Composer, born in New York City, New York, USA. He attended Columbia University and studied music, and by age 17 was collaborating with Lorenz Hart on amateur musicals. With Hart as lyricist, during the 1920s30s he broke from the common Tin Pan Alley musical to develop the musical play. They produced 14 shows containing many popular songs while further integrating libretto, music, and dance. On Your Toes (1936), choreographed by George Balanchine, included his first broad arrangement for ballet sequences (including Slaughter on Tenth Avenue), while Pal Joey (1940) focused on an amoral nightclub owner. Among his many standards with Hart are My Funny Valentine (1937) and Bewitched (1940). After Hart's death in 1943, Rodgers teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein II and created his most popular stage works. Their masterpiece, Oklahoma! (1943), is called the first American vernacular opera; it won the Pulitzer Prize in drama. Their next work, Carousel (1945), also a classic, contains some of Rodgers' finest music. Their last musicals, South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959), contained many famous songs, and were highly successful on screen as well as stage. After Hammerstein's death (1960), Rodgers either wrote his own lyrics or collaborated with others for another 20 years of works for theatre and television.
For the British architect, see Richard Rogers.For more on his work with his two partners, see Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 – December 30, 1979) was one of the great composers of musical theater, best known for his song writing partnerships with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Career
Born in New York City to a prosperous Jewish family, Rodgers attended the same public school as Bennett Cerf.
Rodgers and Hart struggled for years in the field of musical comedy, and finally broke through in 1925. Rodgers was considering quitting show biz to sell children’s underwear when he and Hart had a chance to write songs for a benefit show presented by the prestigious Theatre Guild. The show's biggest hit, the song that Rodgers believed "made" Rodgers and Hart, was "Manhattan."
Throughout the rest of the decade, the duo wrote several hit shows, including Dearest Enemy (1925), The Girl Friend (1926), Peggy-Ann (1926) and A Connecticut Yankee (1927). Also, after trying several different lyrics that didn't quite work, they put out a song that became one of their most famous, "Blue Moon."
In 1935 they returned to Broadway with a vengeance, writing an almost unbroken string of hit shows that only stopped when Hart, a troubled alcoholic, died in 1943.
Many of the songs from these shows are still being sung today, including "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World," "My Romance," "Little Girl Blue," "There's A Small Hotel," "Where Or When," "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady Is A Tramp," "Falling In Love With Love," "Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered" and "Wait Till You See Her."
Anticipating the end of a partnership, Rodgers began working with Oscar Hammerstein II.
The team went on to create four more hits that are among the most popular of all musicals, Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King And I (1951) and The Sound Of Music (1959).
Their collaboration produced many well-known songs, including "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'," "People Will Say We're In Love," "If I Loved You," "You'll Never Walk Alone," "It Might As Well Be Spring," "Some Enchanted Evening," "Getting To Know You," "My Favorite Things" and "Climb Ev'ry Mountain."
Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals earned a total of 34 Tony Awards, 15 Academy Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, two Grammy Awards and two Emmy Awards.
Rodgers worked without a lyricist to provide music for the World War II television documentary "Victory at Sea" (1952-53).
After Hammerstein's death in 1960, Rodgers' wrote both words and music for his first new Broadway project No Strings (1962).
A survivor of cancer of the jaw, a heart attack and a laryngectomy, Richard Rodgers died aged 77 in 1979. Rodgers' grandson, Adam Guettel, also a musical theatre composer, recently won the 2005 Tony Award for Best Score and Best Orchestrations for The Light in the Piazza. Peter Melnick, another grandson and composer, received a world premiere production of Adrift In Macao which debuted at the Philadelphia Theatre Company.
User Comments Add a comment…