| The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze and assess the use of modernist elements in the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. The study shows how these elements are employed in those stage musicals for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics, beginning with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962 and ending with Passion in 1994. In a chapter giving a brief history of the emergence and development of Modernism in the arts, the work identifies the style's dominant characteristics as well as the social, economic, and technological conditions which fostered them. Those elements cited repeatedly in selected historical and critical analyses of the modernist movement are utilized as the criteria to define Modernism for the purpose of this study: experimentation with form and structure, manipulation of time, multiple (cubist) perspectives and simultaneity, urban themes, ambivalence and duality, ambiguity, aesthetic self-reflexivity, and elitism. The second chapter briefly discusses isolated elements of Modernism in the musical theatre before Sondheim.;Subsequent chapters focus on each of Sondheim's musicals, identifying the modernist elements and analyzing the ways in which they relate to structure, theme, characterization, score, and production components. The study concludes that Sondheim, with his explorations of the multiple facets of human experience, has become the musical theatre's spokesman for the ambiguities and fractured quality of life in the modern world, linking the musical theatre to one of the major artistic movements of the twentieth century. |
