The first biographies of Golden Age theater composers tended to be American Masters-style valentines written by members of the family’s outer circle. The results were pleasant but left much to be desired as serious engagements with their subjects. Meryle Secrest’s life of Richard Rodgers, Somewhere for Me, represents the second generation of musical theater biographies. Now that the main players and their comrades are mostly deceased, these bios offer—albeit respectfully—the warts-and-all readers expect; they are charier of legends passed along the grapevine while still falling well short of real substance.
Rodgers was something of a late bloomer. He teamed up with lyricist Lorenz Hart in 1919, and the two banged around penning forgettable college productions for six years before finally making a hit with a smart benefit revue, The Garrick Gaieties of 1925. Rodgers had been on the verge of taking a job selling underwear, but after the success of this little show he and Hart never looked back. Through the late twenties they blessed Broadway with a succession of bonbons, hanging fine little songs on airy plots. After an uneven stint in Hollywood when work on Broadway dried up during the depths of the Depression, they entered into a halcyon period, producing scores bursting at the seams with some of the choicest songs Broadway had ever heard.
But as the years passed, Hart, a serious alcoholic, grew increasingly unreliable. Rodgers often had to trawl New York’s bars in search of his gifted collaborator, sometimes resorting to writing lyrics himself. Finally, in the early forties, Rodgers was forced to jump ship to the seasoned and steady Oscar Hammerstein, and the result was a series of musicals tying song to story in a fashion only fitfully achieved on Broadway before. For we twenty-first-century sophisticates, Oklahoma! is that corny wheezer we have endured politely in high school auditoriums. We can’t readily imagine the impact that it had on audiences at the time, so elated after “People Will Say We’re in Love” that Joan Roberts had to come back onstage to take an extra bow.
For the next two decades, Rodgers and Hammerstein reigned as the deans of the Broadway musical. Today it is quaint to read conductor Lehmann Engel’s The American Musical Theater of 1967, laying down the law that there would be far fewer unsuccessful musicals if writers simply adhered to various tenets derivable from the classic ones. Implicitly Engel treats Rodgers and Hammerstein’s template as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk model, impressive in its own way as the Wagnerian synthesis of drama, music, and dance in a grand spectacle. For us, Pacific Overtures and Urinetown blow Engel’s cozy assumptions sky-high, but how was he to know? In his era, Oklahoma! had been followed by its siblings Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I, all of which had long runs and tours, endless revivals, and were made into big fat movies, their songs becoming virtual folk music for a postwar America.
Secrest tells this story skillfully, yet she has only a yeoman’s familiarity with Rodgers’s music beyond the grand old standards familiar to most people of her generation. Whole musicals go by in a few sentences, with a handful of cast members and a couple of songs mentioned by name. An especial problem is the earlier shows that Rodgers wrote with Hart: just what was a musical like Heads Up! or America’s Sweetheart like? Bringing these alive to the reader requires listening to old dance band medleys of songs from obscure scores, and poring over playbills, scripts, stills, and sheet music in libraries and archives.
But Secrest does not go to this kind of trouble, and the problem continues after the Hart era. With the success of Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein were predictably commissioned to write the score for a top-class musical film. The reader might want to know just how Rodgers and Hammerstein fit into the creation of the hit State Fair and what the score was like, but Secrest addresses the movie and its 1962 remake virtually parenthetically. After Hammerstein’s death, Rodgers wrote lyrics to his own melodies for No Strings. Obviously one would like to know how Rodgers fared as a lyricist: Secrest is silent on the point. In the late sixties Rodgers wrote the songs for a television production of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, starring NoËl Coward! Few readers will have had the opportunity to see this special or hear the music, and we might naturally look to the biographer to provide enlightenment, but amid some passing notes on how the production went, Secrest says not a thing about Rodgers’s contribution to it.
