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and on once running into Rodgers at a party, had inquired, “Fancy meeting you here—who’s minding the score?”
“In our collaboration, Mr. Rodgers and I have no definite policy except one of complete flexibility,”
The gambit worked, and the pair was off and running, working in the standard method of the day, with the music coming first and the words following. This practice was partly a carryover from the widespread American importation of European operettas, in which English words had to be fitted to preexisting tunes, and Hammerstein would follow the pattern through all his collaborations over the next quarter century, until reversing the order with Rodgers.
“Not many of these were good songs. I was too easily satisfied with my work. I was too often trying to emulate older and better lyric writers, saying things similar to the things they were saying. It would have been all right if I had been content to imitate the forms of their songs, but the substance should have been mine and it was not. I know that insincerity held me back for several years, and I know that even after I’d had a period of success, it again handicapped me and caused me to have failures.”
The first rhyme comes ten lines—and forty words—into the song. Hammerstein himself explained his aim: “If a listener is made rhyme-conscious, his interest may be diverted from the story of the song. If, on the other hand, you keep him waiting for a rhyme, he is more likely to listen to the meaning of the words.”
Oscar himself was ambivalent about whether lyrics could properly be considered poetry. Though written in verse, a lyric’s words are not meant to be read silently or recited aloud, but sung—and their cumulative power is inextricably linked to the music that accompanies them, and that inevitably heightens their effect (or exposes their weaknesses). In his best work, Hammerstein seemed to understand this instinctively, keeping the words as simple and conversational as possible, allowing the music to do the work.
That purity went hand in hand with a simplicity that Stephen Sondheim would call “naked plain-spokenness,” a quality that has left Hammerstein’s lyrics vulnerable to the barbs of sophisticates over the decades. “Hammerstein’s work is full of life, but not liveliness,” Sondheim once wrote. “He is easy to make fun of because he’s so earnest.” Hammerstein himself once explained his success as a lyricist by saying that his own vocabulary was not enormous, and that a bigger one might well have hampered him, or persuaded him, as Philip Hamburger wrote in the New Yorker at the height of his success,
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There’s a common misconception that you can stand on the top of a mountain and look at a sunset and sit down and write something beautiful. I don’t think it goes that way. I think the sunset, the mountain, the experience all go inside and may not come out for fifty years. But they become part of your knowledge, part of your personality … part of your education, part of your technique … and, eventually, you express yourself.
Rodgers once told an interviewer that art could be defined
“as the expression of an emotion by means of a technique.”
The show was “too clean,” Lawrence Langner would recall. “It did not have the suggestive jokes, the spicy situations, the strip-teasers and the other indecencies which too often went with a successful musical of those days.”
In a letter to Richard Rodgers in December 1979, after the opening of a smash-hit revival of Oklahoma!, thirty-six years after its debut, the writer John Hersey would recall a morning on the battlefront in Sicily in 1943. “I’d had a pretty crummy night,” Hersey wrote, “sleeping on the ground, muddy and damp, nothing to look forward to but cold C-rations for breakfast. A G.I. who might perfectly well get killed that day (because though the Italians were retreating there were some nasty skirmishes) got up and stripped to the waist and poured some cold water in his helmet and began to shave. The
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I have a story. I see a stage. I know what my settings are going to be. I know in most cases who will be the performer. I am standing in the orchestra pit. The lights are beginning to dim, the curtain is going up. I must have a song here with the proper music. I sit down and write that music. Richard Rodgers
The notice was seen as a sign of Hammerstein’s endearing humility, a great joke, and the talk of the town. But years later he confessed that he hadn’t meant it that way at all. “I thought it was quite the opposite and I didn’t mean it as a modest gesture,” he would say. “I really meant it as a rebuke to all the people who had concluded I was through and who were now concluding that I was a genius. Neither was true. I wasn’t through because I had had a succession of flops, and I wasn’t suddenly a different man or a better writer because I was on a wave of successes now. I wanted to remind
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In fact, Peter Moen, Oscar’s tenant farmer in Doylestown, had told him the same thing, but in the end, he didn’t change the line, explaining to someone else who inquired, “What you say about sheep may all be very true for most years, sir, but not in 1873. 1873 is my year and that year, curiously enough, the sheep mated in the spring.”
