Richard Rodgers

Composer

• Born: June 28, 1902
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: December 30, 1979
• Place of death: New York, New York

American composer

In the course of his sixty-year career as a Broadway composer, Rodgers helped to establish the prototype of the American musical.

Areas of achievement Music, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Richard Rodgers was born in New York City at the dawn of the twentieth century. Tensions created by live-in grandparents and a competitive older brother were dispelled when Dr. William Rodgers and Mamie Rodgers gathered the family around the Steinway to sing and play songs from current Broadway shows. It was here that Richard Rodgers received his first taste of the Broadway musical.

Rodgers started to play the piano at age four. Although he was given formal lessons, he was much happier picking out show tunes by ear. The family marveled at the boy’s achievements, and Rodgers quickly learned that music was a sure way of getting attention.

Rodgers had been stagestruck from his first visit to the theater. When he discovered the musicals of Jerome Kern, he quickly adopted Kern’s ideals as his own. Rodgers aspired to create a new form of American musical theater free from European stuffiness and grounded in a conscious attempt to relate songs to story.

Rodgers’s parents encouraged their son’s ambition to be a Broadway composer. When Rodgers attempted his first amateur score at the age of fifteen, his father and brother Mortimer helped with the lyrics and, through his father’s efforts, he got his first copyright on a song.

To pursue his career, he needed a lyric writer. When a mutual friend introduced him to Lorenz Hart, the professional attraction was immediate. They not only shared a disdain of the childish, old-fashioned quality of current musicals, but they also had a mutual hero in Kern. Hart’s eccentric, disheveled appearance and mercurial personality, however, were the antithesis of his new partner’s dependability and practicality. (Despite his boyish face and expressive eyes, Rodgers was known for his conservative habits and sober appearance.)

In 1919, Rodgers enrolled at Columbia University, primarily to be able to write the Varsity Show with his new partner. The team soon moved from amateur status to professional when Lew Fields, a respected Broadway producer, chose songs from two of the Varsity Shows for A Lonely Romeo (1919) and Poor Little Ritz Girl (1920).

Buoyed by the encouragement of his family and friends, Rodgers left Columbia after two years to study music at Juilliard. By 1925, however, in debt to his father and frustrated by his inability to get professional recognition on Broadway, the young composer nearly took a job in the garment business. An offer to write The Garrick Gaieties (1925) for the Theatre Guild, one of New York’s most prestigious producing organizations, became the unexpected opportunity that launched Rodgers and Hart’s career on Broadway.

Life’s Work

Rodgers and Hart rapidly became one of Broadway’s most important songwriting teams. Between 1925 and 1930, they wrote fifteen full scores. Most were hits. Their greatest successes were shows in which they experimented with new subjects, ranging from the American Revolution to King Arthur’s court.

Rodgers married Dorothy Feiner in 1930 and, in the same year, signed a film contract and moved to Hollywood. Although he and Hart were challenged by their early work, they missed New York. Both returned to Manhattan soon after learning in the press that they had been all but forgotten on Broadway.

The late 1930’s were vintage years for Rodgers and Hart. On Your Toes (1936) was the first musical to incorporate a ballet into the story of a musical, The Boys from Syracuse (1938) was the first musical inspired by one of William Shakespeare’s plays, and Pal Joey (1940) was one of the first musicals that did not sugarcoat the disagreeable qualities of its characters.

In the early 1940’s, Hart became increasingly self-destructive and unpredictable. Despite the critics’ doubts about Rodgers’s ability to succeed without Hart, the composer had to find another collaborator. In 1943, Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II (an old friend from the Varsity Shows at Columbia), and together they wrote the landmark musical Oklahoma! Hammerstein was a playwright as well as a lyricist. His work with Jerome Kern on Show Boat (1927) had been an attempt at the kind of cohesive musical play that Rodgers wanted to write. Their plan for Oklahoma! was to write a show in which the songs, story, dances, and stage design were so well integrated that no single element would overshadow any other. This not only represented a crystallization of the conceptual and structural ideals tested by Rodgers and Hart but also set a precedent for all subsequent Rodgers and Hammerstein collaborations. After Hart’s death in 1943, Rodgers seized the chance for a second career with Hammerstein. Rodgers and Hammerstein also became business partners. They produced others’ work in addition to their own Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946) was their most successful venture and established their own publishing house, Williamson Music.

In the 1940’s, Rodgers and Hammerstein achieved unprecedented success. Both Oklahoma! (which would hold the record for the longest-running musical in Broadway history for fifteen years) and South Pacific (1949) received Pulitzer Prizes; Carousel (1945) became their most ambitious attempt at the integration of song and story; and The King and I (1951), following the pattern of its predecessors, became the third Rodgers and Hammerstein musical to run for more than one thousand performances.

