Broadway’s two most successful teams of songwriters shared one essential ingredient—the same composer, Richard Rodgers. Paired first with lyricist Lorenz Hart (from 1920 to 1943) and then Oscar HAMMERSTEIN II (1943 to 1960), Rodgers’ enormous success as a songwriter was based on craftsmanship, talent, and longevity. As fellow composer Leonard BERNSTEIN said, he “established new levels of taste, distinction, simplicity in the best sense, and inventiveness.”
Richard Charles Rodgers was born in Hammels Station, Long Island, New York, on June 28, 1902, the younger son of a successful doctor. When he was just four, he began composing songs on the piano and was soon emulating the operatic melodies of Franz Lehar and Victor HERBERT. In 1918, a mutual friend introduced the 16-year-old Rodgers to Hart, the brilliant if mercurial lyricist who would be his partner for the next quarter-century. The team contributed several tunes to the 1920 musical Poor Little Ritz Girl, but after two years of failure, Rodgers entered the Institute of Musical Art in New York for formal musical training. However, just as Rodgers was about to abandon songwriting for a career as a children’s underwear salesman, he and Hart were asked to write songs for a 1925 revue, The Garrick Gaieties. One of their tunes, “Manhattan,” became a big hit, and was the team’s ticket to Broadway.
Between 1925 and 1942, Rodgers and Hart produced the scores for 28 successful shows, including A Connecticut Yankee, Babes in Arms, and Pal Joey, plus several other musicals. For On Your Toes (1936), which explored the world of dance, Rodgers composed the memorable symphonic-jazz ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.
By 1943 Hart’s self-destructive lifestyle had made it impossible for him to work, and Rodgers was forced to find a more stable partner—48-year-old librettist-lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, best known for collaborating with Jerome KERN on the 1927 masterpiece Show Boat. (Actually Rodgers and Hammerstein had previously written songs for an amateur production in 1919.) Their first project was Oklahoma!, the landmark 1943 musical, which featured instant classics such as “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” and “People Will Say We’re in Love.” In the new partnership, the sophisticated musical comedies of Rodgers and Hart gave way to fully realised musical plays: often homespun, usually optimistic, always universal in theme and melody.
For the next 17 years, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the scores for an almost unbroken string of Broadway classics—Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), Flower-Drum Song (1958), and The Sound of Music (1959)—all of which became successful movies. The team also received a 1945 Academy Award for “It Might As Well Be Spring” from the film State Fair.
Following Hammerstein’s death in 1960, Rodgers continued to write for the Broadway stage— sometimes acting as his own lyricist (No Strings, 1962), and often collaborating with others (including Hammerstein’s disciple, Stephen SONDHEIM on 1965’s Do I Hear a Waltz?).
Rodgers published his autobiography, Musical Stages, in 1975, and the following year composed his final musical, Rex, which closed after only 42 performances. The grand old man of the American musical stage died of cancer in New York City on December 30, 1979, at the age of 77.
Michael R. Ross
SEE ALSO:
FILM MUSICALS; MUSICALS.
Hyland, William G. Richard Rodgers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages: An Autobiography (London: W. H. Allen, 1976).
Babes in Arms; Carousel; Musicals: Selections;
Rodgers and Hart: On Your Toes;
The Sound of Music.