Word: hammersteins
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...When I was very much younger," wrote Oscar Hammerstein II in the introduction to a collection of his lyrics, "I thought that if I ever made all the money I needed out of writing musical comedy, I would then sit back and turn to straight dramatic plays in which I could say whatever I wanted to say and state my reactions to the world I live in." His rhyming verse made him a millionaire many times over, but Hammerstein never stopped writing it. While becoming the most popular lyricist in the history of American musical theater, he learned that...
With his collaborator, Richard Rodgers, he set a new standard for the modern musical play, integrating verse with dialogue, music with plot, in a theatrical form that once demanded little more than a loose collection of songs, skits and dances. Hammerstein's lyrics were almost always written first, often completed after weeks of agony walking mile upon mile on the blacktop roads near his Pennsylvania farm, searching for phrases to be wrapped in melody by Rodgers. Whether he was writing about Austrian singers, New England factory workers or a Siamese king, there was always a steady undertone...
...When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high," he wrote in Carousel, "and you'll never walk alone." In a hurricane, he could unerringly find the calm center: in 1943, when wartime headlines were black with death on coral beaches, Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, and Hammerstein's words carried across the world the picture of a beautiful morning, "a bright golden haze on the meadow." Just then, many people everywhere were grateful for the reminder that such a thing existed. In a slicker mood, he could be both cute and funny. As the Hammerstein June...
Like Cole Porter, he could dip into a source play, borrow a line and spin a lyric. In Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, the heroine wonders aloud what it would be like "if I loved you," then pauses to reflect silently. Adapting the play as Carousel, Hammerstein and Rodgers filled the pause with unadorned grace: If I loved...
...musician's collaborator, he was himself alive with music, using dummy tunes of his own invention to coax his words along toward a completed lyric. Hearing some of these mock-up melodies, Richard Rodgers staggered backward in amused horror, but he stood in awe, too, of Oscar Hammerstein's enduring awareness of the music all around him, from the observation in Oklahoma! that "all the sounds of the earth are like music," through The King and I's invitation to the dance-"On a bright cloud of music shall we fly?"-and ultimately to the exultation that...