What really interests Secrest is Rodgers the man. We learn that he was an emotionally unavailable philanderer and a hypochondriac with a drinking problem. His wife, Dorothy, picture-perfect on the surface, was in private a chilly control freak addicted to Demerol. Their marriage was one part propriety and one part dependence, leavened by flashes of love. But ultimately this is just John Cheever territory; by now people like this are clichÉs both in fiction and biography.
Yes, Secrest is best known as a psychobiographer. But what would we think of the biographer of a novelist who had not read all of her subject’s books—or the biographer of Chopin who had only sampled a few each of the nocturnes, waltzes, and impromptus? As Secrest repeatedly leans on the aperÇus on Rodgers’s music in Alec Wilder’s classic American Popular Song rather than presenting her own verdicts, one begins to wonder whether, in the end, Secrest values Rodgers’s output in any serious way.
But satisfying as it might be to dismiss Secrest as yet another philistine, unworthy of her subject, the charge isn’t entirely justified. To be sure, Rodgers richly deserves his place as one of the masters of Golden Age musical theater, possessing as he did an uncanny gift for producing bewitchingly infectious melody. He leaves behind a lovely chocolate box of a legacy. The question remains whether there was much more to him and his work than this.
Nothing that Rodgers said in interviews suggests so. When anyone tried to bring him out on his technique, he tended to be a bit dismissive. Really, he just cranked it out. Hammerstein spent weeks tweaking the lyric to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'”; Rodgers came up with the melody in fifteen minutes, and the whole score in a week or two. Nor is there any particular individual personality to be distinguished in his music. It is often said that Rodgers’s music tempered Hart’s acerbity with sweetness—but we would say the same thing if Hart had written with George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or any number of others. Rodgers’s melodies with Hammerstein are often called “warm,” but then this had been a central quality of Hammerstein’s lyrics and scripts for decades; Rodgers keyed his style to one that already existed. Like Berlin, Rodgers was more craftsman than artist.
Of course, to require of great art that it issue from the creator with effort and follow from identifiable aspects of his personality would demote Mozart or, more pertinently, Gershwin, in real life a rather callow caddish sort who gave rather dopey interviews but somehow came up with deathless works like Porgy and Bess. Still, it is hard to say that Rodgers’s work ever surpassed the level of bracing deftness.
Rodgers’s scores are always essentially processions of solid melodies, some of them repeated here and there. Where he tries for pastiche (the “nightclub” numbers in Pal Joey, the German folk evocations in The Sound of Music), he always sounds ultimately much more like himself than the object of the mimcry. Any cocktail pianist is familiar with the fact that talking while playing the piano is oddly difficult, and finds it useful to have under his fingers a few songs he can play practically asleep, to resort to when someone innocently walks over to chat while he is playing. I was a sometime cocktail pianist a while ago, and my “reserve” tunes were all by Rodgers except for Gershwin’s “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Rodgers’ songs are often just plain easy.
Nevertheless, often in the coming year—Rodgers’s centennial—talking heads will sound a familiar refrain: “They don’t write them like that anymore.” On the contrary! In all of his meat-and-potatoes dependability, Rodgers has a true heir today in none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber. Secrest dutifully extols Rodgers’s melodies as “timeless,” but this judgment would have been more persuasive in 1963 than it is today. Rock, rhythm and blues, and rap are now the daily soundtrack for most Americans under 60. Lloyd Webber couches his work in the rock tradition, and thus among those who still cherish theater music, it is his work that is as esteemed and anxiously awaited as Rodgers’s music was back in the Eisenhower era.
Interestingly, the same pundits who get misty at the mention of Rodgers’s name commonly dismiss Lloyd Webber as an undertalented scourge. And it is true that Lloyd Webber’s success is partly a matter of luck and momentum: I have known any number of music teachers and barroom pianists who could produce melodies just as pat and catchy. Lloyd Webber has benefitted from the patronage of slick producer Cameron Macintosh. Yet luck plays a part in most careers, and meanwhile the very traits that critics pillory Lloyd Webber for are the same ones that they treat as unexceptionable when chronicling musicals of the past.
