A Gifted Composer Gone Too Soon

The death of Stephen Sondheim, in 2021, left a rupture in the theatre world, and especially the musical-theatre world, deeper and more profound than any other artist’s passing could. Sondheim had so dominated that world, at least in its more ambitious and self-consciously artistic reaches, that to lose him was to lose a father—though, in this case, a father often taken on in a forced adoption by self-designated children. Like all forced adoptive fathers, Sondheim spent years both rejecting the role and embracing it, acting kindly and judging firmly.

But his passing also left a kind of puzzle, or possibility: all the next-generation Sondheimians, sons and daughters of Steve, could begin to escape from the encompassing shadow of the master. For those of us who love and participate in the musical-theatre form, the history and future began to present new possibilities, a more varied spectrum—and figures easily overlooked, or rather underheard, had a new presence. As Jennifer Homans has written about New York City Ballet after Balanchine, exactly the most Balanchinean moments can now seem stiff and academic, while the dancers turn to newer spirits and traditions for inspiration that they can no longer find in the master, and sometimes they discover exemplars in the overlooked.

And so we open our ears to sounds and subjects that the scale of Sondheim’s genius might have, at least a little, stifled or overshadowed. No member of that family of bereaved and inspired children has a more moving arc than Peter Foley. He was inspired by Sondheim’s example, benefitted from his mentorship, suffered from the eventual rupture of their relationship, and then retreated into what might have seemed more private musical activity—and yet when his final, inspired work, “The Names We Gave Him,” a show about the First World War, with book and lyrics by the actor and poet Ellen McLaughlin, had its first, revelatory, ringing production at Montclair State University, in December of 2021, it awoke the musical world. Now an evening dedicated to his songs will finally happen, at Symphony Space, on June 5th, under the supervision of his wife and frequent collaborator, Kate Chisholm, and the scale and significance of his achievement may be still more apparent—a cheering truth made almost unbearably poignant by the fact that Peter Foley never had the chance to see or hear his last work onstage. He died in August of 2021, at the age of fifty-four, after years of quiet struggle with the rare disease ocular melanoma, a cancer of the eye.

Foley had become, over the years, a quiet fixture on the musical-theatre scene, writing incidental music for many PBS shows, doing the dutiful and meticulous work of copying scores, and serving as a music director on various shows—a role that includes such seemingly mundane tasks as playing the piano in workshops but usually extends, as it did in Foley’s case, to actively editing and amending the composer’s work, particularly when the composer, however gifted, is an unschooled musician. I collaborated, all too briefly, with Peter on what was meant to be a song cycle for his friend and Yale classmate, the singer and actress Melissa Errico, with our one finished song, “On Vit, On Aime,” recorded on her much praised “Out of the Dark” album, of old and new music inspired by film noir.

Foley’s gift for sinuous, haunting melody and surprising musical shapes, not to mention matching music to word, was evident in our work together. But it was when I was introduced, in a concert, to a twenty-minute musical sequence called “Montage,” from “The Hidden Sky,” the first full musical he wrote with Chisolm, adapted from an Ursula K. Le Guin story, that I became aware of the grandeur and power his music possessed. It is a long, complex, multi-voiced unspooling vocal piece about, of all things that might seem resistant to being sung, the heroine’s postapocalyptic discovery of the Fibonacci sequence—the sequence of numbers that is formed by adding together the two previous ones and that elegantly describes the spiral structures of flowers and shells and so many other living and growing things, the very under-grammar of existence. To have managed to evoke this discovery, in music that itself metaphorically mirrored the sequence, was a kind of miracle. I was so taken by it that, facing the unbearable truth that he was passing, I pressed Foley to sit for a series of interviews in the summer of his demise, which he bravely undertook despite his physical struggles; I wanted to understand something of the shape of an artist’s life made under the special pressures of the modern musical theatre.

Growing up in Berkeley, California, he explained, he slept, so to speak, in typical musical teen-age dogmatic slumbers—pop and reggae—until a production of Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” made its way to a local theatre, and his life course was set. This was a generational experience: his contemporary, the hyper-gifted Andrew Lippa, of “Big Fish” and “The Addams Family” fame, also encountered “Sweeney” on a record, right around the same time, and his life course, too, was set. (Lippa later wrote a song about his Sweeney epiphany for Sondheim’s birthday.) “That was my touchstone,” Foley said of “Sweeney.” “I began proselytizing for it—in high school, we even had a ‘Sweeney Todd’ watching party when the DVD came out, with meat pies and ale.” Infatuated by Sondheim and the show, he made his way to Yale, where he began to write a student production, rather obviously in its debt, a musical about the Jack the Ripper murders called “Whitechapel,” starring Errico and Chisholm as two of Jack’s victims. All who heard the show remember it as eerily precocious, both lyrically and musically. “We all thought Peter Foley was going to come to New York and take over the world,” his longtime friend, the music director Rob Berman, recalls, “but it didn’t quite work out that way.”

Choosing Le Guin’s postapocalyptic story, perhaps a bit naïvely, as the perfect vehicle for his professional début, Foley wrote both music and lyrics. (Eventually, he largely gave up writing lyrics, not out of a lack of a gift for language but because “I was such a perfectionist that, if I had written music and lyrics both, nothing would have ever gotten finished.”) Chisolm, to whom he was by now married, was an excellent word-maker and wrote with him the show they called “The Hidden Sky.”

It was then that the eternal risks of the mentor-protégé relation became plain. Sondheim, who had been informally mentoring Foley, as he did so many younger writers—everyone will recall his support of the young Jonathan Larson as portrayed in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!”—came to an early workshop. “We did this workshop,” Foley told me. “And he came to see it, and . . . he did not like it. It was a really awful experience, because everybody was, like, What did Sondheim think? What did Sondheim think? And . . . I had to lie. He called me the next day, and he was just giving me the tough love: ‘This is never going to work. The emotion is all generated by the small space and the large number of singers. I think you should abandon it.’ It’s not exactly ‘Sweeney Todd,’ in terms of a linear movement—it has an almost oratorio-like field to it. A lot of it is stop-and-reflect songs. He just couldn’t relate to it on any level. Which is not to say that he thought of me as untalented. He thought of me as very talented. He just wanted me to . . . not do this.”