Remembering Rodgers and Hart

Abstract he Rodgers and Hart Song Book appeared in 1951, eight years after the death of Rodgers’s first lyricist. By this time Hammerstein had known Rodgers for more than thirty years. Hammerstein recalls their first meeting, in which his future collaborator on Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific, at least as Hammerstein remembered the occasion, was wearing short pants (see “Words by Rodgers” in Part IV for Rodgers’s public refutation of this crucial detail). In this fond and thoughtful tribute to Rodgers’s work with Hart, Hammerstein castigates himself for possessing neither “the perception nor the courage to predict their professional success:’ Hammerstein singles out for special praise Rodgers’s work for invariably adapting “to the situation for which it was written and the character required to sing it,” a trait more commonly attributed to Rodgers’s work with Hammerstein. Similarly, in an assessment that predates Joseph Kerman’s influential thesis that “the dramatist is the composer;’ Hammerstein asserts that Rodgers composes “music to depict story and character and is, therefore, himself a dramatist.”*