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.įoley’s gift for sinuous, haunting melody and surprising musical shapes, not to mention matching music to word, was evident in our work together. 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.įoley 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. 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 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. ![]() No member of that family of bereaved and inspired children has a more moving arc than Peter Foley. 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.Īnd 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. 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. Like all forced adoptive fathers, Sondheim spent years both rejecting the role and embracing it, acting kindly and judging firmly.īut 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. ![]() ![]() 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. 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.
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