A worm’s-eye view observer of the proceedings was the seventeen-year-old Stephen Sondheim, whom Oscar had hired for the summer as a $25-a-week gofer after his first year at Williams College, fetching coffee, typing scripts, and soaking everything in. “It was a seminal influence on my life, because it showed me a lot of smart people doing something wrong,” Sondheim would remember. The experience would also haunt his own creative work. “That’s why I’m drawn to experiment,” he would say. “I realize that I am trying to recreate Allegro all the time.”
The most commercial thing you can do is not to have your mind on commerce. One of our greatest qualities, I think, is the honesty we try to get into our work. Even those who didn’t like Allegro couldn’t say it was phony. Richard Rodgers
Kern’s advice was succinct. “Miss Martin,” he asked, “why do you want to be a prima donna? They are a dime a dozen and most of them have better voices than yours. Why don’t you find your own métier, your own style, and perfect it? Learn to be you.”
The producers also licensed a wide range of consumer products with a South Pacific theme, from a “Knucklehead Nellie” doll, to a line of sheets, towels, pillowcases, and bathrobes; silk ties and clothing; toiletries; hairbrushes; compacts and cigarette cases; and a home hair permanent formula. Howard Reinheimer pointed out that never before had a Broadway play undertaken such merchandising for any purpose other than free publicity. Now South Pacific’s marketing licenses would soon bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues to the manufacturers—and tens of thousands in royalties to
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I think the point is that it isn’t necessary to love one another. The necessity is to understand one another, because understanding, I think, is a block to hatred. We mustn’t hate one another. But love is not the only alternative. Oscar Hammerstein II
Weird. This totally goes against Christian teaching. Why would he feel like he needed to say this? Is the best we can do is not hate one another? I think Christian teaching doesn’t make sense to someone unless they understand their own limitations and sinfulness and also the merciful love of God towards them.
Green added that Lawrence amounted to one of the unlikeliest instances of musicality he had ever known: “Awful voice, incapable of singing in tune, no breathing technique, sheer magic.”
The project would require something approaching thirteen hours of music, by most measures the longest single symphonic suite ever composed, comprising nine major movements—longer, as the critic Deems Taylor pointed out—than Richard Wagner’s scores for Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal combined. Of course, Rodgers composed nothing like that much music himself. The best estimate is that he wrote about an hour’s worth.
But the world is full of zanies and fools Who don’t believe in sensible rules And won’t believe what sensible people say, And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes Keep building up impossible hopes, Impossible things are happ’ning every day.
Oscar summoned the family for a lunch at the 63rd Street town house and passed out studio portraits of himself. Stephen Sondheim asked Hammerstein to autograph his copy. Oscar thought for a moment, before allowing himself a slight smile and inscribing a tender message that nodded to the verse of “Getting to Know You.” (“It’s a very ancient saying, but a true and honest thought, that if you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.”) “For Stevie,” Hammerstein wrote. “My friend and teacher.” Sondheim had trouble making it through the meal.
The sophisticated critics and creative forces that came to dominate Broadway in the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s increasingly looked askance at Dick and Oscar’s achievements. A combination of factors was in play: the too often second-rate, middlebrow film versions that minimized their shows’ sophistication and maximized their schmaltz; the rise of “concept” musicals that emphasized style over plot; and, of course, The Sound of Music.
Even as a twelve-year-old boy in 1959, Timothy Crouse could sense the attitude inherent in the smart set’s dismissal of the show his father helped create. “I’m talking about people in the business who acted as if Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lindsay and Crouse were one of those big food conglomerates who do testing in the lab to create a snack with just the right combination of salt and fat and especially sugar to make it a tour de force of empty calories that consumers can’t stop eating,” Crouse says. “It was as if the four authors had sat around saying, ‘Oh, we’ll toss in so many grams of
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