The Sweetest Sounds

“Richard Rodgers: Enigma Variations” by Stefan Kanfer, in City Journal (Autumn 2003), 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

Richard Rodgers (1902–79) wrote some of the most melodic and inventive popular music of the 20th century, but nothing in his personality would have made you think him capable of that. The man who gave so much pleasure to others had little in his own life, and that remains the great puzzle about him. A lifelong hypochondriac, he was a dour and unhappy fellow, despite his great success and the riches it brought. He drank too much and was depressed too often. “No one in the [Rodgers] family (or out of it, for that matter) had ever seen the composer sit at the piano and play for sheer enjoyment,” writes Kanfer, a former editor of Time and the author of several novels and social histories. The piano was for business, the business was mostly Broadway, and “Broadway was his life.”

Some people are lucky in their friends. Rodgers was lucky in his collaborators. He found Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II at key points in his career, and with the two lyricists he ruled Broadway from the 1920s through the 1950s, fashioning songs that, on the basis of performances and record sales, are even today, Kanfer reports, the world’s most popular. The melodies still enchant, and the words delight (“Manhattan”), enthrall (“Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”), inspire (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”).

So Rodgers was a team player, but always the name before the conjunction. There was a Rodgers and Hart phase to his career and a Rodgers and Hammerstein phase (and a lesser phase with several other collaborators after Hammerstein’s death in 1960, including, just once, Stephen Sondheim). The first team gave the world smart, sassy, glittering, and bittersweet stuff, such as—in a single show, the 1937 Babes in Arms—“Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and “I Wish I Were in Love Again.” For a single show of their own, South Pacific in 1949, the second team produced “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” “Younger Than Springtime,” and “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame.”

Hart was an even more unhappy figure than Rodgers—“an undisciplined, unprepossessing man,” says Kanfer, “whose furtive homosexual liaisons invariably ended in sorrow.” No wonder that “his natural métier was disappointed romance and unfulfilled yearnings.” (“Nobody’s heart belongs to me. Heigh-ho! Who cares?”) Rodgers, on the other hand, “had a muscular work ethic; music flowed out of him like conversation.” Yet the unlikely pair went from success to success on Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s, until Hart simply hit the bottle too hard and began failing to show up for work. He died of pneumonia in 1943, at the age of 48, after being found drunk in the night rain, sitting on a Manhattan curb.

By then Rodgers was working with Hammerstein, who could not have been more different from Hart: “a devoted family man instantly accessible, disciplined by habit, and optimistic by nature.” Hammerstein caused Rodgers to dig deeper and, says Kanfer, “write more serious and sustained melodies,” such as that for “If I Loved You” (Carousel, 1945), as ecstatic a love song as any ever sung on Broadway. Their collaboration began with the revolutionary Oklahoma in 1943 and ended with The Sound of Music in 1959. Of the latter, the critics disapproved: “Not only too sweet for words, but almost too sweet for music,” said the New York Herald Tribune reviewer. But the public adored the show and the subsequent movie, and there’s still no escaping “Do-Re-Mi.” After 1959, Rodgers found no other Hart or Hammerstein, and for one show, No Strings (1962), he wrote both words and music. So “The Sweetest Sounds” is entirely his.

When the man whom Kanfer calls a “pantheon figure in American music, indeed, in world music,” died, his body was cremated. “There is no grave, no statue, no marker; the location of his ashes is a secret. As, finally, is the musician himself. What had troubled him from the early days has never definitely become clear. . . . That his mystery endures matters little beside his sweet, ever-enduring melodies.”