Rodgers was operated on for cancer of the jaw in 1955 and in 1957 was treated for depression. Returning to work proved to be excellent medicine: He teamed with Hammerstein to write Flower Drum Song in 1958 and The Sound of Music in 1959. Hammerstein died ten months after the opening of The Sound of Music, at the age of sixty-five.

Having outlived two of the most successful collaborations in the history of Broadway, Rodgers had to find a way of continuing to work after Hammerstein’s death. After a failed attempt at forming a partnership with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, he became his own lyric writer for No Strings (1962), which incorporated an onstage orchestra into the plot.

In the last years of his life, Rodgers continued to find new projects and collaborators to satisfy his indefatigable need to work. A heart attack and a second bout with cancer made it difficult for him to speak clearly and walk. Although he continued to write beautiful songs, neither the scripts nor the lyrics of his final projects could compare favorably with those of his successes with Hart and Hammerstein.

After sixty years in the professional theater, Richard Rodgers died on December 30, 1979, at the age of seventy-seven seven months after the opening of his final musical, I Remember Mama.

Significance

Although the theater songs that were the result of Rodgers and Hart’s twenty-five-year collaboration represent some of the best work of his career, the eighteen-year collaboration between Rodgers and Hammerstein proved to be the most influential partnership in the history of the American musical theater. As a result of the success of Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I, the definition of the Broadway musical was irrevocably changed.

The most successful Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were inspired by solid literary sources, were strictly American in character despite some exotic settings, and were painstakingly structured so that the songs would be believable expressions of the characters. Both men supervised every aspect of their productions and earned reputations for setting standards of excellence, fairness, and generosity in all of their dealings.

Ironically, the overwhelming popularity that came to Rodgers, combined with the disappointments of his last five musicals, generated a distorted perception of his career. Many came to view him as an outdated Establishment hero. A look at his contribution to the American musical theater from 1925 to 1962, however, reveals not only remarkable quality and quantity (he wrote fifty-nine musical scores and more than one thousand songs) but also a persistence in breaking with convention. His music has influenced generations of musical theater artists in America and has bolstered the reputation of the musical in the United States and throughout the world.

Bibliography

Engel, Lehman. The American Musical Theatre. New York: Macmillan, 1975. A history of the American musical theater and the best analysis of musical and dramatic structure based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein prototype.

Ewen, David. Richard Rodgers. New York: Henry Holt, 1957. Draws on reminiscences and firsthand information from Rodgers’s family, friends, and colleagues. Includes photos, a copy of Rodgers’s first copyrighted song, and many useful appendixes.

Green, Stanley. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Story. New York: John Day, 1963. Focuses on the parallel careers of Rodgers and Hammerstein before and after their collaboration. Includes direct quotes from recorded conversations. A provocative concept but a generally uninspired text.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Rodgers and Hammerstein Fact Book: A Record of Their Works and with Other Collaborators. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1980. The most comprehensive, meticulously researched reference book on Rodgers and Hammerstein. Includes biographical and production fact sheets and selected critical reviews from professional productions.

Nolan, Frederick. The Sound of Their Music: The Story of Rodgers and Hammerstein. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2002. Entertaining story of the two composers, discussing their music and lyrics, shows, and the people with whom they worked.

Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1975. Contains useful personal anecdotes, photos, descriptions of his working methods, and analyses of some of his most successful songs. Some insight into the forces that shaped his career. Written with characteristic modesty and dry humor.

Secrest, Meryle. Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers. New York: Knopf, 2001. Well-researched and comprehensive biography based on extensive interviews in which Secrest chronicles Rodgers’s life and analyzes his work.

Suskin, Steven. Show Tunes: The Songs, Shows, and Careers of Broadway’s Major Composers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986. Annotated reference of all published songs. Valuable resource for musical theater scholars and enthusiasts. All entries are cross-referenced.

Wilder, Alec. “Richard Rodgers.” In American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. Edited by James T. Maher. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Analysis of Rodgers’s most musically satisfying songs. Author admits preference for songs written with Hart. Analysis of songs based on their inherent musical strength, rather than their dramatic contexts.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1941-1970: March 31, 1943: Oklahoma! Opens on Broadway; December 30, 1948: Porter Creates an Integrated Score for Kiss Me, Kate; March 2, 1965: The Sound of Music Captivates Audiences.

1971-2000: March 1, 1979: Sondheim Uses Operatic Techniques in Sweeney Todd.