When Stephen Sondheim writes, he looks at a blank wall.
Lying on the couch where he has created some of his best-known Broadway musical scores, he tunes out the world beyond his New York brownstone. With his back to a stained-glass window featuring an image of a ship at sea, he trains his gaze across the room onto an empty alcove painted black. He occasionally walks a few steps to the Baldwin piano that Leonard Bernstein helped him to get at a discount decades ago.
The composer-lyricist then picks up one of his yellow legal pads. On such pads he's written the lyrics, or the entire score, for the street gangs in "West Side Story," a grasping stage mother in "Gypsy," a blood-thirsty barber in "Sweeney Todd," and many others.
The article goes on to say that Sondheim is a procrastinator ("If I owe you the song Tuesday, Monday night I really get to work on it") and finds his work slow and painstaking.
I know we shouldn't delight in the suffering of others, but it's helpful to know the genius among us often feel like we slow and painstaking lesser mortals. And, I'm beginning to believe, like Hawthorne and Sondheim, that maybe the wall (sanded, stained but unplugged and off the grid) is the best environment in which to practice personal creation.
Unless and until, of course, I catch another genius (like Emerson) looking out the window again for his inspiration.
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