Mark Horowitz had done his homework before Stephen Sondheim came to visit. He filled the room with scores by Bartók, Brahms, Copland and Rachmaninoff; manuscripts in the hand of Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. “The last thing I brought him out was the manuscript for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,” Horowitz recalls. “That’s when he started to cry.”
The “show and tell” of Sondheim’s favourite composers, mentors and collaborators at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1993 planted a seed. It convinced him, Horowitz believes, that his papers would be in good company at the world’s biggest library. “Shortly after that he said he was going to be changing his will and he in fact did. He sent me a printout of the paragraph in his will that left his manuscripts and things to the library.”
