“Overture” to Richard Rodgers

Abstract William G. Hyland’s Richard Rodgers is the first major biography of the composer since David Ewen’s (introduced in Part 111), and the first biography that surveys the last twenty years of Rodgers’s long career.* Like earlier biographers, Hyland notes the durability of the songs with Hart and the shows with Hammerstein. He also reinforces such ubiquitous themes as Rodgers’s facility, productivity, and inextinguishable passion for the theater. In contrast to earlier biographers, Hyland takes Mary Rodgers’s cue (in the reading that follows) in introducing such previously undisclosed topics as Rodgers’s depression, a period of excessive drinking, and even “a mental breakdown:’** Richard Rodgers was a musical genius. He proved it time and again during his sixty-year career as a composer for the American stage. His first professional song was performed on Broadway when he was only seventeen, his last in a Broadway show six decades later, shortly before he died. In the intervening years he wrote well over a thousand songs and the musical scores for more than forty shows. When he began his career, ‘‘The second is Meryle Secrest’s Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). **Hyland also devotes three chapters to Rodgers in The Song Is Ended: Songwriters and American Music, 1900-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 64-76, 235-49, and 275-91.