By John Rockwell

Stephen Sondheim, as brilliant and painstaking a composer as America has produced, is about to present us with another musical, Wise Guys, expected on Broadway this spring and devoted to the lovingly entwined lives of the two seemingly very dissimilar Mizner brothers: Addison, a well-known architect for the rich and famous in Florida, California, and beyond, and Wilson, a gambler, drug addict, and con artist extraordinaire.

Maybe it will be great, as great as Company and Follies and Sweeney Todd and Pacific Overtures and Sunday in the Park with George. What it will undoubtedly do is provoke a spate of sober journalistic analyses about the two souls that nestle in Stephen Sondheim's breast, with learned references to Goethe's Faust. Everyone will have a different take on the dichotomy that those two souls are supposed to represent: intellect and passion, words and music, straight and gay, happy and sad, even glamour and corruption in America itself-it all depends on the angle of the analyst.

So my angle of analysis, at least for this session, is: musical or opera? And, maybe by extension, entertainment or art: Sondheim as a dispenser of pop product somehow excluded from serious consideration, or as a musician worthy of being named Composer of the Year by Musical America?

Looked at biographically, no composer could be more clearly linked with Broadway than Sondheim, who turns 70 in March. In his teen years he lived on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where his neighbor and father figure was Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote lyrics for Rudolf Friml, Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, and Richard Rodgers. Even his brief period of study with a recognized classical modernist led him to a man who himself dotes on musicals, Milton Babbitt. Sondheim worked in television in the 1950s and has tried his hand at playwriting, but for over 40 years, from contributing lyrics to West Side Story to his latest, Passion, he has been devoted to Broadway and to the tradition and extension of the Broadway musical. So is there in fact an opera-musicals dualism roiling in his Faustian breast?

One answer, argued with some heat by a range of writers including myself, is that the division between opera and musicals has been exaggerated, and that if anyone today is writing serious, communicable, effective pieces of musical theater, a.k.a. operas, it is Sondheim. Whether or not one chooses to ennoble or burden them with the name opera, they are artistic expression (not that pure commercial pop can't express artistic truths) fully entitled to "serious" recognition.

But if Sondheim's works are operas, why aren't they performed in opera houses? Broadway's business structure and desire to retain rights for possible commercial runs have restricted full-scale operatic productions of his works by major American opera companies. But Sweeney Todd was done at the Houston Grand Opera and the New York City Opera in 1984, and the New York Philharmonic will perform a concert version with Bryn Terfel in May, to be recorded by Deutsche Grammophon. In fact, numerous Sondheim shows have made it to regional American opera stages, and in Europe, where the dimmer prospects of a commercial run pose less of a hindrance to the licensing of the works to opera companies, they are ubiquitous.

The troubles with accepting this situation and blithely calling Sondheim's works operas, however, are three: First, the separate business and institutional structures of Broadway and opera have shown few signs of change; second, the impetus for jointly funding new operas and musicals from a combined program at the National Endowment for the Arts has come under a double conservative siege, both against the notion that the high operatic art should be sullied by base popular entertainment and against the Endowment and the very notion of federal arts subsidies; and third, Sondheim persists in thinking of himself as a composer of Broadway musicals, however much he may at times suggest that he can see how some people might prefer to regard them as operas.

What makes Sondheim a great composer, apart from the ineffable attributes of genius? First, he marries words and music in a way the battling suitors in Richard Strauss's opera Capriccio, with their earnest arguments over Wort und Ton, could readily appreciate. And he does so operatically, however much dialogue they contain and however much they rely on song-sequences.

Second, he constructs melodies in interlocking mosaics built up from three- and four-note fragments, as in the notes attached to the words "send in the clowns." Shades of Beethoven and his Fifth Symphony, but a long way from the arching tunes of earlier Broadway masters. Third, his harmonic language, while still fundamentally tonal, is acerbic and ambiguous. Fourth, his ensembles open up to an ingenious complexity that doesn't preclude deep emotional empathy. Sondheim's musical originality is incontestable, both as a stretching of Broadway formulas and as part of the larger tendency late in this century to pull back from dissonant excess while retaining a sharp, modernist edge.

Some still regret that he doesn't extend his individuality into doing his own orchestrations, which in the best Broadway collaborative tradition he continues to delegate. But his overall intentions are serious, his themes are important, his musical genius undeniable. Call them giraffes if you want, but his "musicals" are still important pieces of musically driven theater.

A confident critical pronouncement like this can seem naïve in the face of the persistent practicalities of our cultural life, however. The reality is the longstanding opposition between financial viewpoints. Broadway follows a commercially minded tradition predicated on long-running, profitable "hits." The operatic tradition, whether American or European, presents a given work every few days and producers expect public or private support to compensate for the inevitable loss of money.

The two systems have other differences. The gulf between out-of-town tryouts and the workshop process of new musical theater might seem to have narrowed. But the size of the theaters in which the pieces play, the use of amplification, the kind of audience that feels comfortable attending, all these remain widely disparate. Add to all that a gulf in attitudes: a lingering suspicion of highbrow pretension from the Broadway side, and of lowbrow pandering from the classical side.

Sondheim could, of course, make himself a leader in their further amalgamation-popularizing opera, using Broadway even more overtly to express serious ideas, marketing to both the opera and the Broadway audiences, shaping the workshop process to approximate Broadway-style tryouts.

But he remains a reclusive man, uncomfortable with public polemics, and more power to him. Whether he still really believes operas and musicals to be fundamentally different, or whether he's just afraid to make the conceptual leap, is his business. We, if we so wish, can still think of his scores as operas, rest content in the assurance that he truly deserves to be ranked as Composer of the Year, and be confident that in a century or two, Sunday in the Park and Satyagraha and Gawain and Saint François d'Assise-maybe even Wise Guys-will be part of the same canon.

John Rockwell is editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, where he was a music critic for nearly 20 years. From 1994 to 1998 he was director of the Lincoln Center Festival. He is the author of All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (Knopf, 1983) and Sinatra: An American Classic (Rolling Stone Press/Random House, 1984).