There were better composers of popular music in the mid-twentieth century than Richard Charles Rodgers (1902-77), but none was as popular, prolific and influential. He was the first person to be awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Pulitzer.
Rodgers’s career hinges on two partnerships with great, but very different, lyricists: Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. He met Hart while still a teenager, and they started out writing amateur shows, until contributing to their first Broadway show, Poor Little Ritz Girl in 1920. Rodgers had to work at other jobs to make a living, and was considering giving up music until the songs he and Hart wrote for a benefit show in 1925 received high praise from the critics. There was particular admiration for ‘Manhattan’, now an American standard.
Rodgers and Hart wrote Broadway shows throughout the late 1920s before moving to Hollywood, where they scored a particular success with songs for Lubitsch’s Love Me Tonight (1932). Another string of Broadway shows ran from 1935 till Hart’s death in 1943.
Rodgers had, by that time, already begun working with Hammerstein, with Oklahoma! (1943) establishing a new style of integrated musical. They went on to write some of the most successful shows on Broadway and throughout the world of musical theatre.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer never filmed any of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, so it is Rodgers’s collaborations with Hart that feature in ten of the studio’s musicals: Dancing Lady, Hollywood Party, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, Meet the People, Words and Music (a highly-fictionalized Rodgers and Hart biopic), Torch Song, Love Me Or Leave Me, This Could be the Night and Billy Rose’s Jumbo.
Although none of their songs were used by MGM, the influence of Rodgers and Hammerstein can clearly be seen in the greater integration of music and plot from the late 40s onwards.