Critics often complain that Lloyd Webber scores repeat one song too often in an attempt to imprint it upon the public—”Memory” in Cats, for example. But the audience for The Student Prince in 1924 was served up with an almost numbing number of repetitions of “Golden Days” and “Deep in My Heart.” Rodgers was no stranger to this practice, nor did audiences feel cheated by it. During their collaboration on Do I Hear a Waltz?, Stephen Sondheim was frustrated by Rodgers’s casual assumption that such repetitions made for good musical theater even when not strictly motivated by the narrative. Limitations of space on pre-cd recordings required substantial abridgments; obviously reprises were the first things cut. This obscures for modern critics how much repetition there was in many vintage scores as performed.
Lloyd Webber has also been excoriated for his dependence on high-tech gimmickry in his shows, and one does often leave his shows humming the sets rather than the music. But again, the inherent evanescence of theater productions distorts evaluation here. The Ziegfeld Follies hit Broadway year after year with gargantuan sets, massive choruses weighted down with garish costumes, and number after number designed to show all of this off. Today all we have is tinny 78s and quaint black-and-white photos, but in the qualitative sense, little distinguished what theatergoers experienced chez Ziegfeld from Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express (skaters dressed as trains amid moving set pieces and smoke effects) or The Phantom of the Opera (famous for its falling chandelier). If Ziegfeld was a “master showman” and Irving Berlin’s writing for him a mark of prestige, then why is Cameron Macintosh a huckster and Lloyd Webber a hack?
And Ziegfeld was merely continuing a tradition. The American musical traces to The Black Crook of 1866, whose producers tossed together a stranded ballet company with a creaky melodrama and bedecked the combination with gaudy spectacle. After this behemoth, tricked-up “extravaganzas,” as they were then termed, were a cherished genre that nurtured many careers. Musical theater histories take a teleological perspective, seeking the line leading to the musically sophisticated and narratively cerebral musicals of Sondheim. This tends to celebrate the tony book musicals in favor of the blowsy hodgepodges playing at the same time, as readily attended by most theatergoers as the more ambitious ones, and often warmly received by the critics.
Rodgers himself was no more opposed to pageantry than Lloyd Webber has been. Jumbo (1935) was performed in a huge tent and depicted a circus, complete with real elephants, trapeze artists, etc., all of this rather dwarfing songs like “My Romance” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” which are all that come down to us from it today. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s flub Me and Juliet (1953) today lives as a brief, quiet cast recording, which gives no indication that massive sets and attendant special effects were the raison d’Être of the show itself.
Yet there remains for many a sense that Lloyd Webber is somehow lesser than Rodgers. Is there anything to this, beyond nostagia? Yes and no. Lloyd Webber’s scores do represent a qualitative decline even from Rodgers’s standard in terms of compositional quality. But this is the fault more of transformations in middlebrow musical taste than of Lloyd Webber.
By the time he hit the scene in the 1970s, the rock revolution was well underway. Rock music, child of the blues, country, and folk music, is driven largely by rhythm and vocal charisma. These factors have more immediate impact than melody and harmony, whose appreciation are more dependent on tutelage or a chance “ear.” There have always been rock musicians who tried to push the envelope, but overall, the music is less artistically substantial than the idiom that the old standards were written in, requiring less effort on the part of both author and listener. The pop music of Rodgers’s day was about long, crafted lines cast in precise language, to be performed with a certain poise. Rock is brief hooks cast in pungent but loosely structured language, to be performed with elemental vigor.
Today, people roughly 45 and younger have grown up in an America where this is the default idiom. It can be argued that rock’s lyrics are often more honest and probing than anything a Lorenz Hart or Oscar Hammerstein wrote. But these men’s lyrics required much more craft in the composition than Alanis Morrissette’s, and the fact remains that, overall, rock has dumbed down mainstream musical taste in America.
