character, timing. A line has to land emotionally and also physically: on a breath, on a vowel the singer can sustain, on a consonant that pops at the right beat. “Sit on the music” is bodily language. It’s about choreography for the mouth. When it works, character seems to think in music, and the audience forgets the machinery that makes it possible.

Context matters: Sondheim emerged after the golden-age showtune era, where polished lyricism could sometimes float above character specificity. His project was integration and psychological precision. He didn’t want the applause line that announces itself as craft; he wanted the line that reveals character so cleanly it feels like eavesdropping.

There’s also a sly humility here. The “hardest thing” is to erase your fingerprints without erasing your intelligence. Sondheim is describing virtuosity as self-effacement: mastery that disappears, leaving only story, feeling, and the strange naturalness of people singing what they can’t otherwise say.