Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution

by Todd S. Purdum

“I was concerned when I wrote Allegro about men who are good at anything—writers, doctors, lawyers, business, and who are diverted from the field of their expertness by a kind of strange, informal conspiracy that goes on. People start pinning medals on them. People start asking them to join committees or chair committees. And the first thing you know, they are no longer writing, or practicing medicine or practicing law. They are committee chairmen. They are speechmakers. They are dinner-attenders. And this emaciates their achievements.”

For the genius, Fadiman suggested, the challenge is different. “It is at this point—precisely when he has everything that he begins to question what he has, that is, if he is a person of complex mental organization.”