Like Rodgers, Lloyd Webber writes for the market. He is not writing for scholars and artistes; he wants his work to be heard and to make him a good living. Lloyd Webber is actually the equal of Rodgers in coming up with lovely melodies. But in line with the lowered expectations of modern listeners, his tendency is to cast whole songs out of what Rodgers would have regarded as a mere beginning. “Unexpected Song” from Song and Dance is typical. We begin with an achingly beautiful 16 bars. Rodgers would have segued into a nimble bridge, repeated the first statement, and then gone out on a dandy coda. Lloyd Webber simply repeats those 16 bars over and over again, deriving drama from the cheap trick of changing the key with each repetition. Only a corpse would not respond to this to some extent—but then we all like hot dogs, too.
None of this, of course, means anything to most listeners. Young musical theater fans cherish double-cd recordings of Lloyd Webber’s music the way people of another generation loved their Rodgers and Hammerstein lps. Books have been written gushing over Lloyd Webber’s career as if he were the equal of Verdi. Lloyd Webber’s American heir, Frank Wildhorn, has written musicals in a similar vein that are equally cherished even by musically sensitive people. The cast recording of his Jekyll and Hyde, released years before the show actually hit New York, was an instant hit among musicals fans.
The people for whom these scores are so precious never knew an America where “She likes music” was immediately assumed to mean classical music, and where Rodgers’s songs like “Where or When” were considered common coin, rather than caviar for the smart set or retro camp. They grew up with Bob Dylan, Metallica, and Kurt Cobain, and thus the last thing they are listening for is melody and harmony. They seek lyrics written in broad, iconic strokes and the theatrical power of big sound and driving rhythms. They are also cued significantly to individual performance, again trained by rock, which emphasizes performer charisma over musical content. John Raitt’s performance was not the main reason one bought the Carousel cast album in 1945, but fans of Lloyd Webber’s shows and their ilk are close watchers of Colm Wilkinson, Linda Eder, Douglas Sills, and other specialists in the genre.
And what this means is that if Lloyd Webber did write more substantial music, most of his listeners would not follow him. Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard lean closer to the Rodgers level of craft and restraint than his other scores, and it is no accident that neither has had the endless runs that Cats and Phantom have enjoyed. Meanwhile, Sondheim’s more complex music often requires several listenings to fully grasp. While the recordings have conditioned a growing Sondheim cult, complete with a journal and websites, the shows tend to have short runs.
Of course, Sondheim is an extreme. But today even well-crafted middlebrow musicals devoid of rock inflection only run with a gimmick: City of Angels with its film-noir effects and jazz feel, Ragtime with the appeal of the music referred to by the title and its race angle, and so on. Otherwise, such shows do not become must-have recordings, a fate that has eluded, for example, the rapturous Nine, based on Fellini’s film 81/2, beloved by a coterie but unknown to most of the people seeking standby tickets for Miss Saigon.
Certainly there were plenty of shows before the rock era whose scores were slapdash, functional affairs. But crucially, only hard-core buffs have heard of most of them today. If they by chance had long runs, they were unlikely to be revived and even less likely to be recorded (who can name a song from Hellzapoppin’?). Only in the 1970s did scores like this begin to take their place in ordinary fans’ pantheons, the fans in question often perplexed to find that the occasional Brahmin sniffs at the artistic worth of scores they esteem the way an earlier generation did Kiss Me Kate.
To be as gushingly embraced by the American public as Rodgers was in his heyday required that his music not surpass the level of solid craft. If they had lived into the 1950s, Gershwin and Kern would not have attained such a hold on the public with the likes of their nervy Let ‘Em Eat Cake and Music in the Air. Lloyd Webber similarly must write for the modern ear desensitized by rock. In this light, Secrest’s biography of Rodgers can be seen as a demonstration of plus Ça change: viewed up close, one finds that the giant of musical theater composition is actually something of an emperor with no clothes.
—John H. McWhorter is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, has just been published by Times Books.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
