Richard Rodgers

Richard Rodgers wrote for two lyricists and became two composers. With Lorenz Hart he produced twenty-five years of sharp, restless songs for Broadway and Hollywood; after Hart's death he turned to Oscar Hammerstein II and, beginning with Oklahoma! in 1943, built the musical play in which song, story and dance pull in one direction. Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music followed. Born in New York in 1902, he composed at a speed that astonished collaborators and left a body of melody — some nine hundred published songs — that the American theatre still runs on. He met Hart at Columbia University in 1919, and their first success, after some lean years, was The Garrick Gaieties; Jumbo, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse and, in 1942, By Jupiter followed. Oklahoma! and South Pacific each brought a Pulitzer Prize, and he is among the few to have won an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony and a Pulitzer. He wrote more than forty musicals and died in 1979.