Richard Rodgers
(1902-1979)

Like his librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers was born in New York as the grandson of an immigrant and the son of a doctor, William Rodgers. His mother was a pianist and Richard started picking out melodies on the piano with two fingers at the age of four. When he was six he started formal music lessons and by nine was composing his own songs. He wanted to become a concert pianist, but an injury to his hand forced him to give up that career goal.

When, as a young boy, Rodgers began going to theatre, his favorite shows were opera and any stage music. (While he had a life-long love of opera and symphony, he never had a desire to compose these.) At fourteen he visited Columbia University with his older brother and there met Oscar Hammerstein for the first time and, when he was sixteen, friends introduced him to Lorenz Hart. The two connected immediately, and soon they were writing songs together.

He enrolled in Columbia and, while there, worked with both Hart and Hammerstein. He also fell in love with the music of Jerome Kern. With his parents approval of his desire to become a composer, he left Columbia and was accepted at the Institute of Music (now Juilliard). It was very unusual for a Broadway bound composer to be accepted there at the time, the emphasis was on classical music. He never did study orchestration formally and later seldom orchestrated his own works, hiring others to do this for him. (Victory at Sea was an exception.) In particular the ballets in his works such as Oklahoma and The King and I were always orchestrated by others because of the tedious changes that had constantly to be made during rehearsals as the choreography was developed.

For a period Rodgers had doubts about his ability and joined a company which manufactured children's underwear but soon returned to composing, and he and Hart decided to work together on a regular basis. Hart thought the lyrics of contemporary works were trite and wanted to write good poetry for his librettos. They moved away from operettas such as the works of Jerome Kern and started writing musicals. Among the works they created together are A Connecticut Yankee (1927), On your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1931), The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and Pal Joey (1940). They tried to make every number a part of the plot. The lyrics were written first for comic songs but otherwise Rodgers wrote the music first, then Hart supplied the words. However, Hart was a very irregular, erratic and undependable worker and drank and associated with "unsavory people". As the years passed, a gulf widened between them. The business-like and hard-working Rodgers often had to finish Hart's work for him. In 1941 they parted.

During his career, Rodgers worked closely only with Hart and Hammerstein. In addition to his some forty Broadway musicals, he also wrote over one thousand songs and also wrote the background music for Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and Victory at Sea. The Metropolitan Opera offered him a commission to write a work based on Moby Dick but he turned it down; he didn't want to write an opera which would run for only a few performances rather than musicals which could have long Broadway runs.

Later in life Rodgers himself developed a drinking problem; it kept getting worse and he was frequently hospitalized for it.He died of heart failure on December 30, 1979. The opera star Shirley Verrett sang at his funeral and, in 1990, the 46^th Street Theatre was renamed The Richard Rodgers Theatre.

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