Duncan Sheik, the Spring Awakening composer and singer, has died at 56

Duncan Sheik died on Thursday night in a hospital in Manhattan, aged 56. His mother, Suzanne, told the New York Times that the cause was organ failure. Earlier in the week his family had said he was receiving medical care and was in critical but stable condition after an unspecified health problem.

The statement his family posted on Friday described a father, husband, son, brother and friend, and said the world had lost a singular talent and a deeply influential voice in music and theatre. He is survived by his partner, Nora Ariffin, and their daughter, Ines.

His first record did what almost nothing in his later career tried to. Duncan Sheik, the self-titled 1996 debut released by Atlantic, carried Barely Breathing, which reached No. 16 on the Hot 100, stayed on the chart for 55 weeks, went gold and brought a Grammy nomination for best male pop vocal performance. It was the only single of his ever to reach that chart.

He was born Duncan Scott Sheik on 18 November 1969 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. His grandmother, who had studied at Juilliard, started him on piano at six; after his parents divorced he moved with his mother to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, picked up an electric guitar and played in a band doing Def Leppard and Van Halen songs. He went to Phillips Academy in Andover, then to Brown University, where he read semiotics and played guitar alongside a fellow student, Lisa Loeb.

Fame did not suit him and he said so repeatedly. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1992 with a demo tape and, by his own account, could barely sing in public. The press turned him into a heartthrob anyway, a role he spent years backing away from, and he later said he was put in situations he did not have the experience to handle after one album and perhaps thirty or forty shows.

The work went elsewhere instead. Humming followed in 1998, then 2001's Phantom Moon, made with the poet and playwright Steven Sater, whom he met through Buddhist practice. Sater approached him in 1999 about a musical based on Frank Wedekind's 1891 play, and the result, Spring Awakening, opened on Broadway in December 2006 and won eight Tony Awards including best musical. Sheik took best original score, shared with Sater, and best orchestrations, and later a Grammy for best musical show album.

What made that score land was a decision about singing rather than about songs. Sheik coached a cast that included Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher Jr to drop Broadway technique entirely and sing the way rock singers do, telling them to imagine they were Thom Yorke or Fiona Apple and to forget their vocal training.

He kept writing for the stage afterwards: American Psycho, which reached Broadway in 2016, Alice by Heart with Sater, Whisper House, The Secret Life of Bees, Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew, plus a score for the 2004 film A Home at the End of the World. He released nine studio albums, the last of them Claptrap in 2022. A new musical, Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, was due to begin previews this month, and a Spring Awakening revival is set to open off Broadway in November.

The tributes came from the cast he coached. Lea Michele wrote that she met him at 14 and listened to a tape of him singing Spring Awakening songs outside her middle school before her first audition. Kimiko Glenn, who toured the show, and Melissa Barrera, who did it in Mexico City, both posted, as did the singer Bright Light Bright Light, who said he imported all of Sheik's albums to his house in Wales as a teenager.

We covered the earlier statement from his family, which said he was in critical condition, when it was made. For a sense of how unusual his second career was, the closest recent parallel on this site is Carly Rae Jepsen and Lena Dunham taking a musical to Broadway, another pop songwriter crossing into theatre.